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I put something up to capture thoughts and record thing for myself for posterity. At least 1 of the posts started as notes to myself so I could refer to it later on.

Not much there but I did enjoy hunting down photos of Marseille to use.

https://skillscheck.co.uk

It should already support that. If it doesn't then please feel free to create an issue or even raise a PR. :)

Thanks - that's much appreciated!

My dad learned French from Asterix after he married my (French) mum while spending summer's out there with her family. Coincidentally in Provençe.

I wonder if the mix of pictures along with uncomplicated but correct dialogue makes Asterix popular for promoting languages.

I have a male friend that took 4 months of from memory. I'm not sure it's uncommon.

Oh, and the Serrano series also by Elizabeth Moon!

This is an excellent series that has suspense and yet easy to digest. If you like the military SF sub genre you should also look at the Honor Harrington series by David Weber followed by the Safehold series and the March To The Sea series. Actually most stuff by David Weber is pretty good.

In the UK (as I understand it) you might become liable for the costs of replacing you until the end of your notice period, probably because of "breach of contract". But the business would have to be pretty shitty to do this and probably willing to lose all of that money again in legal fees. Mostly they would probably on refuse to give you a reference.

I'd like to see a Beowolf cluster of those.

I don't know the exact rules but in the UK, when calling 999 you're asked which service you require. Fire service will only get police involved when they need it or automatically when more than 2 Fire Engines are dispatched. Ambulance calls can result in an Ambulance with a crew of 2 or a single paramedic in a sensible estate car (station wagon) with a big engine, they'll call the Air Ambulance if they need one and it's free. Dispatchers will send who they think you need as they see fit. That includes Lifeboat Service or Mountain Rescue. Or Police, of course. Each service will obviously ask for backup as required.

The BIG difference with what you've described though is the layout of the UK is much denser than USA. The resources available and the nature and frequency of call outs will obviously be quite different.

Marseille/Provence would be nice, and yes - I am mainly a Java developer but with some heavy C++ and a little Go. Mostly backend.

You should try Nottingham too. There is at least 1 major brand with deep pockets offering very interesting amounts of money for developers at the moment.

And here's a petition to do something about it: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/123569

I started being on-call a few months ago. For us it works like this:

- 1 week in 4 Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59, with a fixed pay adjustment (same fixed amount added to our salary every month, not a % increment).

- If you get a call, you're on the clock and get paid regular over-time rate. Theoretically this only applies if you get called and are doing something for more than 30 minutes though.

- I know most of the on-call managers personally so don't mind picking up the phone for a quick opinion for free, if it's at a reasonable time.

- Online within an hour once we've picked up the phone.

- Senior on-call manager gets woken up by Ops first and then will decide which parts of the system are affected. After going through known issues and work arounds will then work out which part of the system needs to be looked at and makes the call to the on-call developer that is appropriate (ie. which team).

- Duty is primarily to diagnose and provide knowledge to the on-call manager to make a decision so service can come back up again.

- Don't do code fixes (J2EE on my team, mix of Java and C++ on others) - we have far too much to go wrong for hacking around like that, but may do config changes and some scripting. The line can get a bit blurred.

- In our team we should raise a ticket/Jira for every time we get a call so that it's visible to everyone what happened and see where our pain points are.

- During office hours, Production issues are distributed in the team in the same way as bugs, according to domain knowledge and individual capacity.

- We tend not to get called out except for when we do installation in to Production. We have a fairly heavy weight process for releases - which we are working on.

- I am at least 4 levels of communication away from any customers, including 1st and 2nd line teams.

Edit: formatting

Sounds reasonable on the face of it. Are you proposing to build a service to do this matching?