Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.
C/C++ still has a huge place in firmware, microcontrollers, operating systems, drivers, application development, video games, real-time systems and so on. It’s a totally different space of programming to webdev, which might explain the surprise.
Sometimes the real value of a project isn’t its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I’ve backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money’s worth on.
If you’re concerned about privacy I don’t know why you’d use Tailscale over Wireguard directly. The latter is slightly more fiddly to configure, but you only do it once and there’s no cloud middleman involved, just your devices talking directly to each other.
I’d recommend setting up a GitHub profile and developing some personal projects on there, and try to get some experience contributing to other projects (even if they’re just simple first PRs). Make sure you include this on your resume, it’s a great talking point for juniors to show you’re passionate and have concrete examples of your code in the wild.
Also set up a LinkedIn profile (fleshed out as best you can) and start adding people at companies you’re interested in. DM them asking for advice, most people are lovely and want to help. While LinkedIn is horrible and needs to die, it’s still used heavily by the tech industry and you’ll find every tech company and recruiters on there.
… or worked in a large team with juniors and members coming and going over a long period of time.
To take up a career in programming is to be professionally confused on a day-to-day basis. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed at times, but this is the advice I give younger engineers: accept that confusion, and try to channel it into curiosity instead of letting it fester into stress and anxiety.
I’d rather drink a verification can every 30 minutes.
It’s the same for people who don’t understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes “it’s broken” and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It’s expensive to be ignorant.
To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.
The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.
I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.
One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.
Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.
… until you finally track down who wrote this mess, and it was you 5 years ago.
A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.
And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.
I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.
Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.
The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.
Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.
Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.