Technically what used to be bulletin boards with all their maneurisms and excentrics has now been moved to reddit.
You still have flourish of subtopics and categories and groups you can post to on reddit just like you were able to do on usenet bulletin boards. However for the most of places there the problem of an eternal-september is in constant effect in so far as everyone with an internet connection and an account can post, which makes moderators (unbiased ones especially!) all the more valuable
Sounds like we worked the same place, had abou the same issues as your guys only with a limited QA team and we were starting to build up a second product brand for ourselves with new blood that basically had the same people in charge as the old. Hiring talent was a nightmare and learning selfimprovement were set very low on the list. Me being just the admin but having written code in more languages at various degrees of difficulty, topic and necessity ended up making me more mad than the people directly affected by it.
Holing myself up for a month and working towards a new job paid off and I'm now in a better place as a developer and person.
Had experience in sysops perl scripting for web apps under my belt (wanted unified dashboard + designer for monitoring metrics visualization https://github.com/andrdeas-marschke/nagplot) in the process reverse enginieered NRPE from source / wiretracing and created one of the most if no the most linked articles on the protocol in the process. Released the code as seperate package (Nagios::NRPE).
Then decided to learn JS and node and started writing a web real user monitoring system based on http://github.com/bluesmoon/boomerang. While at it submitted PRs to upstream and engaged in the community mostly with complaints about sftandard stuff missing and modules not being in a good state.
Now I work in the same company as the guy who created boomerang and lpve every minute of it.
1. Better know what you are doing when you fiddle with your shellprompt. Nothing is more agitating than having an unresponsive prompt because you entered a larger git repository. (cough linux kernel cough)
It's split up across profile,bashrc,bash_alias,bash_export
4. As was requested in the comments here you can use $TERM variable to determine your terminal name. Since most popular terminal emulators try to be what they are supposed to be "dumb vt100s" you'll get xterm or (if you use a multiplexer like tmux,screen) "screen" as $TERM. IMHO its not of much use therefore.
i feel like I have these Moments at a quaterly pace. This is strange to me too. I start out in a yea hacking and working on things like a crazy person. Then a month or 2 later I slouch. After I'm full of that too I restart the engine and start working. This apparently correlates heavily with the months in which I use google. The ones where I am actively working on something are the ones where I search for stuff the most. If this is the first time relax It'll go away again.
// aside:
Since my Family lives in a less densely populated area with poor connectivity, I found it a perfect distraction-free zone to get back in a productive mood. I have probably started reading into 1 new programming language (Python) and got fairly productive in it already.
Started reading into Scheduling in CompSci. And maybe have already decided on my next to be learned language(erlang maybe). The Bad connectivity may be easy to replicate. Just pull the plug or work via 3G. Surely makes you feel like you have time to read something
You still have flourish of subtopics and categories and groups you can post to on reddit just like you were able to do on usenet bulletin boards. However for the most of places there the problem of an eternal-september is in constant effect in so far as everyone with an internet connection and an account can post, which makes moderators (unbiased ones especially!) all the more valuable