peteevans

In a lot of business code reviews are compulsory (or at least some sort of inspection) and often required for accreditation. There is often a convenient change set from version control tools such as SVN/GIT etc that can be used to define review content and these change set often have associated diff tools to help. On previous projects we'd just branch every change in SVN and get someone else to check the changeset to merge onto trunk. Saying that we are currently using JIRA with associated code review tools and this is great and provides a nice log of comments and responses which we can present to QA (as review evidence) on a simple web interface. Reviewing the code is a great way of sharing the knowledge in addition to finding bugs earlier (if done well).

I'd say yes and no. Given that way that a lot of HR departments just seem to run a keyword search for jobs and this often hits languages. This can work against you. If the cool stuff is relevant then that will be good once you get past the HR, if not it's cool anyway. However, unpopular languages can work in your favour when the number of developers drop or the languages become more popular, for instance Cobol was suddenly a goldmine around Y2K and who knows where current tech will go. However, getting extra languages under your belt is a good thing both for employability and learning new programming paradigms.

Depends what you are looking for (project management tools doesn't narrow it down much) but Trello is often seen as the competition to JIRA which seems to be used extensively in more 'old school' businesses.

Too narrow a specialisation as evidenced by the difficulty in finding jobs. However, if it's something you enjoy then stick with it and add complementary skills. Add in linux kernel/driver development (double up and you can volunteer) and something complementary such as security. You may also want to brush up on things like biometrics and the hardware part (i.e. electronic engineering) to bridge out into a wider space.

Physical stuff: Make sure you get enough exercise and sleep, check your diet is balanced and reduce caffeine and alcohol. Mental: Try to work out what is distracting you and get it done or eliminate it. Technology: It's yours to use sometimes it feels like we are its slave. Time out: Go on a back to basic holiday trekking or cycling , camping etc with a bare minimum of stuff (particularly tech) - find this puts things in perspective

House below is a great idea! otherwise email replacement. Really it's 2017 and we're still stuck in the dark ages, there has to be better way!

As a fellow programmer, I'd saying dancing is good physical without seeming like it, if you find the right place it can be really social and you mix with the non-nerds which is nice in breaking the geek-perspective (or back to reality). I've done ceroc/modern jive for years and found it to be friendlier than salsa (and with better music - not a salsa fan) and being a paired dance you mix with lots of people.

Otherwise bit of photography seems popular to combine some walky with your inner tech!

As mentioned by others lubuntu and xubuntu are fairly lightweight and I've used ubuntu variants on netbooks in the past and where reasonably fast. From ubuntu server you should be able to install the different desktops anyway, but seems a slightly harder route! Saying that look to the browser, chrome tends to be memory hungry, due to multiple processes, and firefox is heading (headed?) that way, which tends to be bad on limited resource computers. I'm finding firefox slow on my old laptop now. There are some other views here http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lightweight-linux-distros-ide...