davewasthere

I did that in one place I worked. We had big scrum retrospectives that dragged on a lot. I used to comment how much the meetings cost. Might have made myself a little unpopular. :)

I don't see any problem with re-installing windows though as often as you like.

By being a little disciplined, you can have a fresh install of windows, configured with all the apps you need from woah to go in little over a couple hours.

I like having a scriptable install of windows in case I completely lose a system while travelling, it's easy for me to completely restore and be productive again within a few hours (just buy a new laptop).

Choco really helps here too.

  choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation
  choco install googlechrome
  choco install firefox 
  choco install 7zip
  choco install vlc 
  choco install git
  choco install paint.net 
  choco install sql-server-management-studio
  choco install vscode 
  choco install visualstudio2019community

gets me to 90% of where I need to go.

on old projects, Nlog to local file log and Elmah pointing to a centralised database.

on newer projects, Serilog with combo of text file logging, sql sink and just recently to centralised ElasticSearch

Gatsby, Hugo or plain(ish) Jekkyl.

Simple, clean, fast. Updates and viruses are a non-issue.

Depends what plugins you're talking about, but if you're a non-programmer/dev type, then you're probably better off using Wordpress as a blogging platform if some serious customisation is wanted.

Just go.

Random walking is my all time favourite thing to do in Bangkok. Although I'd recommend getting out of the CBD. Yes, tech events are great, but I prefer the slower, quiet pace of somewhere like Southern Phuket, or the diving in Koh Tao.

Visa is trivial, English is everywhere, if you're splurging, you could spend however much you want, but it's easy to live cheaply. Rent is something like USD500-800 for the month if you don't even shop around. Food is pretty cheap that I'm not even sure how much stuff costs. A 1 hour massage is about USD10, although you could splurge to about USD20 if you really want to.

That said, while I love Thailand, I'd have to say that Vietnam is still my all-time favourite SEA country to visit... but Thailand does keep drawing me back. I have a favourite beach spot and Kana Moo Grob really hits the spot.

Zoom, Gotomeeting, Skype, SkypeForBusiness(Lync), Hangouts, Some shitty free meeting telephone service, Whatsapp, Email, Trello, etc...

Whatever is convenient for the customer really. Often though, you get the chance to recommend a tech to someone, so take that opportunity, but I figure that I'm the tech guy. If they've got a meeting software that they're happy with, well the least I can do is fit in.

I'm not too worried having a few smaller meeting-based apps on my machine though.

Yeah, you'd think "turn the light off for 2 seconds, then on for 8 seconds. Repeat X times" would be enough.

Although I watched that, and still don't know the value for X... And I can't bring myself to watch it a second time.

That's site's borked for me. Instead here's google's text-cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O79WUSl...

Yeah, but who is going to want to fly in one again? Even working in aviation in the past and knowing that they've probably nailed the issue, I'd still be less than keen.

That's fantastic. I was after a similar solution and after playing with OpenCV, I can see how they put the pieces together.

Annoyingly, I was trying to scan multiple books in charity shops, when one of my favourites started putting their own stickers directly over the barcode (when it existed).

Using a virtual mailbox works well. The only pain is when their address changes for any reason. (Which has happened to me once) Or, if you want to change virtual mailbox providers.

Essentially, they scan in the first page of anything sent to your address, then email you a copy and wait for instructions (Scan all, Forward, or Destroy).

Works really well. Yachties have used similar services for years.

Pay tax in all countries where you're tax-resident. Although it's possible to optimise this by constantly travelling.

Look at the three flag/five flag theory on perpetual travellers.

Check out Curtis Stone, Urban farmer on youtube. I think there are different (new) models for small scale farming that are sustainable and profitable. (So rewarded and respected)

Or changing the sender's email address.

e.g. myaccount+randomstring@domain.com

Otherwise a unique subject is always easy for some people.

My 8 year old Samsung Series 9 Ultraportable. I still far prefer it to my much newer ASUS. Best laptop I've ever owned. (essentially a macbook pro spec machine... and beautifully designed)

It'd be my regular travel lappy if I could bother getting a new battery for it. Still great to code on, and the screen is far far better than the ASUS. Lighter too. (although no discrete graphics)

But battery life is a killer. ASUS lasts up to ten hours, and the Samsung barely does 2 hours now. With a power point, that's not an issue, but it's nice to have something with a bit more go.

I needed to go to the other side of the world for three events spaced over a couple of months. My company wasn't a remote working company though. I suggested my three options were:

* travel to each event separately (my least preferred)

* have a couple of months off without pay

* work remotely for the couple of months while I was away

I'd earned a good rep at my company by smashing out the previous project on time/budget, so the working remotely was approved and all went well.

