Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.

It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.

In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.

I use Windows. It does what it needs to do, and while I haven’t upgraded past 10, it’s not complained about much.

At home I switch between Fedora and Windows, but at work I use OSX because using Linux at work gets you a shitty laptop instead of a MBP. I work for a big tech company, with the Windows and Mac user communities being pretty much the same size. What I’ve noticed is that Windows is fairly tolerable, and often has few issues that don’t need IT intervention. The MacOS community, while often being more technical because it’s used by tech workers, has a lot more issues than any other. Major OS updates are events that take months of planning because it’s guaranteed that thousands of people will essentially brick their laptops trying to just do a standard upgrade. Everything seems to break all the time, which is mad when you consider that Apple is a trillion dollar company with one hardware line. Windows and Linux support many hardware lines.

Ultimately, you know what you’re getting with each choice. All I care about is that my OS does what it intends to do.

Isn’t he the personal assistant to Mr Burns?

What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.

In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.

A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.

A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.

Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.

Unironically, yes.

I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.

After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.

In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…

In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.

One of my first experiences with Linux at university was watching a classmate install Slackware, and then (for a laugh) dragging everything into the recycle bin.

They got a passing grade, because the lecturer saw their working installation, but they learned a valuable lesson in Linux that if you delete something, it’ll fucking delete it.

I stopped around 2016, so it’s been a while, but it’s something I still really miss. I remember .NET Core being a thing, but didn’t see enough movement in places looking to transition away, so I jumped over to a different stack.

Are they fanboys, though? I used to be one of those guys back when I used to help debug Windows permissions issues (it was always permissions issues) when getting .NET code to run on Windows 7. If anything, I think a lot of Windows people know that everything on Linux is far better supported and had more developer oversight, but ultimately these were the tools you had to use to use your language of choice.

If anything, it led to such a deep imposter syndrome that I ended up moving away from C#. While I could be just as productive in Windows as I was in Linux (even today), having to use “different” tools or run “special” commands to get something as basic as Ruby running on your OS constantly made you feel that you were running against the current.

You don’t need to make something unique, if your goal is to learn.

The best thing you can do is to build something that solves a problem for you, or to build something that already exists that you know well.

As for money, given that companies seem to love layoffs lately, I would say that higher salaries only matter if you are employed. It’s an employers market right now, and a lot of people are really struggling to find work again, even from large companies like Amazon and Google.

Funny enough, I probably did more software engineering as a web dev than I did as a software engineer at some companies.

In the UK, at least, the only difference typically between a web developer and a software engineer is £15-20k in salary. Frankly, we’re all software engineers…

Even in 2024, I say that Ruby is one of the best common languages available. While there are some weird syntax choices, and a lot of rope to hang yourself with when it comes to subjects like metaprogramming, it is a better Python than Python, in that it has a clean way to approach problems, and a simple structure to make coding clean and easy. The best part of Ruby is that its tooling is great at pushing best practices, like concise methods, good naming conventions, tests with single/aligned assertions, etc. I’ve taken many lessons from Ruby into other languages I use.

Rails, on the other hand, is totally different. Today, Zed Shaw’s essay on Rails is as accurate as ever, in that many Rails shops have just ignored years of best practices on the web, and opt to do things their way because it’s “better”.

I spent a few years with Ruby, and my experience is that Ruby and Rails couldn’t be more different in terms of programming approach, philosophy, and nature. I don’t trust Rails fully, but I do trust Ruby.

Perhaps as the new hotness to web devs, but Python was a mainstay in science way before Django.

Is this a thing? In MMA, a pro fighter from America called Mackenzie Dern married a Brazilian and adopted both the accent and the need for an English translator. There is also an English football manager called Steve McClaren that managed in the Netherlands, and infamously did an interview in broken English because “he thought locals would understand better”.

Eh, this is somewhat true, and he’s dug into this a few times. Some is put up for TV, but he’s inclined to be annoyed at people that call themselves chefs, take people’s money, and serve them sub-par products. In a few shows, like the one with Angela Hartnett where she took over The Connaught, it showed that he’s still an angry dude, but that it was needed because he’s taking over the restaurant at one of London’s finest hotels. Michelin Star places seem to be the same boiling pot of bullying and anger to strive for the best possible quality.

Some chefs, like J Kenji Lopez Alt have called it and him out several times on it, because it’s a very damaging practice, and one that spreads throughout the industry from wannabe Ramsay’s that thinks intimidation is needed to make food.

I’m sure Ramsay is a lovely guy in person, but I would hate to work for him.

I haven’t written any Ruby for years, but I still praise it in every conversation I have regarding programming languages. It’s basically a much simpler Python, with some design ideas that are both beautiful and deeply strange.