voycey

The UK recently passed laws for Middle Lane Hoggers so they can get fined. Needs to happen here in Australia as well!

I need to be able to use it one handed, Samsung has gestures to enable this which is helpful but feels like a hack - I really dont need a longer phone. I feel the Nexus 5 was the perfect size for a phone - with pixel densities now I will be very happy keeping it at 1080p - no need for 4k in a phone!

We are using Rapids.Ai and unfortunately this requires Pascal as a minimum Architecture - unfortunate as we have been looking at a cheap method to create proof of concepts for code we would eventually push to the cloud (functionality rather than speed for example) - this would have been ideal!

I think the last version we used was Ada95. I definitely wasn't saying it was a terrible first language to learn with - job prospects however - not so good!

And yes the transition from Ada to PHP was easy - agree that the other way around would be painful - it's very difficult to un-learn something!

Ada was the language our University decided to teach for BSc Computer Science.

Once you learn to code in Ada - every other language looks like a death trap. To say it is unforgiving is and understatement. The huge benefit of this is that you learn to do things "The Right Way TM" (because that is literally the only way Ada would allow you to do something - by the book GoF style)

Anyway fast forward to graduation at a time when PHP was ruling the web - imagine going into a job and saying "Well I can do that with a CGI-Bin I will write in Ada", I literally got laughed out of the room.

TLDR - Great language for airplanes / real time systems - but maybe uni should have taught us something to help us get a real world job (not at Boeing) as our main language!

Thanks! What kind of development environment is usually used? IDE's, environments etc?

IOPipe looks interesting - will check it out as I dig deeper!

The UUID (IDFA / AAID) is 'true north' for us, this allows us to join it to other data-sets, however there are several other methods of attribution we use.

We don't collect any PII data (in fact we actively avoid it!), we don't need to know 'who' a device is, only the location history of that device!

There are companies out there who will attribute a UUID to a physical email / telephone number, I think it is a bit of a grey area and with the current privacy landscape something I think that will soon end.

Yep we know your company very well - we came to the same conclusions, even despite the heavy cleansing methods people purport to undertake it is still garbage!

Where are you? Antarctic?

As an Location Data Exec I can say that so much of what he 'assumes' here is utter tripe.

There is no need to have the phone in hand with the application open in order to collect location data - we get billions of signals from first party data from background usage on both iOS and Android.

These SDK's require legitimate usage of GPS in order to deliver the functions that we provide - our permission requests are overt and informational - we let users know exactly what data they will be sending and how we use it (one of our products actually rewards users for doing this!).

True, Apple and Android are both cracking down on un-authorised usage and collection of this data, it just means you have to follow some more rules in order to collect this data. Either way it is good for user transparency.

It sounds like (for the most part) he is talking about bid stream data, which everyone in the industry knows is the sewerage of the location data industry. Sure you can get a few valuable insights from it - but should it be classed as location data? No way. Even with significant cleansing it is still mostly garbage. If that is what their entire business model is based upon then no wonder it feels like a ponzi scheme to him.

For the rest of the location world who are using quality data - we see things differently!

As someone who has been in and out of small companies it is usually for a number of reasons:

1) I feel like I can effect more change with fewer barriers in a smaller company - the idea to goal conversion is much more condensed vs when I worked at IBM and the number of processes and approvals it had to go through.

2) If you are in small companies there is usually very little room for progression, smaller companies = smaller budgets - when I was an employee of these the only real way to get any kind of pay increase as experience increases was to switch companies.

3) Some of us enjoy the change, I loved the work I did at IBM but it was still mostly BAU work, there was very little scope for personal innovation over the long term. Sure you could switch departments quite easily and that was a huge benefit but back to point 1 - the innovation momentum is hard to keep up. At the companies I have been working at for the past 7 years, every day is different, every day is researching the next best thing or how to improve the current things we have with a view to squeezing out more performance, or decreasing costs. Sure I have some BAU work but it's mostly meetings and developer mentoring, hardly painful!

4) To your final point, I am lucky to be doing something I have always been passionate about - this isnt a rat race for me, its not about keeping up with others, my definition of success is how much I enjoy going to work in the morning and not having to fret the little things.

Our WeWork has them in the kitchens - I feel like I'm drunk whenever I am in there!

And already tech companies are talking about leaving Australia. This government is completely backwards, we have idiots legislating on things they don't even slightly comprehend and a senate full of old codgers who have no clue what the repercussions of this are. RIP Tech Australia

I'm not a tin-foil hat conspiracy kind of person but I do find it extremely suspect that the ME requires all that kind of access and is completely black-box.

Yes, ideally using a different CPU platform is an option, but not if you want to do any significant work

I agree with this, there is the secondary problem whereby people advertising work really don't understand how to price that work. The majority of it that I see is probably budgeted around half of what I would charge.

I think for Junior - Mid / Good exchange rate countries it is a great way to get a toe in the door for future work directly, for anything senior I think you are going to struggle.

Until someone manages to open source the ME of various CPU chips tools like this don't offer much more than a cushion against basic surveillance. I can only imagine the shitstorm that is to follow when someone finally leaks it.

Probably just so they can get rid of that 1/3 page notification to "give them money"

"Australia does not have a strong tech industry..."

I'm sorry - what?

Having moved to Australia from the UK I am continually amazed at the tech industry here, sure in comparison to the US ours is small but that is because there is a vast difference between our populations. America only sees size as a measure of strength

Wait - Wine is available on Android? I use Wine for a few things - would be great to have those apps on my Android device!

That cookie notification is absolutely atrocious - is there really any need for a full screen popover??

My brain no longer works that way either, I started getting sick of the same standard code tests asked at interviews while I was a developer (Please write a palindrome detector, please write a function to reverse these sets of numbers).

My point is - computer science teaches you to understand the core of what computing is about, but don't for a second think that much of it relates to real world experience.

Totally agree, Money talks!

Still pissed that they registered .dev as a TLD

I would love for the time to arrive where I can just walk to work with my phone in my pocket, dock it and run everything I need to in one place on one device - unfortunately as someone said above the restrictions manufacturers put on the devices are too hardcore.

Honestly - I would actually require front-end developers to have some backend coding experience in our case, we have a very large monolithic app that we are attempting to break down to a more MSA type app but it still needs upgrading. This means they will need to wade through code templated HTML / CSS / Javascript in order to re-skin the app.

I think this is in part why you see these skills mixed in on job descriptions. There often cannot be a complete separation of concerns.

The prices were similar here in Australia, friends who are on it were given instructions by their doctor on websites in South Africa and a particular brand name to purchase along with a prescription to get around it. Generic version but equally as effective. I believe now it is on the PBS here!

He said 40+ Cobol and Fortran were still kicking 30 years ago - entirely possible! Many older coders that I know kept their jobs in these languages when newer languages were taking over - Mainframes were still using them and the Banking system especially is still archaic!

I'd blame autocorrect but it was just my brain haha

I just don't understand why the majority of them look so terrible, Xfce has weirdly become one of the better looking DE's now and it was designed to use minimal resources.

Progression?

Seriously though - at 20 years experience you probably have a lot you could mentor and nurture in other people?

Not everyone can be managers true but where do you see yourself in another 10 years?

Unless you are doing something "old school" like Cobalt, Fortran or something equally as esoteric by todays standard then do you have the energy to keep maintaining your skill set with the latest tools?