I liked it so much (escaping the northern hemisphere Winter), that I started my own consultancy and did the annual migration for the next 8 years. Most of that work was remote, so as long as I managed timezones, all was good.

I'm surprised that Websockets is the wrong choice. What would be the right choice? WebRTC?

No. I enjoy chatting and networking in a co-working space. But I don't find it the most productive of environments.

That said, I've not yet tried co-working in my current city, and a mate has kicked off a co-working space there, so I'm tempted to give it a go, partly to see if the experience differs, but also just to support the venture.

Mostly though, working in isolation (from home, or in a quiet office) is the best thing for me. After reading this thread though, I should probably invest in some really good noise cancelling headphones.

I've helped a few clients migrate from whatever ad-hoc process they had to CI/CD with Azure Devops.

Apart from one minor issue with a bug in node.js timing when running the build server on burstable VMs (which is probably more to do with AWS setup than node), I've not had any issues that I can think of.

I don't have the problem with cache though, as I always run my own build servers/agents.

The UI has changed a few times over the past year, mostly around the rebrand from VSTS to Azure DevOps. But once learned, it's pretty straightforward and I'm sure I've barely touched the surface of its capabilities.

I, for one, am very impressed.

EDIT: oh, one improvement I can think of, would be to accept web-hooks rather than polling Bitbucket. But honestly, that's only a delay of a minute or two, so it's not a big deal. You could also easily enough create your own serverless webhook listener that triggers the build, so it's a bit of a non-issue, but I was surprised at the lack.

Splash dialogs asking me for my email address, or to sign up on a site where I've just come to read one article.

Having to dismiss something is an utter pain.

Annoyingly, doesn't mention how it counts the chickens. :)

Seriously? I've kept daily logs (on and off) since around 2002 when I first discovered John Carmack's .plan files.

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/

For one thing, take the tabloid headlines with a grain of salt. This article should actually read something like "Interesting new way to measure warming oceans could be even more accurate". But in reality, they still model/interpolate the results between the many thousands of measuring points, which is still just part of the picture. Which hasn't really changed that much, just a gradual refining. Which is sort of how science works.

By the way, as a skeptic, you have access to the raw data yourself and can come up with a hypothesis that the oceans aren't warming and prove it yourself. http://www.argodatamgt.org/Access-to-data

I don't think climate change is worse than we thought. It's more that it's becoming acceptable to report it in those terms and gradually that's how the populace as a whole are coming to view it.

The key thing appears to be political will. You get the full spectrum of politicians. Some have been pushing for environmental policies since the 60's and 70's when it was very fringe (and scientists were already giving us plenty of warning - with claims of CO2 causing radical climate effects if unchecked... as it mostly has been). Then you've got the muppets who are still in denial and don't appear to give a shit about what sort of planet is left to the next generation(s).

It is a great language to learn. I speak a bit of Khaleej Arabic, and maybe twenty years ago, could read the characters (I'd struggle a bit now) so could read anything that was transliterated.

But it's logical and very easy. Well worth learning even just the fundamentals. There are a few sounds that us English speakers don't necessarily use natively, but on the whole, it's a lot easier to learn (I find) than say a tonal language.

Think about how much collective time that would be multiplied amongst the millions of users. Huge!

So maybe Google did the world a favour by binning Reader.

I used Feedly for a while, but I pretty much abandoned my RSS fix after the demise of Reader.

Ah, weirdly, removing 'Source Code Pro' from the font-family then renders it correctly..

Which is odd, because that's a mono-space font, I'm sure.

Nexus 5X from 2015. Although I've not had it that long...

Yep. Your website is lovely. Under 200K for everything, looks nice, responsive and delivered very quickly.

Nicely done!

This is where some sort of Lynx-browser-powered-proxy would be ideal.

I know it'd probably break several sites... but your average news reading would be hugely improved.

I will say that https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ is one of the best community sites I know of. It's very lightweight, looks good, works incredibly fast. As a dev, I'm really impressed.

At 25 I just moved sideways from doing embedded software development to web application development prior to the dotcom boom.

That led to solid IT skills and a very interesting career. I don't think I'd change anything.

Biggest piece of advice would be to save half of what you earn. (or try and live off half of what you earn) At 25 I'd just become debt-free, but it took me a while to figure out how to reduce my tendency to spend whatever I earned.

If you could do that, then at 40, your expenses are covered by what you earn in investments. That frees you immensely.

Oh, and take time out to enjoy it all. That's key.