thorin

Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.

My father worked in signals, first in the armed forces and then railway signals and telephone lines for his whole life. When I was young I was interested in Electronics, but not too great with them. I did study a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering but preferred the computer parts of the course and have since then been working in IT for nearly 30 years. I can understand how your fathers advice is important, but you also need to do something you can enjoy and succeed at.

I would say with your background don't worry too much about which technologies to learn. Things are changing fast so try and instead develop an engineering mindset, which will serve you well whatever you do.

He will guide you, but you also need to make your own path. Good luck in your journey.

Tell him you'll make sure to turn it off at exactly 5pm (or whenever you're supposed to finish). And that you'll turn it on at 9am and can't join any meetings till it's started.

I know they were pushing cloud very hard, and it was nice to see they were offering a lot of free tier to developers. What has been a surprise to me this year is working in the UK with certain enormous clients that they are still choosing Oracle products for new implementations which I was not expecting.

Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.

Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.

I seem to remember some pirate copies of art packages (maybe Photon paint) on the Amiga coming with a similar set of images that would be of interest to some teenagers...

It's a lot easier to go part time in a job you already have than find a new part time job. If you are already successful in your job start by asking to move to having every Friday off or even every second Friday. This is very popular in UK/Europe. If this is working maybe you can drop another day after some time.

Alternatively a lot of companies let you take as much unpaid leave as you want (as long as you don't miss anything critical). This amounts to the same thing but gives you a lot of flexibility.

Probably Manic Miner!

I used to use Soundtrackers a lot on Amiga in the 90s. I'm also pretty ok with using Reaper as a DAW playing all the instruments. I would have no idea how to get into remixing though. How would you suggest starting that? Do you tend to start with isolated tracks or just the whole mp3 and take sections and move around and add parts>

Curious how you've treated your adhd, do you mean medication?

For me the next 10 years will be consolidating my kids development as they'll both be working or at finishing uni by then.

What are the "best of breed" tools in your opinion?

In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices, although recently I've been doing a lot of logic just with python running on serverless functions.

I'm not sure if you've done much of an investigation into these but:

1. Parcel deliveries - unless you work for the main carrier e.g. Royal Mail in the UK I don't think you can expect to make more than minimum wage and will effectively be on a zero hours contract with no benefits. I don't think this is going to be better that software.

2. Train driver (or bus driver, lorry driver), this might be ok and once you are in does pay well in the UK (but probably half what you get paid as a developer). It's definitely going to be a candidate for automation in the next 5-10 years though.

3. Electrician / plumber - you could add to this painter, builder, plasterer etc . This is decent if you have the skills, work hard and are physically up to doing it for an extended number of years. You'll likely have to manage your own work load though. May pay the same as software if you really work on it.

4. Mechanic - I don't think the pay will be amazing, what you say about cars not being repairable really isn't true especially for none EV. You still have brakes, oil change, servicing, tyre changes and alignments and lots of other things that people pay for throughout the lifespan of the car. Garages near me are always busy (as are cycle repair shops).

Can you expand on the Scaleway comment? Would be interested in the details.

Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?

It's the German / European version of unions. For instance when I joined an ex-public company 25 years ago unions were very active in the UK still, but they are even more active in Germany etc.

Interested, in the US if you want to go on holiday will companies be ok with you taking unpaid time off? For instance in the UK I get 25 days paid, then the bank holidays we have (8 days I think) but when I asked they were ok for me to take some unpaid leave if required as well. The biggest problem I have is that if you don't take the paid days you tend to lose them at the end of the year.

There are quite a few protest bands but they don't have the level of popularity as Rage against the machine, Bob Dylan or Public Enemy. Pop music is more of a commodity now.

I see Billy Bragg had something to share on FB about recent events as do many older artists.

Maybe you saw what happened at Glastonbury this year with Kneecap and Bob Vylan.

Personally I enjoy Idles, I went to see them last year and they had good energy and try to be politically active while spreading "the love".

One of my all time favourite bands New Model Army are still going and releasing music. I don't think they ever made it big after effectively being cancelled before it was popular releasing the single 51st State of America.

Cows and sheep in the UK (and I guess much of Europe) wander round outside all year round and I guess are eating almost entirely grass. You can't go for a walk in the countryside without coming across them constantly. Most of the beef you buy in the shops (not talking about processed foods) is produced in the UK.

Trading Places

Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.

AFAIK know phones are banned in all secondary school (and primary school) from the start till the end of the school day. My daughter just started secondary school and one kid was trying to text her mum to add credit to her lunch money account in the first week and got a one hour detention for getting her phone out during school. This was in the canteen, not in a lesson. Bit harsh but seemed to get the message across.

Ironically most homework is done by the kids on their phones so when I tell her to get off her phone she always has the excuse that she's checking/doing her homework, or looking at her timetable online.

[edit] note this is a UK perspective, not sure why this got downvoted

Yup, AI is actually great for vibe coding yourself up a prototype in a technology you're unsure in but we all know that most of the work on a given systems is in scaling and maintaining the original idea.

What makes you want to visit Iran - doesn't seem very relaxing to me and there are lots of other interesting historical sites in the rest of the middle east and Europe. Assuming you are coming from the US?

Lots of technical questions but what exactly are you worried about - some systems you want to have access to or some data you want to hide?

I've travelled near the Iran border on the eastern edge of Turkey and the countryside is beautiful! Hope you get the break you're looking for!

In recent years I've struggled with knowing the details and how to get started. I've had to programme/design in Java, C#, Android, Python, bits of c and c++ all kinds of stuff. In theory now I can write programmes because I know what I want to do but I don't have a good knowledge of all the details so spent too long looking at docs or Stackoverflow. Now in theory I can write useful programs with AI. In some ways this makes me more keen to create and design programs. In other ways this means I don't really need to learn all the details that I didn't learn recently anymore.

Also stuff like leetcode goes away hopefully soon as as long as you understand a data structure and it's benefits you don't have to learn to implement it in every language?

If you want to live in a low cost of living country you need to learn to live as the locals live. My friends that live overseas in Asia or in Eastern Europe probably spend as much as I do on rent and have servants, drivers etc so they still need to earn quite a bit.

If you don't have any family you could try somewhere relatively close by for short periods and see how you get on e.g. USA->Panama/Costa Rica, Western Europe -> Eastern Europe, or maybe consider Thailand/Vietnam.

Lex gets a lot of hate, probably mainly for political reasons and the way he manages his public persona. However not many people can argue with the fact he has probably the best collection of programmer interview/podcasts out there. If that's what you're into you probably won't find anything better:

e.g.

Carmack Brian Kernighan Gosling Guido DHH Demis Bjarne

List it endless, and something to be celebrated I think.

Downhill mountain bikers basically expect their bike to be destroyed and train to bail and are dressed for impact. Road cyclists wear no protection other than some thin skimpy lycra and don't fall often but when they do it can be catastrophic.

Totally agree. Most of my professional coding has been on window desktops although the servers are often unix/linux. The amount of time spent spinning up a new framework, IDE, build pipeline or something can be ridiculous and every time it seems to be different in some way. Stuff like npm package management, proxy servers, random stuff being blocked by a corporate vpn, getting admin access on certain things, app server setup and monitoring, CI/CD setup seem to take up 99% of the time!

Actually writing some logic and seeing the results can be quite satisfying at times if I can get over all that. Mostly I just do small POCs and things to help out my team and have a break from meetings and system design.

I'm pretty sure they do, but quite a few parts of the Oracle applications suite are acquired so probably not those. I'm sure sap would use sap erp, from what I've seen almost all big European companies use sap for payroll.

It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.