We all know the Daniel Radcliffe story, right?
(He performed The Elements from memory on a UK talk show, which was allegedly what got him hired to play Weird Al in his 'biopic' - https://youtu.be/rSAaiYKF0cs?si=MRbiCH20VMCCcnuz )
Very sad news - been using vim for decades, still use it every day as pretty much all of my colleagues use VSCode... I met him briefly at FOSDEM 20+ years ago, will have to see if I can find the photo I took of him looking slightly bemused when I showed him vim running on a Linux-ified iPaq with a touchscreen and no keyboard!
As others have said, time to make a donation in his honour.
I'm an experienced senior engineer, currently in Hong Kong but relocating to the UK this month, looking for work starting early April, either fully remote or hybrid accessible from Leeds. In my last 3 jobs, I've worked for a pan-Asian logistics start-up as the 'code owner' of the core backend engine, a large European bank as the senior engineer in an informal devops team building internal tools to modernise operations, and freelance building sites for an accounting firm. In the past I've worked on websites/APIs, Android apps, the Unix kernel, and also spent a while working in a bra factory...
It's a bit of a cliche, but when asked I say I'm looking to work on a good problem, with good people, using good tech. Beyond that - I'm flexible!
That's exactly what happened to me during lockdown - hired at a bank on a fixed-term contract, purely by phone interview. When I started, they required me to work on-site because I wasn't permanent staff and therefore had to be supervised, except my manager wasn't on-site and I was there for over 2 months before meeting him in person - they were actually quite strict about separation because they were worried about the operational risk of an office outbreak.
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
Experienced engineer, originally from the UK, worked on a large variety of different products at different levels of tech stack.
Recently, mostly backend Python/Django, but also non-code expertise like mentoring, code review, workflow, troubleshooting, etc.
Previously: PHP, shell, C (Unix kernel and system utils), Android/Java, Linux, some HTML/CSS/JS, little bits of Kotlin and Golang, also bras.
While technically my first Linux was a generic boot/root floppy pair in late 1995, my first distro was Slackware in 1996. I've used Red Hat, SuSE, OSX, Solaris, Unixware and (rarely) Windows since then - but last night I updated my home PC to Slack 15RC3...
I am an experienced software engineer, and I have mostly been working on backend/server-side code recently. In the past, I have worked with many technologies, from C in the Unix kernel, to Java for Android apps, plus various PHP and Javascript bits. I have recently finished a contract in an experimental devops-ish team for a large European bank, and before that I was a senior engineer and 'code owner' (responsible for code/design reviews and deployments, as well as making my own contributions and mentoring junior devs) at an Asian unicorn.
I'm flexible w.r.t. working terms - would be interested in discussing local, remote, permanent, contract, etc. opportunities.
This kind of post is somewhere between depressing and surreal to me.
I live a long way outside the US - UTC+8 - and these sort of numbers are utterly unreal for most of the world. In my recent experience, pre-, during- and 'post-'pandemic, the vast majority of remote companies aren't willing or able to consider people outside their local timezone(s) and/or tax jurisdictions, while my local market is masssively under-developed compared with most other developed parts of the world, unless you can break into banking.
My most recent income was a little over a third of this, and that was with a bank, albeit on a devops-ish contract. I am a senior engineer - you could say mid-senior if you really wanted to pick holes in my CV - and I'm pretty much ready to quit the local market, and then likely relocate due to inability to pay rent otherwise...
Meh. Have a good end of year and stay safe, y'all.
I am an experienced software engineer, and I have mostly been working on backend/server-side code recently. In the past, I have worked with many technologies, from C in the Unix kernel, to Java for Android apps, plus various PHP and Javascript bits. I have recently (yesterday!) finished a contract in an experimental devops team for a large European bank, and before that I was a senior engineer and 'code owner' (responsible for code/design reviews and deployments, as well as making my own contributions and mentoring junior devs) at an Asian unicorn.
I'm flexible w.r.t. working terms - would be interested in discussing local, remote, permanent, contract, etc. opportunities.
I'm a Brit - got a grad job at SCO in 1998, then moved to Sun in 2000 when SCO imploded, then decided to emigrate when Sun started imploding in 2005. I was initially planning to move to Israel - I'm Jewish, so don't need a visa, I speak decent Hebrew, got friends and family there, and there's plenty of tech work, but I got... diverted.
16 years later, I'm still in Hong Kong, having initially come to work for a bra company owned by a distant branch of my family, in more ways than one. Since then I've worked for an IT services company, amongst other things debugging SuSE servers in the back room of 7-11 stores, freelanced for a decade or so, built a few sites and Android apps during that period, worked for an Asia-wide 'Uber for cargo' start-up, and have now been contracting at a large bank doing devops for the past year.
Hong Kong is/was a very easy place to live as a Westerner. Everything official is bilingual, it is/was a transport hub so it was very easy to get home or anywhere else - before the Covid lockdown ended that - plenty of international food, brands, and other expats, and there is/was a fairly active local tech scene. It is/was fairly easy to get a work visa for a 'professional'-level job, but I actually got a special visa which allowed me to work, freelance, have my own business, etc. without needing to be sponsored by an employer, and after 7 years you become a permanent resident which means no more visa needed. That said, moving to Hong Kong was much more of a whim than a plan - it happened to work out pretty well, overall, but it would have been easy to back out and move back to the UK/EU if things hadn't gone well.
I have vague, but slowly firming-up, plans to leave Hong Kong next year, for all the obvious reasons (feel free to ask if they're not obvious!). Unfortunately(?), my local partner is very uninterested in leaving, so it's likely I'll be travelling solo, and my unformed plan at the moment would be to spend a bit of time in UK, maybe bum around Europe for a bit to decompress, then look into Israel - again.
I know it sounds like a broken MP3, but I don't see "support for Linux on non-servers" on that list of improvements - apparently because they still think only Linux users have large hard drives...
I'm an elderly (mid-40s) non-USian techie, and I've never done Instagram. On Facebook I mostly follow people I've largely lost touch with in real life (particular these past couple of years), and on Twitter it's news sources and journalists, plus a selection of 'celebs' from various niche interests like tech, sci-fi, winter sports and comedy.
Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?
Of course there are specific niches, but it's pretty easy to answer in general: 'actual professionals' need some combination of two criteria - capacity and reliability/durability/usability. A device which can handle 'large' loads - be it CPU-bound, memory/storage-bound, or even screen size bound, and can be worked hard for 6-8-10-12 hours per day, 5-6-7 days per week without either the machine or the user breaking.
The point is not a professional using a computer, it's a professional computer user - someone who doesn't just use a computer to do their work, but someone for whom the limits of the computer are the limits of the work they can do.