I'm a middle-class person from the US. I've even had several short stints of living in Europe. I'd love to live in one of the countries there, but being a little bit older now I really don't want to start over again. Making new friends is hard, and it gets harder the older you get. Not to mention family here in the states. I've spent a few holiday seasons alone and it sucks.
To add to your QoL statement I feel as though European countries have a different kind of QoL. Here in the states the material quality of life is high. Things here are cheap compared to the rest of the world. Whereas in say, Germany, the social QoL is higher. People are more taken care of there and overall have less stress. Cities are walk-able, trains can actually take you where you want to go in a reasonable amount of time, a sense of community still exists. I think of lot of people from the US value the type of QoL we have here over what they have in various European countries.
I was going to read it, but that pop-up asking me to sign in or sign up for your newsletter kept blocking my view. For a blog, with what I'd imagine would be limited readership, why would you insist that people login or sign up for your newsletter? I think you'll drive away more readers than retain using this method.
I've played around with Lazyvim a fair bit and it seems pretty solid. It's a bit more hands on than kickstart. Currently working as a laravel dev and really enjoyed Jess Archer's course on how to setup nvim specifically for laravel. Would recommend it if you work with php and js.
Another vote for Carhartt shirts. I'm large and it's difficult to find shirts that fit well. Their shirts are cheap and last me years. Also if branding is an issue for you, it's very easy to remove the patch on their pocket t-shirts.
I don't have a novel solution to your problem, but here's my experience. I had a mac laptop for a previous job and I went down the route of using separate a iCloud account. I used spotify so it was no issue in terms of music. The company was also heavily into the Microsoft office suite of products, but I opted to not use OneNote but instead used a password protected sync-able third party note app. I did this so I could have my notes if and when I left. I personally value a clear separation of my work and personal accounts so I found this worked pretty well for me.
Perhaps you could remote into your personal mac for iMessage/Music? It would be clunky but would protect your privacy.
I don't actually fall asleep, but every day after work I lay down on my bed for about 10 minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes and sometimes I just stare at the ceiling, but I just breathe and relax. Really helps me get into "home mode" and out of "work mode".
I'm currently using Laravel at work. It's very opinionated, and some folks say it uses anti-patterns with regards to its use of facades. That being said my last job was C#/.Net and I am so much more productive with Laravel. It really allows you to develop quickly and I haven't yet bitten by any of the "anti-patterns". If you give it a shot I'd recommend just using Laravel Sail as, if you already have docker installed, you can have a full dev environment setup in less than 10 minutes.
This hasn't been true in my experience. People were very critical of Picard season 2 and the whole of Discovery. I posted criticisms myself and never got banned.
I just took a job as a Laravel dev. I was previously a C#/.Net dev before that. Not making any claims about one being better than the other, but you're right about the ecosystem and the community. It's been great and I've been surprised how quickly I've become productive working in this new ecosystem.
I mean that they used versions of frameworks that were no longer supported, and they did not use best practices which resulted in lots of security concerns (and messy code).
Oof, my condolences. As someone who was a junior somewhat recently I narrowly avoided a couple of projects like that. The desire to push off important work to cheap labor blows my mind.
I know the person who was in charge of the redesign. This may sound unbelievable, but she was not a reddit user prior to working at reddit or being put in charge of the redesign. Really nice person, but they did a terrible job.
I got hired from a Who's Hiring post last year. I doubt my experience is the standard but I landed at a really terrible company. Used outdated tech in really unprofessional ways. The culture was extremely toxic as well. I have since moved on to a nice new company I found through my network.
I've gotten two jobs from Linkedin. I don't much care for it outside of when I'm looking for jobs. Whenever I'm employed I put it into the "hibernate" mode and only reactivate it when I'm back on the job market.
I'm a mid level developer and probably about 5 or 6 on any given day. I do a lot of designing/coding and by the time 3pm rolls around the part of my brain that can think in that way just starts to shut down. Having upcoming deadlines invigorates me and can help me push the number of hours worked up, but it's very much "borrowing from my future self". I try to maintain a steady pace throughout a sprint and 9/10 times it works and allows me to work those 5 or 6 hours a day. I'm still available/at my desk for those remaining 2-3 hours though.
We didn't have any clients, it was a marketing department for a CPG company. I was just a peon; I didn't have any say in how things got done. Say all that to say, you would think that at some point VPs of other departments would want to know how all the money that got allocated to marketing was actually benefiting the company. I'm talking a concrete dollars to dollars comparison. I personally didn't get to scratch that itch until I moved into e-commerce.
I've often wondered about that. Spotify has never failed to have the music I wanted to listen to. Though their app interface has always been a little painful for me to use.
I definitely couldn't "make" anyone click on anything. But delivering it wasn't the only thing we had control over. The format and content of the email we had complete control over. This was years ago, but at the time I suggested trying to record and study which emails lead subscribers to actually click the link so that we could learn to produce content/offers that more people wanted to see. The idea was mostly shrugged off but I did it anyways. When the numbers of people actually following the links went up my boss never wanted to show anybody. My somewhat cynical guess is that he didn't want to introduce real accountability (proof that we were having an effect) into some of the data he was presenting to other departments.
Personally I have to "prove" that I took something away from the conference to justify the expense to my company. I take a lot of notes, even if it's basic material, because it allows me to copy the flow of the presentation for when I inevitably have to show that I learned something back at work.
As someone who used to work in marketing, this. Anecdotal, but in my experience working in marketing it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented. My boss didn't care how many people actually clicked on the link in our newsletter, as long as we had a lot of subscribers we were good.
I'm late in responding to this, but I just use vanilla Gnome and have never had any issues. My work laptop is a P15v Thinkpad. All I do is plug it into my 32in monitor via usb-c and everything works as expected. Maybe my company's IT guys are just really on it? I have no problems screen sharing in google meets, discord, or teams. Battery life I couldn't say, as I'm almost always at my desk with the exception of a couple short trips to the cafe. But on the rare occasion that I am mobile, I don't have any issues with my touchpad or anything else, at least that I've noticed.
I use Ubuntu for work, but my gaming rig runs windows. I went through all of the applications I use on my windows pc the other day and they're all available on linux now. With proton getting as good as it is, app availability on linux, and with the annoying occasional ads coming through my windows os, I'm starting to think I won't upgrade to windows 11 when 10 stops being supported.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I'm a .Net/C# dev and see tons of job postings all the time. I have yet to have trouble finding a job, even when I was first starting out.