marpstar

USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me...

The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...

My most recent project launched in January. NextJS 14 client integrated with PayloadCMS (http://payloadcms.com) for the back-end. I love both technologies in theory, but they're both going through a renaissance period and "bleeding edge" doesn't even begin to describe it.

If I'm just building a client app, create-react-app is still my go to.

Before now, I'd been building on WordPress for 10+ years for anything client-administered. Planning on using Payload from here on out.

I’ve been frustrated by this, too. Trying to ask for ways to support a close family member who experienced sexual trauma. ChatGPT won’t touch the topic.

I grew up listening to my dad's record/CD collection, all 60s-80s rock. When we drove in the car, we listened to music on the radio.

My father in law likes 1950s big band music; it's not really on broadcast radio much. He listened to a lot of public radio when my wife was growing up. As a result, she listens to public radio in the car 90% of the time.

When we first got together and I rode in her car, I was stunned that she never listened to music while driving.

Podcasts are on-demand talk radio. It's really nothing more.

My family and I drove through the Ports of LA/Long Beach on vacation last summer. A port is basically an entire city dedicated to getting things in/out of the water. Takes 15-20 minutes to drive through. You can't imagine the number of cranes/lifts. It's worth the drive through.

This ship was carrying ~5,000 TEU (Trailer Equivalent Units). Imagine 5,000 fully packed semi trucks crashing into the single upright of that bridge.

Even at 7.5 knots (~10mph) the bridge stood no chance.

I'd think that a place like an international shipping port would have equipment in relatively close proximity for handling (albeit much smaller) tasks like wreckage removal and the like.

I have no idea what a practical timeline would be, but I think it's fair to say that it's less than your average 1.6 mile bridge.

My original eBay account (which is now in possession of my mother -- who "borrowed" it one day to list some trinket she found at a garage sale, got hooked, sold a few more things, and didn't want to give it back after she had amassed some positive feedback) lists 4/10/1999 as the signup date.

Amazon since April 2001.

Gmail since invite-only days (03-04?)

I worked at Best Buy circa 2005 and we had a single Mac Mini on the floor that had the fish wallpaper and it always drew me in. I had no interest in Macs at the time, but there was something alluring behind that wallpaper.

This is why the price of "Enterprise" level of SaaS is always "Contact Us". Contract deals (i.e. "lock-in") are negotiated behind the scenes.

You check CNN, you check Fox News... same story, different spin. Who's correct? Probably neither.

Agreed. It's "fun" to start breaking your code down into small bits; more interchangeable "pieces" -- until you have to maintain it for 10 years (or worse yet, explain it to a new junior dev) and the extensibility you envisioned never came to fruition and now it's just a liability spread across 8 source files.

You sure it wasn't PRNG? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

Not everyone is willing to uproot their life on a whim, even for a theoretically great job and a theoretically great company.

Skimming the track list, Tendering was first to grab me. The mood changes are so fluid... love it. Thanks for sharing.

I don't turn mine on for every meeting, and neither do the other devs on my team. The Product Managers almost always have theirs on.

Larger meetings (more than, say, 10 people) I keep mine off but will turn on if I'm speaking or in an active discourse.

My employer/manager does not enforce cameras on, but my last one was trying to make cameras-on a requirement.

To add to this, it's not like a mailing list, either. Marketing opt-in is lower because it's annoying. A lot of people don't want emails.

Anonymized stats from your machine? Most normal people (who don't use computers like we do) do not care and just click the most affirmative option so that they can move forward.

You don't provide health insurance to vendors.

I'm reading it right now and really appreciate the short chapters, which really helped grabbed me and keep me reading. The whole backstory of founders of the original semiconductor companies is stranger than fiction.

It felt weird at the time, but I think the reach of COBOL is underestimated by just about everyone. I just checked the university's website and they still have their introductory Programming in COBOL course as well as a 400-level "Applications in Information Systems" course that "includes coverage of advanced features of the COBOL language."

Northwestern Mutual is based in Milwaukee and is where most of the grads I knew who went down the COBOL path either started out or ended up.

None of those things are what most in the GIS space would consider "complex", so you could go with any of the options you selected. For lightweight maps, I like Leaflet

https://leafletjs.com

Oops. 2010*

I did an internship in 2009-2010 with a company who used MicroFocus “AcuCOBOL” to modernize a green-screen automotive dealership management system into a Windows GUI.

I wouldn’t say I did it for fun, but I did do it for the learning experience. My university was very invested in COBOL, and I had classmates who got offers much larger than mine to work for various finance companies in Wisconsin, so I had already learned the basics of language.

It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.

Migrating data files to new descriptors was always a stressful time. The equivalent of a database schema change, but you had to load the old files and rewrite in the new format largely manually.

The tooling we used felt dated, but worked well enough. Better than the tools we used in school.

I always used “Murach’s Structured COBOL” [1] as my primary reference. Carried that book just about everywhere during that time.

[1]: Murach's Structured COBOL https://a.co/d/hONfFT7

Define "complex maps". I haven't seen anything that offers as much functionality as Esri's SDKs, but that's biased by the fact that I've been working with their SDKs for over a decade.

I've been using MJML for a few years now, I can't imagine even trying to build a responsive email without it. I don't even have to think about it.

You may still have to slice images, but it's grid/column support has worked great for me.

This is one school board, not the state.

With that said -- I'm in Iowa, my fiancé works in public libraries and for the Iowa Library Association and the ALA as a resource for those facing book challenges, and it's a shit show here (and in most red states) right now. It's largely coordinated by conservative groups (e.g. "Moms for Liberty") who band together to canvass the schools with their "think of the children" pleas.

This is only the beginning after the signing of the Senate File mentioned in the story. The same people bitching about social media companies censoring their tweets are now trying to keep books they don't agree with out of the library.

It's starting in the schools, but the public libraries are next. https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/5/23711417/republicans-w...

Right, but the bigger the organization, the larger those costs. Think of a city of Los Angeles switching to a new system for tracking their public works department versus a township of 3,000 people. Smaller orgs are much more tolerant to this. New orgs start small and don't need something huge like Salesforce immediately; they need something usable.

Accurate. The licensing (and the "kill switch") at a previous job were controlled entirely via Salesforce. Our app would "phone home" regularly to check which features are being paid for and we'd toggle them on and off in our app accordingly.

I had, at the same company, been asked to evaluate building Salesforce apps (using the custom programming language they provide) and contrasting that with building new apps on our own metadata-driven platform.

Developers hate it, business people love it. It won't be going away for lack of paying customers, that's for sure.

In my experience, it's the residual sugar (in everything that comes in a box/wrapper/bag) that keeps this "sweetness sensitivity" high.

I've done strict keto off and on for 10+ years and drank Diet Coke like it was going off the market. When I cut out carbs (we're talking < 30g per day), it becomes obvious that it's real sugar that triggers the cravings for me. Never did a diet soda make me crave a candy bar. Instead, it was generally something like a bite of a real hamburger bun, or a couple french fries.

It's really hard to isolate the effects of things like artificial sweeteners when "real" sugar is absolutely everywhere.

On greenfield projects, even at the Fortune 500 level, there is almost always a greater concern about execution than stack. Especially for smaller projects. They care about results, not fine details behind the means of getting them.