They have inadvertently invented their own philosophy. It's basic tenet is "don't miss out on things" - and by killing yourself you miss out on all the drunken parties and Tinder fucks.
On the other hand, having learned PHP inside-out as my first language, this is perfectly natural to me, and I miss the flexibility of PHP arrays in other languages :)
Before the usual avalanche of posts criticising some PHP 4 features, the union types look like a nice way to formalise something that is commonly used and very useful.
I went to a school in south-west Poland. My experiences were not too dissimilar to those described here, so I think this account is entirely plausible.
> High levels of intellectual ability allow you to write software with better abstractions and cleaner interfaces.
If anything, the opposite is true in my experience. People trained in writing clean interfaces write clean interfaces. The very purpose of abstractions (etc.) is to reduce the cognitive load on the programmer. The dumber the programmer, the more he needs those things.
What is the visa situation? The only thing stopping me from doing something like that is that I dislike the idea of border hopping every 3/6 months and I am definitely not going to go through the hassle of obtaining permanent residency in such a country.
Nowadays, it seems possible to grow traffic without any external help. My simple website has grown from 0 to 9k monthly UU without a single backlink, I simply submitted it to Google.
I may have some standards, but I have never had a chance to reject someone. This is actually very puzzling to me - most guys seem to at least have the option of meeting the extremely unattractive / obese women. I don't.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I spent the past year going out so much... Some weeks I went out every night. Clubs, parties, Toastmasters, interest groups, assorted meetups, ... to no avail. I think I'm done with that, back to square one, writing code from my "basement", talking face to face to maybe 1-2 people a week.