I wrote a simple date extractor (parsing stuff like "two days ago" from strings) for my hobby website project in prolog [0]. It was great fun to write, and prolog really shines in such applications. And running a prolog microservice in docker feels just a little perverse in a good way. :)
This reminds me of my time at the university. Everyone there was using IRC, and not just somehow using it, everyone had an instance of irssi running inside screen on the university's unix servers. When you were done chatting, you'd simply detach from the screen and irssi would keep on running on the background making sure you were always up to date.
The first thing that freshmen learnt was how to do just that. Windows users would install PuTTy and others, like me, would learn how to install and run Linux. Every community had its own channel, private or public, and life was good.
During my exchange year I was shocked to discover that this wasn't a standard practice in every university. The people at the other (non-technical) university were using a mixture of Skype and Facebook to communicate, but non of the feeling of being one big community was there.
In case there are some people who still avoid Gnome3 due to experiences from the early versions, I strongly recommend giving this one a chance. I myself was a Unity user for a couple of years because I liked the fact that they were trying to do something new. I had tried Gnome3 as well but the first versions were pretty messy. Now, though, after getting fed up with Canonical and switching to Manjaro (highly recommended as a fairly easy rolling release distro), I've been very positively surprised about Gnome's progress. It looks good, fits my usage patterns very well, and the minor annoyances I had were pretty much fixed via a couple of extensions.
[0] https://github.com/jvnn/date-extractor