jsdwarf

I wouldn't be so tough on the online certificates. The key value I get out of Coursera is an unbeatable "time to knowledge" and some proof it was me who attended the course through the id verification. Compare that to traditional in-person education, where you are bound to fixed course dates, long approval timelines etc. Until you get feedback from HR that you are eligible for a course/training, i've probably already completed it via my Coursera complete subscription.

Claude.md is an input to claude code which requires a monthly plan subscription north of 15€ / month. Same applies to Gemini.md, unless you are ok that they use your prompts for training Gemini. The python script works with a pay per use api key.

pptx-tools, a collection of cli tools for interacting with Powerpoint presentations. Covers use cases that PowerPoint doesn't support. Currently in the making:

* pptx-grep - find text across multiple powerpoints, yield file/slide no and text excerpt of match

* pptx-dump - dumps extended info about a powerpoint, such as number of slides, applied master slides, used fonts etc.

* pptx-lint - allows to define validation rules for pptx based on content and/or formatting. E.g. presentation must not contain word "TBD", all text must be formatted in Arial etc.

I'd say in 80% of the cases a pure, static html include is not enough. In a menu include, you want to disable the link to the currently shown page or show a page specific breadcrumb. In a footer include, you may want a dynamic "last updated" timestamp or the current year in the copyright notice. As all these use cases required a server-side scripting language anyway, there was no push behind an html include.

Many alleged benefits of basic income can be explained by flaws in the study design. No I will not quit my 40h if the 1200€ are paid out for three years only.

But i will use the money to hire cleaning ladies or baby sitters -> more spare time than control group.

You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards

IMHO the crisis is fueled by the fact that more people want to enjoy the beauty of barcelona short-term (tourists) AND long term (digital nomads moving and working from there). Short term stayers "pay" with increasing hotel&airbnb prices, long-term stayers with low salaries. According to Glassdoor, a software engineer in Barcelona has a 30-40% lower salary than the same position in e.g. Vienna or Berlin. And believe me, hiring in Barcelona is easy.

I can offer another "why?" How many animals attack a wasp's nest? Almost zero, except other wasps in a territory war? How many animals attack a beehive? Humans, bears, apes,.. pretty any big enough mammal that can climb. So bees not only suffer from much more predators due to their precious honey, in my view they also need to differentiate between "honey maker" and warrior (sting) functions as their poison could contaminate the honey. Why do the males have to die? Because almost none of their enemies can extract a bee sting from their skin. Once stung, the poison glands and some muscles remain with the sting, acting as a "poison pump". This could deter the attacker longer from a second attack. Which makes sense, as the beehive cannot run away from the attacker.

One big trigger for burnout is if you cannot answer the question "why do I work?" any more. One of the big whys was that working hard allows you to buy a house/appartment which allows you to maintain your standard of living in retirement. But this isn't true any more due to the declining purchasing power of salaries. Why should I be stressed out in my job if this only allows me to rent an apartment that i have to give up as soon as I stop working?

Disabling guest checkout would have been my weapon of choice or at least requiring the user to enter an email address to so that they are notified when the product becomes available.

Been there. hedger/ledger look tempting, but if you follow the approach of the OP, you need to build your own toolchain around it so that it recompiles your journals on each rule change.

I've found it easier to use a spreadsheet. Sheet 1 contains the csv export to which i constantly append, sheet 2 the hierarchical acoount structure: an account name like "expenses: groceries:walmart" is followed by a regex that matches the expense description on sheet 1 for that account (walmart). On sheet 1 I have an "detected Account" column, into which a formula outputs the detected account based in the regexes.

Sumif formulas sum up the totals per account. Since no compilation step is necessary, rule changes are picked up much faster

What does MtCellEdit set apart from the standard spreadsheet program apart from its lightweightness? Any special features?

That's exactly my problem. Assigning the purchase of a new computer mouse to the "Expenses:ITEquipment" account? Easy if you purchased the mouse at your local computer store and used your debit card. Just define a text pattern to make any purchase from that store go to the ITEquipment account and run it against the csv from your checkings account.

Same purchase from amazon? Difficult, because you have two layers of indirection: checking account > credit card > amazon > it equipment.

Currently testing a new spreadsheet approach to deal with such scenarios, but not easy.

Funny you bring up logistics and (data) ontologies. I'm a PM at a logistics software company and I'd say the lack of proper ontologies and standardized data exchange formats is the biggest effort driver for integrating 3rd party carrier/delivery services such as DHL, Fedex etc.

