Ross, if our lives ever go sideways and you find yourself needing a roommate, I think we would get along just fine.

Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and that’s always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.

They have (had?) a fairly generous free tier that works well for people starting out.

I ended up buying a license after evaluation because the UI provides everything I reasonably want to do, it’s fundamentally a Linux server so I can change things I need, and it requires virtually zero fucking around to get started and keep running.

I guess the short answer is: it ticks a lot of boxes.

You can’t do much preparation since you don’t know what they’re going to ask. You can assume there will be some “basic” programming questions, but that’s really as far as you can take it in advance.

My advice here is for during the interview: keep talking. You should always be talking. That’s how the interviewer assesses you. They want to know how you are deconstructing a problem and how you want to solve it. Sitting there silent for 5 minutes and then banging out some code isn’t giving them anything.

“Ok, I need to modify this array and I should try to do that in place. I need to look up the syntax for that because i rarely need to do this…”

“I don’t remember what a splurgenarf is. Can you give me a quick definition before I get started?”

“I’m going to just slop this incomplete code in and run it once to see the output. It won’t work but I want to see if the first part is on the right track.”

“I think you’re asking me to write a wrapper around a basic network call so that it will _______. Is that right?”

Oh, and you’ll always home your first interview if it’s been a few years. Don’t sweat it, and don’t make your first interview at a place you really really want to work because of that. You need to go through a couple of interviews before your brain remembers how to function in a coding interview because it’s so far divorced from how a developer usually works.

I tried them for a few months and cancelled.

For me, the quality of the recipes was poor. It was the kind of stuff I’d make when i’d just moved out from home and was learning to cook for the first time. Boring. Simplistic.

There’s also way too much trash. There’s a big cardboard box, a few ice packs, and a mound of pre-portioned ingredients each in little plastic bags. They cheerfully say you can keep the ice packs and reuse them! How many fucking ice packs can one person use?? Anybody can use a couple of ice packs. No one alive needs 2 new ice packs a week.

If you aren’t a confident cook and/or you need some inspiration for new things to make, it’s totally worth it for a few weeks or months. After that, though, I think most people will outgrow it.

If you need some historical context, look up the recording industry anti-piracy panic that began when cassette recorders came onto the consumer market (early 80s?). Similarly the VHS panic when video could suddenly be recorded.

I haven’t kept any sources, but I recall a few studies over the years that showed the industry concerns were comically overblown and didn’t impact their bottom lines.

Well, I can’t remember exactly where but I know it’s in there somewhere.

These fucking guys. They think their tip should be worth the effort they put in, and I’m looking at my ice cold order that looks like it’s been banging around in a clothes dryer for an hour. I appreciate the effort but, fuck, I wouldn’t have ordered anything if I knew it was going to be this way.

Shortcut through hell. Quick adventure - in and out in 20 minutes!

I set up Syncthing using the docker image from the Unraid “store” and it works great.

I’m not in love with the clients (especially Windows) but it seems to work pretty well once your setup is stable.

White cables also transmit slower in the dark. As soon as the cabinet is closed the data is going to slow way down with only the dim glow of the LEDs of the equipment acting to accelerate packets.

My Windows 10 PC is just as, if not more secure than any Linux machine on the planet.

But one of these days I’m going to have to actually power it on again and then I guess I’ll have to do something.

“Hey why is it taking you so long to review my PR?”

The little discussed Pythagorean Wild Conjecture.

The thing I hate most about rsync is that I always fumble to get the right syntax and flags.

This is a problem because once it’s working I never have to touch it ever again because it just works and keeping working. There’s not enough time to memorize the usage.

Hours to get a response? So it’s gpt-5?

I got an email advertising Windows 11 features. It was a mandatory service email they would not let me unsubscribe from.

What is wrong with these people?

SORRY, CAN’T HEAR YOU. ANYWAY, HERE’S SOME MORE CAT FACTS.

I hope it’s on December 25 so MAGA can implode trying to decide if it’s heretical to rename Christmas to Trump Day, or if it’s more heretical to get rid of Christmas to create Trump Day.

Every moment I have one on one time with a junior coworker and we talk about workload, I remind them that it’s a multibillion dollar corporation and it is not your friend.

Some of them get it.