Yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. I worked in a port-related area and often we would just cruise around the port and look at the ships. If it looked cool we would yell loudly and ask if we could come aboard. The seamen were usually thrilled to show us around their massive ships and would often invite us to a barbecue. With the introduction of the ISPS all of that was over in an instant.
I remember Mohammed Said (of Laravel fame) telling this story to Matt Stauffer in the Laravel Podcast. He wrote is programs at home on pen and paper and went to the public library to try them out.
No idea where you get your news on Germany, but the only valid thing was the part about the auto industry being legacy. As someone working in the energy sector, I can gladly tell you we got rid off most dependencies, we’re 95% independent regarding electricity. Oil and coal are still a problem, but we’re getting there. That ballooning welfare deficit you talk about must be a joke, what are you even saying? Germany has a zero deficit policy in it’s constitution (which what’s actually causing trouble right now, especially regarding Ukraine help funding). Please also point me to information on unions fighting EV because I haven’t heard anything about this (being active in the largest German union).
Price is not everything. My company has Gitlab licenses as a part of a larger Microsoft enterprise agreement/partnership but we still pay for GitLab Ultimate and use that as a default for all developers.
As a Linux (and Mac) user, I had the same feelings for a long time, until I joined a large corporation that heavily relies on Microsoft stuff.
So just speaking as a user: Outlook is the crappiest email client on the planet, but it’s the best calendar I have seen so far. I haven’t been able to replicate with OSS, what I experience now in this corporate environment. Everything just works and is well integrated. I can easily see availabilities of co-workers before inviting them to meetings. I can easily share certain aspects of my own calendar with some or all co-workers (only availability, titles, full event content). I can hand my calendar over to be managed by someone else and it will be clear that I did so (A invited you on behalf of B).
All these things just work.
I applaud the work to start a good OSS calendar implementation, but what I‘m actually missing is a corresponding OSS server side that does all these things I‘ve seen in the enterprise.
Those industrial titanium powder printers are not comparable at all what you know, I assume. They‘re used at scale to produce airplane parts. Usually also utilising bionic structures, e.g. to make brackets that are much lighter and sturdier, than their conventional counterparts.
Working for one of the largest energy grid providers in Europe, I can tell you: This is the future we‘re currently building. We already have many areas with a huge energy surplus completely generated by renewables.
There is no one here that doubts the renewable future and we‘re quite sure we can finish building the necessary grid until the end of the decade (with around 6 times the capacity of the current European grid).
My company would happily pay for licenses. Not after this shit was pulled, though. They even went so far to remove the Kong enterprise api management products from our internal order system. It's not so great to work with a company that pulls the rug underneath you without warning.
I also think these features have a place. I'm quite sad that Kong completely destroyed all trust our company had in them.
Inline styles have no support for media queries, container queries pseudo classes (hover, focus), pseudo elements (before) and attribute selectors. With tailwind I can even just stack them like this "lg:hover:px-[10px]".
Works councils represent the interests of the employees and work very well in my experience. AFAIK companies with strong workers representation do a lot better than those without. Council members are elected on a yearly basis. By law they cannot be dismissed and they get a say in topics concerning workers rights. Want to introduce a software benchmarking workers performance? Good luck getting it approved by the council. They are also present during job interviews to ensure applicants are treated fairly and equally. They make sure your job stays family friendly and healthy. There are actually often council members in HR questioning managers why their employees work overtime.
The key mapping still works. I prefer the UK layout, e.g. (which has the vertical return key instead of the horizontal enter key in US layouts). If I connect a UK keyboard and use US mapping it still works.
Generally, though, I always try to get any English layout, instead of a European one and map as I desire. For macs that would be English International.
Starting a competitor involves doing all the things that Reddit is doing (having a legal team, servers across the world and staff to operate them, making policy decisions, ...).
That is not at all the same as building an iOS client using an API as a one man show (or 1-3) and directly selling that.