beebob's comments

The basic electricity coverage that you are getting if you have no contract with any provider was around 74 €ct/kWh beginning of the year (maybe even 80 €ct, depending on where you live). But some are reducing that to around 54 €ct/kWh again, since it was just to cover the surge of new users that required them to buy energy for high prices. Having a proper contract with an energy provider it's currently around 46 €ct/kWh last I checked.

Previous prices were around 31 €ct/kWh on average (seen them as low as 26 €ct/kWh).

People that have ongoing contracts are the lucky ones currently.

But here I have to ask what your experience with such remote setups is? I used the remote features of Visual Studio Code a while back because I needed a beefy machine that was integrated into a specific remote service landscape. I have to say I couldn't really notice that it was running remotely. But that probably depends on your company and how weird their network setup is.

You mentioned RDP which I wouldn't even start comparing to a setup like this. Obviously streaming individual frames, video and the likes over the network is a different beast than having an editor running on a remote machine and only stream commands and keystrokes. For example my ssh sessions don't usually involve a lot of lag and work just fine.

I have to say that I strongly believe that the hate for Jira doesn't come from Jira but from misconfigured workflows. I used to use a stock Jira in my last companies and never understood what people were complaining about. I had boards with the simplified workflow and the team had free reign.

I first started being annoyed by it when I joined a large corporation with a central department that would enforce specific workflows and processes. Now I can't move tasks into a sprint without assigning them to a person first, can't move task from status x to y and have a 100 custom fields in there. It's no fun anymore. At the same time the projects are owned by project management and it doesn't feel like home anymore. Where I initially opened up my Jira Board first thing every morning it now has become a chore.

At the same time I have to say that I kinda understand where those processes come from. I now work in an industry where accidentally using a wrong issue type or forgetting to assign issues to specific code changes can become an actual issue due to traceability requirements mandated by law.

Same here. I'm one of those people that try VSCode every few weeks because "it's free and it would be nice to have a more lightweight IDE for some stuff". But coming from IntelliJ it is really hard. It feels like a lot of convenience and stuff "that just works" is somehow there, but not working on the same level the "old" full fledged IDEs. You can notice the optimizations that gone into the auto complete features and similar. Tried Python, Go, Java and Kotlin in VSCode. Just couldn't compare. Granted. At least Java and Kotlin might not be languages that work well in non specialized IDEs.

I really loved the remote execution feature of VSCode. But in the end it resulted in me programming in IntelliJ and then copy and pasting the code over to VSCode...

For me it feels like the modern Eclipse. The one IDE/Editor which is basically a container for thousands of plugins. And it's great. Everyone uses it. There are a lot of plugins that cover every imaginable use case. Even more than e.g. IntelliJ or Visual Studio could cover (ok maybe not). But in the end it's just not as great as an IDE with most core features already build in and tuned against each other.

But then there are also people using unmodified vim installations for programming. So the expectations and ways of working really seem to differ a lot.

I also see a value in being in the office and meeting the colleagues face to face. But I also like to have more free time and choose my neighborhood based on my own preferences and not based on where my work is.

I totally okay with traveling even longer distances for occasional meetings if I can otherwise be flexible and choose on my own. I hate the "being forced to come to the office" aspect.

For me there is a high chance that I might switch companies after the pandemic to retain the gained freedom I now have. Albeit "gained freedom" might be a bit much. Since I currently have to assume that it's "back to the office" again after the pandemic, I'm not yet as free as I could be with a true remote job.

Interestingly, reading this blog post, this doesn't seem to be common knowledge. The first comparison of global variables inside a process and environment variables left me wondering. It just felt wrong.

A gripe I have with environment variables is when they are used to modify a programs behavior deep inside it's belly and aren't treated like configuration input similar to program arguments.

Otherwise they are a universal way of configuring applications. Universal is good, universal is nice.

From what I’ve seen up until now it’s often the last option. I’ve seen comparisons between the major cloud providers, but those have often been on the level of “I can boot a VM with x cpu on provider y and z”. With these kind of comparisons a major deciding factor then is discounts. And that’s an area Microsoft excels at.

I'd like to second this. From where I'm sitting it feels like Microsoft is prioritizing marketing more than engineering.

It seems like most larger customers that use Azure do so because management got shiny presentations from Microsoft and now it's their "strategical partner".

A lot of overselling with huge discounts gets them their in. Already seen this at multiple companies. Azure is a nice platform for your Windows administrators to shift some load to the cloud. But to build large applications on?

Edit: And I kinda feel bad for saying this, since I assume that there are indeed pretty competent engineers working on Azure. But somewhere something isn't right.

Interesting piece of information. I'm one of the people that values the chat history. Mostly as there are often occasions where I would look up something like a product or a website someone sent me. Also for nostalgia.

It would be perfectly fine if exporting/importing chat history would be a manual process via encrypted files and if it was disable by default. But not having it at all is an issue for me.

That said: It isn't exactly easy with other messengers. WhatsApp does have some backup/restore. But afaik it is limited to the platform you are using (Android or iPhone). The export is limited and cannot be imported again. Telegram has all the messages on their servers... which... ah well, let's just leave it at that.

Makes me think that I need some private third party database that just ingests and consolidates all my chat data for me. With something like that it might be okay just having a few days worth of chat history on the phone.

For me this fits the narrative. Encryption needs to be transparent to the user in order to become ubiquitous. I assume most people are actually reluctant to read the documentation. If the tool is not self explanatory or fully embedded in the tools people use they will not see any broader adoption.

It too managed to use the tooling. But I knew what public-key cryptography is and was aware of its general concept. I do not expect anyone in my family to be able to set this up. Not without putting some time into it. And putting time into it they will only do if I pressure them to do so.

So I would say: Yes you are correct that he could have read the documentation. But from a UX perspective I do not see the failure on the part of the user.

That is correct. In his first sentence he made the assumption that this will not be the case. As such I do not see a discrepancy here.

I'm currently starting to learn rust (previous java and go developer). But at the moment it feels like the good old times where I was developing with an editor and api doc side by side.

What is the current editor of choice for rust projects? I tried intellij-rust and atom with the racer plugin. Both seem to be in a somewhat early stage of development regarding the auto completion.

Regarding the book: I like it. Has been a long time since I had fun reading such a book. With most languages I just learn by googeling one problem after another until it clicks ;)