Indeed. :-)

I still insist that the music of our generation growing up was the best time for listening to alternative/metal etc.

So much innovation, new genres were created, and so much creativity.

Today most of the music sounds like ‘more of the same’ and very formulaic to me. I am happy for any recommendation of current music in alternative/metal which is innovativ.

Thank you very much, a great recommendation!

… and yes, agreed: I am lucky I had a very good manager once, who didn’t pull the usual shit and had human integrity, but people like that are the exception not the rule.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I’ll buy it! :-)

Yes, I also saw it in every job/team/organization, and it seems very human, everyone just likes some people better than others.

The think which irks me, is that I also sometimes experienced favoritism/nepotism with totally incompetent people I had to directly work with and also several level above my pay grade. Like, if you have two competent people and chose the one you like more, I can totally understand. But if there are competent people and you chose your incompetent crony over literally everybody else, it seems self defeating in the mid/long run.

I benefited of someone with relative power taking a liking to me later in my career, and all of a sudden I was elevated into a network where things are possible which weren’t before. Still at the very bottom of the ladder, but very aware how much difference a few connections can make.

Correct, not all of my examples are about nepotism.

Thank you for your recommendations, funnily enough I don’t suffer from the political/social skills.

What I cannot wrap my head around are situations, where people through nepotism/favoritism or politics get a position where they fail, which then comes back to the people who put them there. To rephrase it a little bit: “Why not put someone who is 50% competent and 90% loyal on a position instead of someone who is 25% competent and perhaps 95% loyal”? It seems kind of obvious to have a little bit competence, and if it is only for self preservation. (Just to ‘objectify’ that: Saw higher managers which are totally incompetent (not only my opinion), have a proven track record of failing everything they touch by stupidity (like: that is not how reality works stupid) which got officially demoted after several years, hurting their sponsors. Why didn’t their sponsor demote them earlier or put them in the position in the first place?)

Wow, thanks a lot, the books look very interesting and special shout out for the Podcast, I already subscribed to the feed! :-)

• Finch - Say Hello to Sunshine
• Paledusk - Palehell
• Faith no more - King for a day, fool for a lifetime
• Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
• Philipp Glass - Glassworks
• Henryk Mikołaj Górecki - Symphony of sorrowful Songs
• Fear Factory - Obsolete
• At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command
• Boy sets fire - After The Eulogy
• Refused - The Shape of Punk to come (not a fan after their sell-out-reunion, but the album is still great)

… and the following 4 years the young voters will learn that votes would be forbidden, if they changed anything. :-P

Harris would not be where she is w/o support from the elite, even if she wanted, she cannot change the system.

Anyway, hope she gets elected, so I don’t have to suffer Trump news every single day (like now). It’s worth it for that alone, so go and vote, citizens!

Seems SAP’s investment in good arguments pays off.

OTOH Europe and Germany have obvious problems in the cloud sector: They cannot do it on their own and thus are depending on either the USA or other countries who have the know-how.

Not a situation you want to find yourself in, when IT is the backbone which keeps everything running.

Luckily German government’s investment in paper, floppy drives and fax machines makes it secure against attacks towards IT infrastructure… ;-)

No worries and thanks a lot for your suggestions/answers!

Thanks for your suggestions: Can confirm start/end bytes are wrong. Tried to open in Shotwell, GIMP, Firefox, Google Chrome w/o results.

I assume the hard drive is ok: I also have some git repositories on the drive and the checksums for git are correct. Every other file on the drive is ok, so cryptolocker malware could have only been on my phone at that time.

Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!

Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.

Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.

Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P

… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures…

Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or ‘proven by anecdote’.

Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.

Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.

Thanks, great write-up!

This! So great when simmering/cooking stuff one has to fish out of a pot. Mine is used almost daily at home!

Source

Perhaps for perspective, because ‘rich’ is relative and I am always surprised how hard it is to forget that every person/class lives in a world of their own.

When I was studying, I had to work to support myself, coming from a working class background. My whole time at the university was like visit mandatory courses, study, work and use weekends to study some more/do classwork. My parents could neither help me financially or with advice.

I meet a study friend from a normal ‘middle class’ background on the street. He would spent many weekends to do short trips, go sailing, visit family, … perfectly fine and I am happy he could afford to live like that. During our conversation he mentioned casually, that he was going on a multi week vacation, because ‘Sometimes you just need to get out and see something else.’. He didn’t mean it in bad faith, I just felt like shit because at that time I haven’t had vacation for multiple years.

Now, I am perfectly fine with my friend living a good life. What really gets to me, though, is that for example the middle class takes all their privileges for granted and nowadays you can suddenly read in newspapers discussions, if it is still worth to go work if you cannot even afford to buy your own flat/house. Where I live, working class couldn’t afford to buy a flat/house for decades now, but there was never a discussion whether it would still be worth for the working class to work. The discussion is more about how to force the working class to work more for less.

The ‘artist’ faces a potential 2 years in prison (!).

Of course I assume he won’t be put in prison for 2 years, still, the German legal system is a bad joke. Politicians/managers of companies who willfully and knowingly harm society have nothing to fear, putting an image on the wall has the potential to bring you behind bars.

Very nice, should be a top level post so nobody misses it! :-)

Don’t worry, while you are waiting for Windows to react to your input, you can enjoy watching some ads in the near future! :-)

• Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu

Golangs web server is production grade and used in production. (Of course everyone uses some high performance proxy like NGINX for serving static pages, that’s another story.)

Technically you are right that java has no production web server, which I don’t like, OTOH Java has standard APIs WebServers and Spring is the defacto standard for web applications. (I totally would not mind to move Spring into the OpenJDK.)

My point is simple: Instead of having Rust edtion 2020, 2021 etc. and tweaking the syntax ad infinitum, I’d rather have a community which invests in a good/broad standard library and good tooling.

The only platform widely used in production w/o a big standard library is Node.js/JavaScript, mostly for historical reasons and look at the problems that Node.js has for a decade now because of the missing standard library.