dleskov

TDD only works in conjunction with thorough peer reviews. Case in point: at my place of work, code and tests written by an intern can go through literally dozens of iterations before the check-in gets authorized, and even the senior engineers are not exempt from peer reviews (recent interns are especially eager to volunteer).

> if doing GPL stuff use the open source license from ExcelsiorJET.

Thanks for mentioning our product, but I have to make a few corrections:

First, the Excelsior JET Runtime license is sadly not GPL-compatible. Also, you cannot use it to target embedded systems, unless you buy Excelsior JET Embedded and pay royalties, though we are currently weighing the option to switch to OpenJDK to eliminate the latter.

Second, the Standard Edition is free even for commercial use (the above limitations apply).

Finally, other editions are available at no cost for use in public non-commercial projects. It does not matter whether the (software part of the) project is open source or not.

See https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free for details.

Problem is, the God Folder dates back to Vista and it is the Windows 10 Creators Update that began setting that field to NULL. Apparently the author of that change did not foresee any backward compatibility issues.

Excelsior guy here.

Overall, I would say that AOT suddenly becoming kosher helps our business way more than competition hurts it.

Then, "JDK9 has AOT out of the box" is a bit of exaggeration. Oracle AOT is only available for Linux/x64 ATM, yields huge binaries and may be a bit cumbersome to use: http://mjg123.github.io/2017/10/04/AppCDS-and-Clojure.html

The main difference however is that a binary produced by Oracle AOT is to a big extent just a pre-populated HotSpot cache, whereas Excelsior JET has been AOT-centric since day one. In practice that means that with Oracle AOT you have to ship both the native binary and the original class files to your customers, and with Excelsior JET you only ship the native binary, which makes reverse engineering your application more difficult.

I recall us being quite surprised when a customer survey had shown that IP protection is more important than application performance for many of our customers, even though it was just a byproduct of our optimization efforts.

Author here. Kindly (suggest where to) cross-post - I think it's important for the health of our industry that freeware authors and open source enthusiasts keep getting rewarded for their efforts. Thank you.

Some info for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it:

The entry-level edition of Excelsior JET is free (as in beer) since the end of August 2016. Licenses for the more senior editions have been available for non-commercial use at no cost for many years.

https://www.excelsiorjet.com/free

[0] can be had at $10+ under a charity program at the moment: http://www.excelsiorjet.com/charity

Low/zero cost is a benefit only if everything else is equal. Eclipse and Netbeans are free, yet people pay for IntelliJ IDEA. We use an expensive commercial GUI testing product because all the free and cheaper alternatives sucked big time, and support was either poor or non-existent.

I mean someone who can build support for your shiny new language and/or instruction set into GCC or LLVM and get their pull request accepted by the maintainers.

I am with a small company focused on compilers and managed runtimes (JVM), and I can tell you that _good_ compiler consultants are in high demand. For instance, I had a discussion with a CEO of such specialized consultancy looking for GCC specialists last year, and he said that LLVM engineers are even harder to come by.

I also see processor startups popping up all the time that need compiler/tools engineers badly.

Overall, I'd repeat what others have said: "save a lot and invest your savings wisely."

Just want to make one thing clear: in this particular case the request was to block a specific URI. It is the (smaller) ISPs that do not have a technology to block an URI and the (bigger) ISPs that do not bother to employ that tech who block entire sites by IP addresses.

Just specify on your freelancer's profiles that you are available part-time due to "other commitments". Not all prospects are looking for full-time workers.

The section on résumés in Butterick's Practical Typography book has some decent advice, not just typography-related:

http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html

Have your CV edited by a professional editor. I have seen this working wonders - from no responses to competing offers from two top companies in the field. Editing is so cheap compared to its potential effect on your entire lifetime income that it has a good chance of being your best ever investment.

Emails get lost, most often in Junk Mail boxes.

When I don't hear back from someone within a reasonable time frame, I follow up with a short email asking if my previous email about this and that was received. If I do not get anything back either within a day or two, I call with exactly the same question: "I sent you an email about <subject> on <date> but have not heard back, so just want to make sure it found its way to your inbox". More often than you would think the person I called would either find my emails in their junk folder, do not find them at all, apologize for overlooking them, or apologize for not replying sooner. (And sometimes they would say they replied and I would find their replies in my junk folder.)

My limited experience of disputing a PayPal transaction was exactly the opposite (i.e. I was the buyer).

> creating a super-optimized tight loop of a program in C++, C or (better) assembly might be much easier to do than in higher level JITted languages

Sometimes, the situation is exactly opposite, though:

http://pzemtsov.github.io/2014/05/15/how-to-make-C-as-fast-a...

Excelsior guy here. Actually, Excelsior JET is a proper AOT compiler. That is, a developer or build enginer runs it on their workstation (build server) and then ships a native executable to the end users. We used to have a caching JIT, and even an option to recompile the cache into a single binary, but concluded it is not worth the hassle, and deprecated it last year.