geekles
Twitter as a platform and product works better today than it did a year ago. Less bots makes a huge difference.
It's also not hard to imagine why they lost 50% of their advertisers. 50% kind of lines up with the percentage of "woke" (horrible label, but whatever) companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in.
Prognostication is fun, but to be honest, we don't really have any idea whether or not this rebranding and redirection will work. Time will tell.
I, however, applaud people willing to take moonshots.
What helps to prevent spammed low quality apps is the app review process.
Those who are spamming the app stores with low quality, keyword dense apps are those who are looking to make a quick buck, and they do not hesitate to pay the paltry yearly fee.
I didn't do much serious programming until I was about 24, the place I worked, a convenience store, just got cash registers with scanners. So we had all this scanning data but no easy way to collate it over time. I wrote a perl script that would parse our scanning data and tell me how much of x we sold for a period of time y. That was when I truly got bit by the programming bug.
My advice would be to have a problem you really need to solve, a goal. The rest is just trying to figure out how to make your language of choice reach that goal for you. It is so much easier to learn how to program when you have a real, tangible, and personal goal, and not some arbitrary exercise put forth by a language tutorial.
Something I wish I knew before getting into programming? Language choice is personal. Find a language whose syntax you enjoy and you can wrap your head around. Don't get caught up in language wars/debates. It's basically meaningless (although fun to argue about). Whatever language you enjoy the most is the one you should be using.
Everytime I see XMPP in print, it makes me think of that media player I use to use in fvwm way back when.
What is the total LOC of the implementation, period. Remove all ambiguity.
It should be called 2009 Ruby Top Ten, but interesting all the same.
The development environment is a joy to use, although unfamiliar to the uninitiated, but very powerful indeed. Some people do not like the image idea or the fact that they can't bring their tools with them, but I love it. Pharo lives on my USB stick and is ready and willing no matter what type of system I am on, or whose for that matter.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - overheard in an interview somewhere.
This could be the beginning of the end for consumer telephony.