YourMatt

I love your documentation.

Small thing: Your "Built with" links at the bottom are broken.

I'm a fullstack dev, and I routinely fill up the 16GB in my laptop. I generally have two full IDEs, SSMS, Illustrator, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Visio, a bunch of browser tabs, and now Teams or Zoom. I tend to be more constrained by core count than RAM though.

I try to use my desktop as much as possible (which has 64GB and 16 cores), but I can't always be tethered to my office.

I loved it in July as well. I describe it as otherworldly. Just bring a lot of water. I'm from Phoenix though, and I'm well used to heat.

I did my part by holding on to the money. We took a vacation a few weeks ago and spent it that way. I think we're in the vast minority though. The stimulus really should have been held so the money could go to businesses as they reopened. As for the vacation, we drove to our destination (a resort in San Diego). We disinfected the room ourselves before moving in. We canceled daily cleaning. We avoided crowds and stayed masked up. People are critical of vacationing right now, and rightly so, but it can still be done in a safe way.

It was a Lifeform chair with some upgrades. It was over the top for sure. I've been happy with the X-Chair I bought for under a grand. The Leap chair came up a lot when I was doing research. People love them. I didn't find one locally where I could use it for a while before buying though, so it wasn't in actual consideration.

I worked from home for 10 years without asking for a thing. Last year, I asked for a $3,000 office chair. They asked for a few weeks to think about it. I still haven't received a thing.

I personally don't feel like I need my company to pay for tools to do my job, outside of software that's priced outside of what an individual could afford. I think of the mechanics and contractors in my family who have spent an order of magnitude more on their tools than I have, and earn a fraction of what I earn.

I only asked for the chair because it was really nice and would have helped my posture, and I can't justify dropping $3k on a chair.

I loved WSJ online, but I had to temporarily cancel while cutting down on spending a while back. Their cancellation process left a bad taste in my mouth, and I decided to not restart my subscription when I was ready.

Aren't they just a middleman for AWS anyway?

How do you like using Node for CLI? I started playing around with it a couple years ago, and at this point, I don't even consider BASH scripts if they involve the slightest bit of logic. Part of me feels like by going all-in, I'm going to lose touch with my ability to write direct BASH scripts, which are likely to work literally forever. Meanwhile, I expect my Node scripts to have a relatively short lifespan, particularly in that I'm leaning on NPM. It's been so nice though, I've decided it was a worthy tradeoff.

Also note that a Java Applet is included in there, which has likely not worked since 2015.

I don't think a generic version would have ever caught my attention at all. I'd think Instagram's jumped the shark if they branded it with that. Like, that would just sound like a photo frame that only shows IG posts or something; I'd roll my eyes and move on. I don't know anything about WhatsApp other than people were hacked or something.

For non-tech folks, I think the Facebook brand great. They chat with friends and family with Facebook messenger. This must be where they can make video calls to those same people. You get it just by seeing the name and the product together.

At my company, this was not true until a new CTO stepped in. That was nice because it instantly increased my salary by about 20% with no change in work.

Can they really go much lower? Interest rates won't ever dip below inflation will they? If they do, wouldn't this be detrimental to the future of our economy?

My guess is that after the election's over, interest rates will start creeping up and eventually cause an overall reduction in housing values as it becomes harder for middle class incomes to afford homes at the current values.

I don't think a crash like 2008 is coming. I just think a relatively minor adjustment is right around the corner.

You might want to recheck your math. It should be ~$800k total with current rates. If you're including taxes, insurance, HOA fees, utilities, maintenance, etc, you'll easily be over a million, but I can't see any calculation coming out to $2M.

Personally, I suspect that when a crash happens, it will come with higher interest rates. A 2% increase will result in an 18% higher mortgage payment, which could actually be higher than the dip in home values.

That's why I'm buying right now. I too expect a dip in values within the next couple years, but we've got cheap money right now, and I don't plan on moving again for long while, if ever.

I was given the information to help base my decision on which offer to accept. The idea is that the better qualified buyer has a better chance of actually closing. I thought it was a little strange as well. Each of my offers came with details about their financing, and in a few cases, the buyer's income information.

