morvita
Source: work as a software dev at a company developing antibody drugs
https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/breaking-apple-will-...
The last few times I've tried to use Uber, immediately after matching with a driver they'll message me telling me to cancel the trip because they don't want to go where I'm going. When I refuse, they'll play chicken and drive around in circles refusing to come pick me up and refusing to cancel themselves if they don't want the job, trying to make me pay the cancellation penalty rather than them. When I fly into YVR, it's so much more convenient to walk to the taxi stand and get a ride home within a few minutes for $50, than to order an Uber, wait 20 minutes for it to arrive, and pay $60-80 for the privilege.
hello :maple leaf: -> bonjour :fleur-de-lis:
Just as there are different spoken/written languages and people find different ones easier or harder to learn based on a huge number of variables, I believe the same is true of programming languages. Sometimes it's the syntax that makes a language difficult, sometimes it's a different paradigm, sometimes it's an unfamiliar memory model or type system -- there are lots of things that can make your brain throw up a block when trying to dive into a new language.
I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.
I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/amazon-canad... [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/microsoft-vancouver-office-b...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...
I think one of the driving factors in this is that, as other people in this thread have discussed, most of the people writing this software are not software developers and have no interest in being software developers. The scientists trained in the 60s/70s/80s learned Fortran, who then founded their own research groups and taught their students Fortran, who are now running their own groups using Fortran because it's what they know. Some folks use Python for data analysis after their simulations run, but even that was rare 10 years ago.
If we take your more charitable interpretation, I still think it is fair to ask whether we are ok just accepting 100,000 new infections/day of a serious respiratory illness as a normal thing in the summer months, a time that we usually see lower infection rates for this type of illness. For every endemic disease, there is a number of infections that are considered acceptable and public health measures are taken to keep the real infection rates at or below that. I, for one, do not think 100,000 daily is an acceptable number of infections in the US and we should be speaking out to say so. We can collectively do more to bring that rate down, but we don't want to because we're tired of wearing masks on the bus and for some reason have tied protecting yourself personally to a political ideology. We can do better as a society and should be demanding as much from our leaders, not encouraging them to do less.
In the US and Canada (can't speak to other countries), we've collectively agreed to pretend that COVID has just disappeared and return to normalcy because we're tired of dealing with it, but in spite of pretending it's gone away people are still getting sick and dying from this disease every day.
I caught COVID for the first time in July and my "mild" case knocked me out for five days. It was the sickest I've been in ten years and I'm a fit, healthy thirty-something.
The company had just released a new SDK to access a data repository. Since it was a brand new library, they only had Java/Scala versions, with plans to support other languages (JS, Python being the next two on their roadmap) in the few quarters. My team, primarily researchers who only knew Python, needed to use some of this data for a new project. I figured, what the hell, I've been looking for an excuse to learn some Scala, I'll see if I can throw together a utility for my team to use to get access to this data sooner. I fired up Sublime Text and opened up the docs for the SDK and got to work. The documentation was terrible and I really struggled to do basic tasks with this SDK. Simple things like what types were expected for function parameters was just non-existent. Since this SDK was planned to be released publicly to customers, I thought I'd do my co-workers a favour and sent them a message with some feedback about places where I particularly struggled with understanding how to use their SDK, thinking I could help improve the documentation before this went out to paying customers. Their response was that if I just used a proper IDE for my development, I wouldn't have these problems since the code completion/suggestions would let me know what the types of parameters were.
That experience completely soured me on the JVM ecosystem and I walked away from learning it. When I finally came back two years later, I discovered that I actually really like working in Scala (admittedly I do use Intellij for it now), but that many library's documentation is still quite poor compared to what I've come to expect for Python libraries.
I haven't looked at the validation app's code, but I assume the main reason the have their own app instead of pointing businesses to one of the existing SMART Health Card validators is so they can bundle the public keys used for verifying the QR data wasn't tampered with allowing the app to work offline. The SMART Health Card system does provide a way to download the public keys (I've checked and BC does publish them as expected), but it's probably easier to guarantee offline functionality here.
[0] https://smarthealth.cards/index.html [1] https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS, https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android
[0] https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.6.html#whatsnew36-compa... [1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-December/1...