And... informal communication has to be in a video call? It can't be in writing?
On video calls and in meatspace, you get to see peoples facial expressions, their smiles, they can move their hands and make gestures. I much prefer that to text.
As for the human contact, I do recommend having a social life outside work. Distributed or not distributed work.
You are correct but, personally, I think spending 8 hours a day without seeing faces is too much.
Have you been in that scenario, ever? Video calls are infinitely worse than typed text between non-native speakers. And if the call is not going to be in english… why would the written communication be so?
I am in this scenario every work day as a non-native speaker. I much prefer talking to people than trying to get the text correct.
I disagree with a lot of this article because it assumes that we are efficient robots that just need things to be searchable and written down. Tools are also a bit lacking -- in theory writing stuff in a wiki is useful but then try finding the information with, say, Confluence search.
The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case.
I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable.
it routinely eats up close to 4 GB of RAM, which in my case is an entire VPSes worth and costs me about 60 Euros a year
You are absolutely correct that running other peoples Ruby code is expensive. I would argue similarly for Java because of the high RAM requirements.
However, if you are a company developing your own software, if you use a more productive technology and it spares just 1 programmer then you have paid for a few hundred VMs and running costs become insignificant compared to labour costs.
This is an argument in favour for both Rails and the Java monsters.
Even if actual flu related deaths reverted to a pre-2020 level, I guarantee it would still be news. People will still be wearing masks, state/local governments will be enforcing mandates, etc.
We're still using Spring boot and some JHipster. I feel quite productive in Spring boot and, even though I hate frameworks, its the best framework I have ever used.
In Go, you solve problems by outputting inhuman amounts of code.
The standard library manages to pack a lot of functionality in little code. Its probably not easy to write simple concise code in Go but it is certainly possible.
Linters such as golangci[1] which will warn if you ignore the return value. If you ever write Go again I highly recommend you look at golangci -- the security checks have been really helpful to me.
You can't even leave your mobile at home accidentally - that would trip alarm bells, especially if your contact does it at the same lunch hour.
This is straightforward to spoof. A single programmer could do it if they cared enough. It is possible to change the GPS (GNSS?) HAL to send any information you want [1].
On video calls and in meatspace, you get to see peoples facial expressions, their smiles, they can move their hands and make gestures. I much prefer that to text.
As for the human contact, I do recommend having a social life outside work. Distributed or not distributed work.
You are correct but, personally, I think spending 8 hours a day without seeing faces is too much.