So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.

Yeah. It’s hard to do better than the classicsl books. The language structures have changed, but the core principles endure.

there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”,

That’s a great point. The metric that really matters is “good enough for today”, which can be very subjective.

Yeah. It was pretty awful early in my career. The good news is that “The person with an opinion has no power over the person with an experience.”

As I’ve built up years of my own work experiences, I don’t spend as much energy on each new idea I encounter.

Now I’m just proud that I still, once in awhile, significantly change the way I work, thanks to new information.

But, since what my team is doing works well already, I have to encounter the same advice from several trusted sources. And then we put it through a test sprint with a thoughtful team retrospective, after.

It’s possible to find a happy balance, but it takes experience to get there.

Edit: So to answer the obvious question - what advice stuck with me?

1. Host team retrospectives. The rest of Agile is optional. Effective retrospectives are mandatory, because they’re what tunes everything else correctly for my team and my organization.

2. Cherish plain text under version control. I’ve slept soundly many nights when others were up and working late, thanks to the simplicity and clarity of the process of reviewing what changed in plain text files. Any time a tool supports being setup with plain text files under version control, I advocate for that option.

3. Pick one thing that matters for today. It helps me focus, and forces me to really decide what matters, today. It helps me say “no” to requests that need to wait. And it helps me choose to give myself a break after I get that one thing done. One important thing per day adds up to awestriking levels of annual productivity, given reasonable opportunities.

That’s a great point. A nice Debian LTS release could be just the thing.

Yeah. I think you can’t go wrong with either Debian or Fedora with Gnome. I would pick whichever I’m most comfortable with. The grandparents will probably never notice.

I love to give Gnome crap for being a large install, but I’ve lost count of the number of machines that I’ve put Gnome on and had it just work. And I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve searched for a fancy command line way to fix an annoyance in Gnome, and discovered there’s just a simple toggle in settings for what I want.

Everyone is losing their minds because they’re afraid there’ll be a run on popcorn, not because anyone will miss a waste of space healthcare CEO.

If people don’t feel like we can make things better with negotiation, this is where it goes. I’m not up for pretending I didn’t see this coming.

This may be good time to be an experienced professional body guard, because there’s a lot of healthcare CEOs left and no way was the alleged attacker (I didn’t see shit!) the only person they’ve hurt.

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Yep. And while I’m personally convinced the US was actually doing fine on “who counts the votes”, the “who gets to vote” part has been rigged for quite a long time. Arguably from the very beginning.

This is perfect. We need to choose increasingly lower pixel shocked Pikachu for this kind of news, until it’s just a vague yellow splat with red highlights and everyone still knows what it means.

Nippon Steel says they would keep older (unionized) facilities in Pennsylvania open. Union leadership has said that they don’t believe them.

That promise plus $9 is absolutely worth the price of a coffee. Unless the price of coffee already went up again, then maybe not.

Yeah. “We found a union member completely unaware that they’re absolutely statistically guaranteed to be fucked by this merger, who is also shocked that Trump doesn’t give a shit what any union member thinks.”

I know someone mourning the death of their younger brother to COVID who still voted for Trump.

The dude literally helped kill their younger brother, through his “leadership”, but they don’t see it that way.

Really shitty ones, but yeah.

Lest we forget Reddit “finding” the Boston Marathon bomber.

Lol. If I had any leads on this, I didn’t see shit.

I, personally, wouldn’t voluntarily lift a finger to save or find justice for anyone currently in power in US healthcare.

US Healthcare company CEOs are a sociopathic pox on mankind. While I respect the rule of law, that’s all they’ll ever get from me. I don’t prevent people from swatting mosquitoes either.

Per one article, “A motive for the shooting is unclear, and police haven’t announced one.”

Seriously? We’re really gonna pretend not to be completely 100% aware of the likely motive?

I look forward to the police investigating every single family hurt by this bastard’s policies. I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it right before the heat death of the universe.

Yeah. That would be a shame, in that we missed every chance to be collectively better, before reaching that point.

Plus, I expect to feel bad about the whole situation while I render my “not guilty” jury verdict in the potentially many court cases to come.

Assuming that any onlooker saw anything, that is…

they want poor who can work to stay alive and live as their obedient slaves that serve them.

Minor clarification.

Uh…“from scratch”? No thanks. I’m a big fan of GCC, and don’t intend to learn to code without it.

Lol. I assumed they were shopping around for a burned out hard drinking senior developmer - one ready to walk away from computers entirely.

I love the idea that our first message to aliens might be “FRESH WATER ONLY. NO WASTE.”