It starts with the lack of a common terminology. For tool A a "booking" might be a reservation e.g. of a dock at a warehouse. For tool B the same word means a movement of goods between two accounts.

In terms of data integration things have gotten A LOT worse since EDIFACT is de facto deprecated. Every carrier in the parcel business is cooking their own API, but with insufficient means. I've come across things like Polish endpoint names/error messages or country organisations of big Parcel couriers using different APIs.

IMHO the EU has to step in here because integration costs skyrocket. They forced cellphone manufacturers to use USB-Cs for charging, why can't they force carriers to use a common API?

My trick is to make the objects "stand out". Black headphones, smartphones, keys etc are easily overlooked in work bag pockets or when placed on other dark surfaces.

I've greatly improved the "retrieval interval" of my phone since I've put it in a mint-green case instead of the standard black one. Same goes for my bluetooth headphone case, on which I applied reflective stickers.

Another trick is to group related objects. My office key card is in the cover of my work smart phone, so I have to look out for one item less each morning.

Excel is so ubiquitous because it is the only IDE/Programming Language/Database Environment business users can run in a restricted corporate IT environment.

We probably wouldn't know anything about Kafka's Works if his agent Max Brod had adhered to Kafka's instructions to destroy all his notebooks and manuscripts upon death.

and found all of the bugs in the database

This is when I stopped reading

You can steer attrition by so many parameters - compensation, (non) promotion, change in benefit plans.

And again, a "non-regrettable" termination can also apply when the employee quit.

"Non-regrettable" attrition means either that the person was fired or laid off.

No. Every leaver is classified as a regrettable/non-regrettable case - this was a part of my last exit interview when I quit the job."non regrettable" just means you have very low chances of being hired by the company again.

Have a slightly different view. In times of high interest rates, you are rewarded for profitability, not for growth. When interest rates are low, your company needs to grow or it will be outgrown by its competitors and becomes a takeover target. With high interest rates unprofitable companies (which is a side effect of a growth strategy) slowly bleed to death and become takeover targets by themselves.

Same goes for embedded fonts

The problem with AsciiDoc is that its only maintained implementation AsciiDoctor is written in Ruby, which is a nice server programming language, but not the most logical choice for a multi-platform desktop documentation tool. Sure, there is AsciiDoctorJ, which is a Java wrapper around it, but for PDF generation, UML Diagrams etc you land pretty quickly in Ruby land again, which can get complicated depending on your platform.

The big problem with Markdown is that it is horribly underspecified. Everything beyond basic text formatting and hyperlinks behaves differently in each markdown dialect (e.g. tables). What is the benefit of bolting additional use cases like UI rendering onto this mess?

Aldi pays top salaries, but also expects top performance. An adage goes that they pay you 1.3x the salary of a normal store employee, but expect the performance of 3 employees;-)

They were know for doing cashier drills in the pre-barcode age: you had to sum up a shopping cart filled with certain products and report the sum plus time needed. Even now cash desk time per customer is measured - with crazy outcomes, e.g. AlDi cashiers putting groceries in the shopping bag for elderly people so that the dont block the queue too long.

One word of warning about the cozy R&D department of a product org: you may suffer from the boiling frog syndrome. Little attrition and long-time continuity means everybody stays in their seat and there a few true career opportunities beyond seniority promotions (dev - senior dev etc). After 5-10 years you find yourself quickly at the end of your promotion trajectory and realize that much younger/cheaper folks have the same role as you. This puts you at a disadvantage in salary negotiations and increases the risk of being let go. Project-driven orgs can be brutal environments, but there is always a possibility to climb up the ladder due to high churn.

Also think about the negative case - which people should not sit on the same table because they don't get along too well or will start a neverending dialogue?

Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

IMHO it's an essential skill for a PM to familiarize him/herself with a new domain in short time. It also offers cross-pollination / the chance to do things different. Imagine Steve Jobs coming from a pure IT background instead of liberal arts / calligraphy -> Apple wouldn't have been so different any more.

That may only work if the target group of your product are developers, then it's not a suprise they have a clear understanding what's valuable to them.

If your product targets customers outside of the IT department, it's a whole different picture.

There are golden handcuffs called RSUs, shares that are distributed to employees over a longer period of time. The longer you stay, the more shares you get ;-)