I second this. WSL2 is very well integrated. You just open a terminal and have your Ubuntu (or Debian or whatever you set as default) environment ready to go. Even though it's running in a VM, whenever I start Tomcat, I can access it from the Windows side using http://localhost/... It's that well integrated. VS Code opens my projects inside WSL as if they were local.
I second the Garmin Instinct Solar as a really good everyday watch. I got tired of charging my Apple Watch everyday and getting annoying notifications all the time. I just wanted something to keep track of my walks, track my sleep and give me basic watch functions such as alarms, timers and stopwatch. The Instinct is perfect for that.
I also have it set so that the backlight turns automatically on when it's dark and I flip my wrist. I wear it to bed (sleep tracking) and I can always check the time if I wake up in the middle of the night.
He was one of my favorite authors. I remember reading "Eon" many years ago. I thought it was the best book I had ever read. Then I read "The Forge of God" and found it even better.
I am one of those people who still have a lot of PostScript files. I have many scientific papers from college in my collection. I know I should convert them to PDF, but it sucks that they quietly removed support for a file format that's been around for a long time.
This is a very cool use for a watch. You can use any watch, but some watches, like the Seiko Alpinist, even have a rotating bezel with the compass points. This makes it a lot easier to find the other directions. One thing the article forgot to mention, is that the trick works only for standard time. If you are on daylight savings time, the direction will be off.
I say this as a Java developer, but I hate UIs written in Java. Native UIs are always superior. IntelliJ comes to mind. I used it for many years, and it always felt "different". There were weird inconsistencies in rendering, focus and behavior that were annoying. Same with NetBeans.
On the other hand, I think server side Java is still great.
As the article states, many developers have degrees other than CS. I have a BS/MS in Mathematics and have worked as a developer for the past 20 years. Interestingly, back in the early 2000s, it seemed that having a degree in Math was actually an advantage for me. I think I got a lot of interviews because of that.
This makes me sad. I thought the Microsoft Store at the Domain in Austin was very cool and I visited from time to time. There was also an Apple store in the same location so I could visit both! And there was a Borders Bookstore, which I loved browsing in, and is also closed now :-(
I can say the same thing about a legacy Java codebase that I had to work with at a big "enterprise" software company a few years ago. The code was so convoluted, with some files over 12k lines long. You can write spaghetti code in any language.
This is great news! I was really excited about Perl 6, until I realized it was a different language, and it never quite jelled into a usable thing. So I kept using Perl 5. I write mostly modern Perl code, so this is exactly what I wanted.
I learned Perl back in the late 90's when it was the best way to do web programming. As a C programmer, it was a breath of fresh air. It was a higher-level C for me and
I used it for prototyping all kinds of things before writing the production level C code. Nowadays, I still use it for system maintenance and prototyping. It's a great language and very powerful tool.
I'm in a similar situation. As a UNIX, command-line user I've noticed that every release they make things harder for us. Yeah, Homebrew is great, but Apple doesn't support it and they could break things anytime.
Lately, I've been doing most of my dev work on a Windows 10 machine using WSL. It's come a long way and is very usable now.
Interesting write-up, but it sounds like he didn't want to succeed. I have been using WSL for two years now as my primary development environment and it works great. Yes, file I/O is slow, but unless you do a ton of I/O it really isn't that big of a problem for dev work. I like having access to Ubuntu repositories and I actually prefer it to MacOS/Brew.
He also spends time complaining about Edge when it just takes a few minutes to download and install Chrome as your default browser.
Finally, Linux is pretty good these days. I have a System76 laptop running Pop!_OS and it's super nice, everything works out of the box. Why he decided to use Windows if he wanted a *nix environment is a little strange.