I highly doubt it, Windows is known for its stellar backward compatibility. Code signing means a lot of older software, that is still in use, would not be able to install or run. This is not going to happen (at least in the enterprise).
- You can still learn from the best of the best, its called books, try to read at least one per month.
- Conferences, not my thing, but if you are new, you may learn a trick or two there. No just go there, try talking to the people. Approach a few senior looking guys and ask them for advice.
- Confs can be quite expensive, a cheaper alternative is local user groups. You can try to find the closest ones via Meetup.
- ChatGPT (yup, hallucinates but still has a reasonable answer for 90% of the questions).
As for your situation:
- You are responsible for hiring. Try to hire people with more experience than you.
- "to the highest standards of the industry" isn't that perfectionism? Most production code has much much lower quality than what we see in open source.
- I think for the time being (the job market is really bad right now), just concentrate on delivering stuff. Learn if you have some time left, but delivering solutions should be your prio #1 in my opinion.
Blogs and small sites still show up when you look for obscure contents like "RS232 DTR line". So far when I had a very specific question related to hardware or software I could find it via Google.
I find that blogs and small sites do not have a chance when looking for a commercial products or when trying to find a review for a product. There is too much SEO spam and fighting for the top positions.
But if you are doing something that cannot be commercialised easily or is very niche your blog will have easy time on Google (programming is not a niche anymore).
My bet would be to write a small program using your target language. With ChatGPT this is extremely easy as you will get a list of recommended libraries to use. Try to choose an app that requires some serious coding e.g. creating an image board like 4chan is better than coding a tic-tac-toe.
My recommendation is that the learning app should:
- Interact with an SQL database
- Expose an HTTP endpoint (REST or GraphQL)
- Use a logging framework
- Use concurrency
- Use a unit testing framework and a few integration tests
- Build should be automated using GitHub actions
In my opinion that's the fastest way to learn a language or more broadly a platform (as every language now is a kind of platform with its own set of libraries, conventions, idioms and untold rules).
PS. My list is probably not good for a system language like Rust or C++, but should work for languages from Ruby & Python, though Java & C#, up to Go and Erlang.
Ad Scala - it depends if you already knew a JVM based language. If you are coming from Java you will have a head start: use Maven/Gradle instead of SBT, you will already know IJ, you will know your way around managing JVM versions and understand core concepts like jar files and class loading.
For me the most time intensive part of learning a new language is learning the new libraries. I don't mean here the standard library but rather things like library for interacting with SQL database, how mocking works in the new language, how concurrency works, web API framework.
Learning "just" a language can be done over the weekend. Learning to properly use its standard lib and the entire environment of libraries may take years.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
This is not my domain so my knowledge is limited, but I wonder if the chip designers have some sort of a standard library of ready to use components. Do you have to design e.g. ALU every time you design a new CPU or is there some standard component to use? I think having a proven components that can be glued on a higher level may be the key to productivity here.
Returning to LLMs. I think the problem here may be that there is simply not enough learning material for LLM. Verilog comparing to C is a niche with little documentation and even less open source code. If open hw were more popular I think LLMs could learn to write better Verilog code. Maybe the key is to persuade hardware companies to share their closed source code to teach LLM for the industry benefit?
Still it is impressive to create something complex like this in a matter of 4 days (looking at the commit history). And it is a good start to develop a full fledged IDE.
The more advanced features like syntax highlighting & autocomplete unfortunately are missing. I did not run it (I am on macOS) but I also expect there is no debugger.
Now I also want to share my childhood story: I started my dev journey first by using Turbo Pascal and then by switching to Delphi 7. Delphi was pretty much like VB6, you designed an app by dragging and dropping components on a form. My first app that I have created was a Notepad++ clone, I still keep the code for it but it is so awful that I cringe every time I try to look at it.
Scheme is a small LISP written in C. It is smaller and simpler than Clojure. Common LISP is much more advanced if you find Scheme limited.
Erlang and Smalltalk are both interesting languages based on message passing paradigm.
Verilog - a hardware description language. Tetris in hardware? No problem! There are free simulators out there but using real FPGA boards can be expensive.
CUDA/Shaders - massively parallel take at the programming.
You may always put an "innocent" looking file into the output binary that states who is the actual authors. Say you may create AUTHORS file in your repo, but store a SHA512 of that file in some obscure file in resources e.g. META-INF/ArtifactSignId, don't automate this step in any way, do it manually. A lot of people that are mindlessly copy'ing your work will not bother doing anything more than remove some stuff & search'n'replace author name. Then you will have a proof in case this other fork gained popularity (not very probable) that it was stolen.
I would not stress over it until that other person sets up a project webside and starts a marketing campaign. Most probably it is only about making a good looking GitHub profile.
Great that JavaFX is not dead yet.
I still use it for hobby projects e.g. apps that communicate with Arduino or MIFARE card readers via serial ports.
Ad 2024 the framework is seriously behind any other commercial GUI be it WPF or Qt. I found the SceneBuilder to be highly unstable, crashing often several times during development.
The idea to use CSS for styling is not bad, but there is absolutely no autocomplete in IntelliJ Community for it. Makes writing it hard. There is a JavaFX plugin for Eclipse but it looks abandoned.
All in all it works when you need to put a simple GUI for your hobby project but I would not recommend it for any serious app.
I think they selling point is that you do not have to solder. Soldering is not for everyone: you need expensive equipment, soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is quite harmful to your health, young kids should not solder.
I used breadboard to play with electronics during winter in my small appartment at that time. No troubles with fumes, no need to buy expensive soldering station, no need to safely get rid of tin with lead. This was a good way to start, now I own a soldering station but now I also know that I need it about 2 or 3 a month.
I only want to add that you need resistors with slightly ticker leads. Most of the cheap resistors have either too soft leads or too thin and they do not provide a good contact with the breadboard.
The same applies to wires that you use for the connections. Do not buy the very thin ones. An example of what I use: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3175
Jumpers are good but if you have to do a lot of wiring (e.g. 8 address lines + 8 data lines) then using custom cut wires is the best.