This was in Colorado. The market's hot, and I think that's in part because people are afraid that Colorado is going full California on real estate. They want to get a piece while they still can.

It seems like this time around, everyone's on edge about a coming crash, and they've already cashed out a good amount, with intent to buy back in when everything's on sale. Wouldn't this have the effect of turning a would-be crash into a minor correction, because there'll be so many people ready to buy?

I'm one of these people that's sitting on more cash than stocks at this point, by about 4x, but I'm starting to question this choice.

On the other hand, I recently sold a house that received a lot of offers. Only one person actually had the down payment money. Everyone else's loans were approved, but most were people were coming with low cash and lower income than I would have expected. Some looked like irresponsible loans to me.

I guess I feel a bit less stupid now for never getting comfortable with the ribbon. Anything beyond the basics that I use frequently, I'm maximizing my window then digging through every menu. I thought the old menu system was so much more intuitive. I generally embrace change for dumbing down software, but even after all these years, I still think this went in the wrong direction.

I lasted until a third round of layoffs. I got lucky in that a friend had a lead on a job in the mortgage industry, writing loan origination document software. Within a week, I was riding the next catastrophic bubble.

If I'm searching commits, I'm trying to find record of what changed and when. I only want clues, and quick skimming is paramount. I want no personality. I want concise descriptive commit messages.

That said, we reference an ID from our project management software with every commit, so once I find the commit I'm looking for, I can reference it back to external documentation. I still discourage personality there as well because it can get out of hand and clutter the comments, but it's more forgivable than being on the commit itself.

It's nice that it knows when I leave and adjusts accordingly automatically. If I need to come home at a non-routine time, I can adjust from my phone so that it's comfortable when I get home. I don't see the need for most smart devices, but the Nest thermostat has actually been really useful for me.

The hard part is finding remote jobs.

I negotiated a full-time work-from-home arrangement with my employer, then moved out of state to a place with no local tech industry. I think that fear of being helpless if I lost my job ultimately helped me to excel. I used time in the morning before work to start a freelance business where I would expand upon my skillset in a way my job didn't offer. Successes in that led me to pitch new technology to my employer. Over time I was promoted several times and am now lead architect.

I've since moved back to the home office where I work on-site 3 days per week (at a slight detriment to my productivity mostly due to our open office plan), but those 10 years of being home 100% of the time were huge for my career. While remote work has gotten more popular, I still think it's the best kept secret in boosting developer productivity.

An interesting aside: Our lease is up in about a year and there's talk that we'll just scatter at that point and all work from home without any home base.

I've been using it for 10 years as well. I haven't noticed it getting better or worse during this span. It's never been perfect, but it's always been good enough.

I'm still using one I built in 2009. CPU, motherboard, and PSU are really the only original components anymore, so maybe it's not a great comparison, but it's still a great machine that can do heavier lifting than my maxed out Surface Book. There are some bottlenecks that's going to force me to rebuild soon though. I love how we can now get a decade from one build with minor upgrades every few years.

Facebook's implementation is only behind two clicks. When you go to add a post, there's a drop-down to select who you want to see it. Opening the drop-down is one click. Selecting the list is the other one.

The problem is in managing the people in these lists. I haven't found a place where it shows all users I have in a single list. Adding or removing a single user is easy though, as the available lists are available for selection/deselection anywhere you're allowed to change your friend status with that person.

You were fired for simply asking for a raise?

I was once in a position where a new director came in and brought in a bunch of his own people, as he starting letting go existing staff. I quickly found out that they were all making a lot more than I was, although not quite a $50k difference. I was on thin ice just for being an existing employee. I liked my job and my company, so I took the strategy of not letting them get rid of me by means of performance. I didn't concern myself with salary differences.

Within some 3 years, my salary had almost doubled. When you're the lowest paid, and you're outperforming those at the top, the money can start to shift on its own.

I'm pushing 40. It's split in my circle. Less than half use it. Of the other half, it's mostly women. I personally tried it and rejected it after getting a feel for how it works.

I've spent so much time tweaking Twitter notifications and ultimately just had to turn them all off. It would be nice if they had one option for notifying me for @mentions and nothing else.