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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Modern programming languages and IDE’s are so complex it’s enough to put a lot of people off ever learning to program - it seems such a massive learning curve. There’s something to be said for learning Basic then assembly on an 8-bit computer, where everything is so much sampler and direct. Writing a value to memory and seeing a blotch of pixels change on the screen gives such a direct understanding of what’s going on inside the machine. And if you only have 48k of memory, you can genuinely understand everything the computer is doing.



  • I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I’ve opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.

    This is why I have never taken on programming as a profession. I earn more than I would ever make as a developer (even a very senior developer) leveraging my (average) programming skills to produce a personal suite of software tools and scripts that means I can do my chosen profession better, faster and with less effort than any of my colleagues or competitors. I have also developed small apps on a private/ personal basis that I have then sold to my employer for wider use in the company.

    And I still enjoy programming as a hobby as much as I ever have. Don’t underestimate how much being able to program at even an average level can boost a career in another field.



  • Of course, it is not always possible to avoid over-committing as sometimes the business calls for it.

    Well that sounds like lazy acceptance of a bad situation for your team.

    No mention of fighting for better terms for the team. If the business calls for over-committing you team, you or someone else in management have failed. Such a commitment may be indeed be unavoidable in that situation, but your job as a manager is to fight for your team to be additionally compensated for such an over-commitment.









  • Coming from the UK generation that grew up during the decimalisation process, and therefore being equally comfortable with both systems, imperial measures are far less intuitive than metric. Don’t mistake simply being being used to something as it being intuitive.

    We use a base 10 numeric system because that’s how many fingers & thumbs we have. Having a system of weights and measures based on that decimal system, is far more intuitive than a system that scales up through orders of distance using different scaling factors at ever order, is so unintuitive as to be absurd.