dchesterton
- University is definitely not free, at least in England. Fees are £9k per year. Interest rates are high and you don’t have to pay it back unless you earn over a certain amount so in reality, it’s more like a graduate tax for many, but it’s definitely not free.
- Childcare is limited to a few free days a week, often has extras to be paid for and is otherwise very expensive. For those on higher incomes that’s reduced too.
- 52 weeks parental leave is for the mother only and is only at statutory pay after 6 weeks (about £150 per week). Paternity leave is 2 weeks at statutory pay.
- 6 weeks of holiday is not normal. Normal would be about 4 weeks.
- The state pension is £185 per week. Nearly everybody contributes a decent amount to a private pension too.
I have smart devices everywhere yet I can still adjust the thermostat manually, turn on lights using a normal switch, set the house alarm using the keypad etc. However, I also have a 'Night' scene in Home Assistant which sets my alarm to night mode, turns off all the lights in the house and sets the thermostat to night temperature all with a single tap and all over the local network.
Traffic is accurate, although it is be a little slower to update than Google Maps (it seems to be ~5 mins behind). Directions are spot on and the UI (at least in CarPlay) is clear and detailed. The only thing that's poor compared to Google Maps is the search but it's certainly a decent alternative and it's come a long way since it was first released.
Obviously banks have a lot of regulation they have to comply with but I think a lot of it is simply a case of "that's how it's always been" and a lack of competition due to the high barriers to entry.
My bank: I look on their website which says I can phone up and do it over the phone. I phone up, go through the automated options and then I'm told that actually I have to go into a branch with ID and proof of address because apparently I'm not registered for 'telephone banking' (why?!).
The nearest branch to me is open 9-4.30pm on weekdays and 9-1pm on Saturdays. I generally work at these times so I have to take time out of work to go into a branch, queue for 10 minutes and eventually get it changed.
Monzo: I open a live chat within their app, answer a couple of security questions and the address is changed right away. It took about 5 minutes at most and I could do it while working on other things.
My bank also charge a small fortune for foreign transactions and contactless won't work abroad. Monzo is free and contactless has so far worked fine in 3 different countries.
The UK banking industry is massively behind the times with regards to customer service, facilities and technology. The potential for Monzo is huge if they can pull off what they're trying to achieve.
We're looking to add support for Microsoft's new Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions, and this will be a matter of creating a single file for each to handle the input.
You should always abstract your dependencies, especially if it's a critical part of your infrastructure.
This also has the benefit that if one service goes down, we can automatically fallback to the other with (hopefully) no downtime. Most email providers have a limit to what you can send until you're established with them, so using another provider as a standard backup isn't feasible, as suddenly sending 1,000's of emails a day will see the account get suspended pretty quickly.
Plus, if one of them goes out of business or changes their terms with little notice, like Mandrill, we should have a bit more time to work around it as at least one service will work.
Musk has stated in the past that they're looking to eventually use this tech to create rockets which can be used on Mars, hence why parachutes and inflatables are out of the question.
People hate on PHP but there are a lot of quality packages out there and Composer is definitely considered best practice by most developers now.
These companies were generally fulfilling a niche which required a certain amount of complexity at the core of the application. They were also difficult to replace as they fulfilled a very specific need.
Evernote, a note taking application, has no reason to be complicated and can be easily replaced. They're trying to appeal to the masses but have overloaded the app with unnecessary features which are not core to the application.
Things that are 'good' for me: Good concurrency primitives, single binary deployment with no dependencies, a language that can be picked up in a matter of days and a consistent coding style (gofmt).
If another language suits you better than use it, but to call Go "a regression from other modern programming languages" ignores the many reasons developers are using it.
Pros of IronWorker: More language support, better logging, easier to debug, scheduled tasks via API (this is the main thing stopping us going all in on Lambda).
Cons: Slower start up time (~2-3s on average compared to milliseconds with Lambda), pay upfront rather than pay for what you use, no choice re. CPU/RAM.