mrlyc

Thank you for writing the "How to Find Lemmy Communities" guide. It was very helpful.

https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...

It got me my first programming job.

Back in 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Vic-20. It had multiple rooms (message areas) which users could create and make public or private, private email and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. It was very popular with each user spending an average of 70 minutes on it. One of my users hired me as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!"

Thirty years later, that same guy wanted me to work with him at Google.

I just wrote

  echo "open $mainframe\

  \nuser $mf_username $mf_password

  \nsite lr=160\

  \ncd ..\

  \nmput \*\

  \nquit" | ftp -i -n -v > $ftp_log 2>&1

The program collected data from the telephone company's Nortel MD110 switches, tidied it up and sent it to their mainframes.

I rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program with its own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.

It depends on what you're used to. When I stated programming 42 years ago, it took two days between submitting the punched card deck to the computer centre and getting a printout of the results. Now I get concerned if my program takes longer than 20 seconds to compile.

I live on my own so I prefer being with people at work.

Another interesting documentary about this topic is "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson, one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. He interviews several of his peers. The film was nominated for two Emmys. It's available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km_JmxnzTvc.

One thing to watch out for is when the board manufacturer changes its memory map without telling you. Boards built before April booted and the new ones didn't. Fortunately, the product was still in the development stage.

For my dopamine hits, I prefer Reddit (frat party) to Hacker News (church).

Zimbardo was an evil man who tried to justify his behaviour by setting up a sham experiment to "prove" that everyone can be evil, given the right circumstances.

We're trying to do the same with the country.

What worked for me was to tell my employer that I was taking the time off to get allergy shots.

I'm cobbling together a language that is stock standard C with classes. Just classes, nothing more. I'm calling it C+.

Hacker News, The Register

Reddit

    Documentaries from https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/new/

    Lectures from https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/new/

YouTube

    Subscriptions from https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions/

I download the videos, convert them to MP3s then add them to the podcasts I've downloaded.

Some years ago, Gmail changed so using Eudora with it became difficult. I've worked out the following procedure:

after checking email fails the second time,

Server SSL Certificate Rejected pops up

click on Yes

click on Tools then Options then Checking mail

click on Last SSL Info

click on Certificate Information Manager

under Server Certificates, keep expanding until you reach the bottom one

click on it then click on Add to trusted

click on File then Check Mail

That happened to me when I went for a job at Wang to work on Australia's EFTPOS network. The position required using protocol analysers but the recruiter had removed all references to them from my résumé. I gave the interviewer my original résumé and got the job.

Do what you love, what you are good at and what people are willing to pay for. Sometimes you have to do the first one as a hobby and the last two as a job.

I started with a Vic-20. I wrote a BBS for it with multiple rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. It was very popular with each user spending an average of 70 minutes on it.

That's how I got into programming professionally. One of my users said "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!" and hired me as a programmer. Thirty-two years later, that same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.

Facebook is still moving fast and breaking things, just not their things. The morality of an organisation reflects that of its senior management. Zuckerberg doesn't care about breaching privacy so why should Facebook? He only cares that he was caught.

Sometimes deleting code isn't enough and you have to do a rewrite. I once rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program with its own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.

I deleted Facebook before it was cool. They wouldn't stop sending me "Won't you please come back" emails until I made a formal complaint about the spam to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. No more emails.

I was on there just a few days ago to find out what my elderly aunts were up to. Crickets. They hadn't posted anything for three years.

Google's C++ course at https://developers.google.com/edu/c++/ looks useful to start with.

Oh great. Now my robot wants to go skiing.

Peer review of code and documentation works well. It can be formal or informal. After I was unexpectedly put in charge of a three-person programming team 32 years ago, I started giving my code to another programmer to look at before it shipped. I hadn't heard of peer review so I called it the "Will you have a look at this?" system. That became the norm in the team.

Later on, at another company, we had formal meetings to do the peer reviews with software to document the results. The meetings could be brutal. I remember submitting about 1,000 lines for review, which was a bit long, and the only thing the reviewers found wrong was that one line had "while(something)" instead of "while (something)". They kept going on and on about it. I did get an exemption from having the rest of my code reviewed, though.

I've done better with my home investment than I have with my managed investment funds. I bought my flat in 1994 for $107,000 and it's now worth $715,000 after Melbourne had the same rise in house prices as San Francisco.

Two problems, though. (1) The money is locked up. I can't take a couple of bricks down to the travel agent and exchange them for tickets. (2) I am locked up. Google wants me to work for them but are quite insistent that I move to California. I guess remote work can only go so far.

It's probably a reference to the debate on Reddit about whether a dress (http://i.imgur.com/9VWYggm.jpg) was black and blue or white and gold.

When I moved from programming into management, the hardest thing I found was to change from flow-driven work to interrupt-driven work. I started with the golden rule: "Manage people the way you would like to be managed." That lasted about ten minutes. I changed it to "Manage people the way they want to be managed" which was much more succesful.

> HI-EMA did not have an automated way to send a cancellation of an "event" message, so it had to issue one manually.

Why is this kind of engineering so common in the US? Another example would be the No Fly List which, until recently, was almost impossible to get off, whether one had been added by security personnel or a grumpy airline employee. Where is the worst case analysis?

I'm confused. Both my Samsung Galaxy Ace GT-S5830T (January 2011) and Galaxy Ace 3 GT-S7275Y (June 2013) phones came with an app called "FM Radio" that works. They cost me $100 on sale. Why don't the more expensive ones have that feature?

I find it useful to remind myself that I am interviewing them while they are interviewing me.