CodeMonkey

TAOCS has a reputation for being very deep and thorough, not for being a good introductory text. One of my professors said that in his (very long) industrial career, he only met one person who actually read the books beginning to end but everyone looks something up in them once or twice.

That has been my experience. I once needed to find out how to solve a very specific problem (I think it was calculating statistical values on an infinite stream). I found the single copy of TAOCS in the office reference library, read the relevant section, and implemented the suggested algorithm.

Do you think that is too slow or too fast? Many of the CICD pipelines I work with take much longer than that. We have integration tests that deploy a fresh Kubernetes instance, install our software stack into it, and run several test suites against it.

If I am working on bug found by a pipeline that takes more than a couple minutes to run, it is generally worth my time to figure out how to run the failing test individually on my dev machine. That approach does not help when I am debugging issues with the pipeline itself.

Maybe it is just my experience, but in the last decade, employers stopped trying to recruit and retain top developers.

I have been a full time software engineer for more than a decade. In the 2010s, the mindset at tech giants seemed to be that they had to hire the best developers and do everything they could to keep them. The easiest way to do both was to be the best employer around. For example, Google had 20% time, many companies offered paid sabbaticals after so many years, and every office had catering once a week (if not a free cafeteria). That way, employees would be telling all of their friends how great it is to work for you and if they decide to look for other work, they would have to give up their cushy benefits.

Then, a few years before the pandemic, my employer switched to a different health insurance company and got the expected wave of complaints (the price of this drug went up, my doctor is not covered). HR responded with "our benefits package is above industry averages". That is a refrain I have been hearing since, even after switching employers. The company is not trying to be the best employer that everyone wants to work at, they just want to be above average. They are saying "go ahead and look for another employer, but they are probably going to be just as bad".

Obviously, this is just my view, so it is very possible that I have just been unlucky with my employers.

pip is a perfectly usable package manager and is included in most python distributions now. Is it perfect? No, but it is good enough for every team I have been on.

I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.

Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.

C does exactly what you tell it, no more. Why waste cycles setting a variable to a zero state when a correct program will set it to whatever initial state it expects? It is not user friendly, but it is performant.

Are we really doing fine? 4% linux market share? Windows is a default?

I suspect that the issue hindering adoption is GNU and other user land projects, not the Linux kernel. Plenty of people use devices that pair a Linux kernel with an easy to use UI and popular software (see Android and Chromebook).

Many people would happily switch to a Linux based OS that had the exact same GUI as their current OS and ran the exact same software. That is not a realistic requirement in practice.

It is possible that Linux would have more adoption if they invested more money into having drivers for a wider range of hardware, but having Linux kernel develers write drivers instead of hardware vendors is not a strategy that scales well.

Senior developer tip: squash the evidence.

This is not a supply chain attack, it is sudden extreme enshitification. according to the article, the attacker also bought the GitHub repo, so all releases should be considered tainted. The community will have to find a fork from before the acquisition and hope that there are no pre-purchase favors smuggled in.

The early days of the Internet, there was a cottage industry to burn Linux ISOs to CDs and selling them.

I work in Java, Golang, Python, with Helm, CircleCI, bash scripts, Makefiles, Terraform, and Terragrunt for testing and deployment. There are other teams handling the C++ and SQL (plus whatever dark magic QA uses).