riaandewit

This one time, I doubled the speed of our bulk mailing app by reading the template in, setting as a variable, and using that instead of reading the template inside the loop each time. Biggest bang for buck change ever :)

What worked for me: come up with a bit of patter or a general “surrounding script” that you wrap your answers with. JFK did this sort of thing to buy himself time to think.

You can also use it to build in your disclaimers: you’re just giving your opinion on the spot and might have better answers after thinking about it offline for a bit. Counter to intuition, I found the “hmm, first approximation says THIS to me, but can I take the problem away and get back to you with something better, once I have more data and have run through the options in my head?” Approach tends to build trust over time, and actually helps ramp up your confidence too. It turns the whole process from a step to a gradient.

Don’t worry too much about the body language of confidence. Unless you’re doing something pathological like picking your nose or something, there is a WIDE range of acceptable ways to interact: think Brin, Musk, Newton, Darwin, Hawking.

And… cut yourself some slack - you’ve got this ;)

For me, portability trumps pixel count at the moment.

I haven’t used a multiple monitor setup for about 10 years now, and that works just fine - adding another monitor adds only the ability to keep an eye on things out of the corner of my immediate focus.

If I had to keep track of dashboards visually, or did 3-d modeling, or video editing or something like that, it’s possible I’d need more real estate visible at once, but since I’m programming, I only really care about the function I’m working on at the moment, which doesn’t need much :)

Making the case (and sounding like an oil exec) that we need to be consuming more energy.

I agree: access to energy is vital to our future, but if we’re boosting efficiencies and being less wasteful that’s going to have an effect. So we can expect to see a decline in total energy consumed over time, even though we’re doing more with it!

So, don’t ship cars then. Tweak cities for micro mobility and walking.

Also: a couple of burned and sunk ships is a much cheaper price to pay than climate change. If the cost of the odd lithium fire is a lot, wait till you factor in the costs of the emissions of an ICE over the vehicle lifetime.

This reeks of FUD during the death throes of the petrochemical industry, tbh.

This could be tricky! More and more, programmers are moving away from the stereotype of white dude who likes to play computer games in their spare time, and is always on the lookout for a gadget. I’d opt for giving them a gift voucher for an area of interest to them. That way, they could buy a raspberry pi if they wanted, or art supplies, or get nails done, or have a spa treatment. They could even use it to top up their own spend :) Key thing is to know your audience. If you don’t, maybe setup a system where they can choose. I wouldn’t recommend buying equipment for them. They’re a very particular bunch, and you could end up buying “rubbish” in their opinion! Maybe one of the options could also be to not give the money to them, but to a charity. Only if they choose it though!

I lerned to touch type using Dvorak in 2001. I’m useless at Qwerty! If it’s the only way you can realistically learn to touch type, stick with it. Absolutely no RSI - but I might just be lucky. I don’t have Emacs pinky either… :)

At this one job I had, the org basically ran on stored procedures. Like thousands of them. So I whipped up a couple of functions and keybindings so if the cursor was on the name of a stored proc, I could surf to it. And then back and so on. Basically, it was a stored proc browser!

At one job, the order came on down from on high that we had to do timesheets, but we had to log precisely 7.2 hours a day. So I made a little emacs lisp function to adjust my times proportionally. Hot key was C-M f (for Fraud) :)

S3, cloudfront, route53 for the hosting. Your text editor of choice for generating. Git for version control :)

Global logistics service, with side aim of distributing surplus food to areas that need it.

Big data backed surgery scheduling for units with high contention, to minimize patient loss.