mpalfrey
Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.
(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).
I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched.
Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it).
Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!
Hardest thing is reproducing a bug reliably.
I developed a taste for it that weekend - it's not that bad (I'd take it over something like Becharovka). Annoyingly years ago (2009ish) I spent a fair amount of time over in the Midwest with work and never drank the stuff.
I've experienced it slamming on at slow speeds and it's pretty aggressive.
My first year of uni also had a pretty evil pure maths course which was worth a high percentage of the year. Not much fun.
I tend to keep my seat belt fairly loosly fastened throughout the flight. At least once I've experienced bad turbulence around where this flight had it - enough to make me hold tightly onto things and for service to be stopped. Usually I need a few trips to the bathroom during the flight though and if nothing else, a chance to stretch my legs (20 hours on planes in 24 hours means walking around is important).
Be interesting to see if anything is different on board (either with crew or fellow pax). RIP to the guy who died.
I enjoyed Cisco (great 4th July parties!) but it never felt like we were properly integrated.
I've got a GCSE in Welsh (having been one of the first years to have to do it mandatory). Used it once in anger up in North Wales. It was a difficult language to learn and I'd have preferred to continue with another European language ideally. I'll probably try to teach my daughter some Welsh though (she was born in England and will go to school in England).
I interviewed at Shopify last year, I didn't end up accepting (I stayed at the unnamed software company) but I do agree with a lot of their processes (not so much since the layoffs they've had however).
In the end I moved it all to GSuite for a few bucks a month. It's simply worth it to avoid the issues with sender rep.
I've had to provide background references for a number of jobs in the past. This could well come back and bite you - what if the person hiring knows people from the company you supposedly worked for? It's a small world out there, in particular if you're looking for roles close to home.
I'd guess they knew it was safe and it's easier to deal with a plane full of pax at your originating airport than diverting to STN (where there's no BA ops) or LGW (BA have ops here so could have worked).
I got addicted to that too, and Beehive Bedlam in 2001.
I love TV tech. The old Teletext / Ceefax product was pretty impressive for its time and some insane engineering. I spent a number of years writing software for the TV industry (both backend and STB software) as a result of playing about with this when I was younger.
Public speaking or presentation course can be good.
I've been doing some certs lately. AWS Solutions Architect Associate was about that for a virtual course + exam voucher.
Find a conference somewhere next year and book that? Not sure where you're based but $1200 would cover a couple of days and some travel depending on the conf.
I still go on certain forums (e.g. Pistonheads.com) but the niche groups are all on Facebook these days.
Instead of a simple method call, you now have the joys of distributed systems to deal with instead.
I'm a fan of right size architecture. Monoliths have their place. Microservices have their place. Neither are necessarily better than the other. Different tools for potentially different jobs.
I've had an Apple Watch SE for the last couple of years. It's been pretty good on the whole. Bought it after my Garmin Forerunner nearly failed to get a GPS lock in time when I was in a start pen for a half marathon (AFAIK the Fenix gets a lock far quicker).