I was just thinking of Logo today and how it got me super interested in programming. I ended up doing simple rectangles with my 5 year old. He loved the turtle!
I worked at a ~smallish startup. While we had around 20 devs employed we shared oncall between 3 people.
We invested a lot into availability - especially DBs. Most of our issues were internal DNS related which we at one point automated into hosts files that updated every hour.
Oncall was shared between 3 of us with all 3 paged at once and us getting on WhatsApp to 1. diagnose and 2. fix. Most of the time only 1 of us was close to a laptop but all 3 of us would assist as best we could.
One of us wasn't tethered at any point in time but for the most part we were able to get to a laptop within 30 minutes at most. I now work at FAAMG and find oncall especially stressful but it's once every ~6 weeks.
In my case you're 100% spot on with the unhealthy relationship part. I lost around 45kg in slightly less than a year and gained most of it back in the 2 years after.
For the most part, it's due to really bad habits built up over years.
Addictions are interesting things to break - I suspect they're also very different based on the person.
I smoked for close to 10 years before going cold-turkey from 3 packs a day yet the nicotine cravings I had doesn't come close to how badly I crave sweet stuff most of the time.
Aehm yes these are independent qualities. And i didn’t state they are connected.
But both (and other business stuff as mentioned that doesn’t come automatically just by being a great dev)are helpful if you wanna bootstrap a small company / freelance business without external funding. You can be lucky and be so well paid for being a so great dev that you never need to save, but it’s good to be able to save when anything doesn’t work out as good as dreamed.
I state you need more that tech skills to be successful.
If you don’t have these other skills, better keep in a “safe” employment. But also then i recommend to work on some of these, like at least the negotiation stuff. It will help you.
The first thing I thought of when seeing this was giving a card to each team member which allows for small purchases at specific partnered businesses - e.g. expensing lunch outings without most of the paperwork.
In the short term you'll probably end up feeling guilty about it but it's much better to work somewhere where you don't hate the environment.
Before I started my current job, I already had an accepted offer from another company (Company A). While I had some regrets about accepting the first offer too quickly I put it down to the second company (Company B) reacting slower and that they should probably have moved a bit quicker if filling the position was really a priority (they're interview process took much longer because the CTO was on holiday during the process).
Eventually I did start working at Company A but realized within the first day that my co-workers had almost no passion and some of them had very questionable work ethic. After two weeks I contacted Company B and asked if they would still be interested in me working there and had the difficult conversation with my manager. At some point one of the directors had me explain to a client that I was leaving by my own choice - to this day I'm not even sure what this accomplished.
I ended up being much happier at my current company and didn't have to work in an environment that I hated.
Close friends even commented on noticing a change in my demeanour within the first few days of starting at Company B.
Overall while I would do it again but I think it's also taught me to be careful when accepting a position as well as that it's much easier to rescind an accepted offer before you've started adding value to a company than resigning afterwards.
Thanks! Some of these were the only programming books that our local library had (in the mid 90s). I remember the Adventure Programs book quite fondly.
When I was in high school our local mobile networks brought out a feature called "Please call me" in which you used USSD to send an unbilled notification for another number to call you - you only got around 20 per day but that was more than enough.
Most people seemed to use it to notify their parents that they were ready to be picked up from a prearranged place much like you're describing with missed calls.
* Small util on an ESP32 to turn my garage lights on when I open the side door.
* An app to track players I've played against before in Dota2 and pop up before a match so I can skip matches with players who I've found to be toxic.