brzezmac's comments

Somehow i get this as I find myself either creating or using a generic e.g. "run.sh" which I then wrap into other scripts which call the generic one with the most common use cases / configurations.

I'm building a "mail merge for PowerPoint": - https://pptxmailmerge.com

Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales.

What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out).

It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process).

People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.

Two employees of a company were suddenly approached by the CEO accompanied by the CTO.

- Death or Scrum? - asked the CEO

The employees knew nothing about this Scrum thing, but were to intimidated to ask and the other choice was one they were not ready to make.

The first one thus replied in a quavering voice: "Scrum"

In this moment the first employee was grabbed by the CTO and was put through horrors not many could withstand:

- Neverending sprint planning meetings

- Daily Scrums that lasted 4 hours

- The sprint reviews

- Sprint retrospectives

- The backlog refinements

After all this the employee was only able to say: "Still working on User Story XYZ. No impediments."

The CEO then asked the second employee what their answer was. The employee was fighting a tough fight in their head.

"I hate meetings, I would love to do some real work, but I'm not ready to die yet. On the other hand, I can't go through life after all that abuse; There's no way I could live with myself". So he answered: DEATH!

To this the CEO swiftly replied: Death ... by Scrum

Scorch is the ultimate gaming experience. In primary school we would always finish computer science classes with a game (or a few) of Scorch. Recently I've shown this game to my kids (10 and 8 years old) and they were really excited to play it. They don't make games like they used to anymore.

Looks like a good place to workout before attempting to switch off notifications in some popular applications.

Thinking, especially abstract thinking, is crucial to software development, as often (not always) creating software is abstracting real life into algorithms and data structures. Writing text in a word procesor, notepad, etc. is in my opinion first step to validation of the idea, to having at least faint idea about the complexity of the solution we would like to build.

On the question of "how to think clearly" - I'd say it's pretty individual - some people start "from the bottom", some "from the top" and others "in the middle". Experience is to know which is which and which approach suits you best.

So we have come full circle. That's the way we have been building software when I was starting with professional software development (this was around 2005). But the idea of doing a thorough analysis (business, technical) is a little bit older. The only people to whom this might come as a surprise are the ones who've drank too much of the "agile Kool-aid". I'm not here to bash agile and start this flame war all over again (agile has it's merits ...), but somehow thinking before doing got a bad rap recently (for reasons beyond me).

It's like software development got trapped inside of King Julian's (from Madagascar movies/series) brain with his modus operandi: "let's start doing this before we figure out it does not make any sense".

Recommend revisiting Mr. Stoll's book - 'Silicon snake oil' (1995). It shows how much people who are inside the revolution can't see that it's the revolution. I think he got it wrong with everything the internet would become.

Mr. Stoll wrote something along the lines: "Some people who are offline feel that they are cut off from some very important aspect of the present day. However, only in some ways everyday life requires either computers or access to digital networks. They are irrelevant to cooking, driving, receiving guests, talking, eating, walking, dancing and gossiping. There is no need for a computer to bake bread, play football, sew a bedspread, build a fence, recite a poem or say a prayer."

"grab her waist, pull her close, lift her up, ..."

I'm on the fence with this one.

In EU we had a discussion about link tax and some related areas regarding remuneration for content providers by content distribution platforms (search engines - prominently Google and social media sites like FB, Twitter, etc.). Back then I was strongly against this new laws as some of the newly proposed regulations bundled with link tax I considered potentially harmful for e.g. opensource software managed in GitHub repos.

When I think of the link tax now and after reading this rant defending FB, I lean towards the link tax.

Quotes like make me shiver: "First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons."

I don't think we should put FB and open internet in the same sentence. Sharing the news is available all the time, through e-mail, slack, SMS or any other mean of electronic communication. It has just stopped being available through FB (a private, global corporation) who will STOP benefiting from it.

Japanese did their fair share of disgusting things during WWII and occupation of China, Korea, but the article sounds like and old joke about a mugger who says he saved a girl today. He didn't mug her, so that counts as a save.

we need to go deeper ...

so it's time for Carbon-14 then ...

I'd say e-mail was not. The features that gave it a bad rap are CC and Reply To All. My 0.02$ on the subject: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cc-reply-all-perfect-match-ma...