Yeah, been dealing with that a bunch lately too, I’ve started pushing them towards the documentation directly (though to be fair, sometimes that’s ass or nearly nonexistent) with some success.

Sqlbi for Power BI, Marco and Alberto have pretty much been my go to in that world for probably near a decade (though I haven’t really done a lot of that in a long while).

Not used nix so can’t comment on that, aura is a pacman wrapper + aur helper -S for package operations, -A for aur, gives you similar options too so -Au to update like -Su in pacman. Has a lot of other options that I’m probably not taking advantage of, but for me, gives me a single place to manage most everything (flathub too but I don’t use a lot of flatpaks, just nice to have)

It was reminding me of an evolution on Andromeda’s combat, actually plays well, went in not a huge fan of that change (da:o is still my favourite of the series) but after how dumb as fuck the companion AI was in inquisition (I always play sword and board, unless I micromanaged people in inquisition they’d all be dead during dragon fights), but ended up really enjoying it, between that and the sphere grid skill tree, there’s some decent stuff to work with.

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I’ve used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I’m comfortable with it and it’s supported in every cloud environment I’ve touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

I’ve got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I’d go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don’t find much of a difference beyond package management.

I was just blaming the usb-c connection to my monitor and throttling on a combo of windows and corporate bloatware, I guess I feel a bit better that I’m not the only one.

The connection to my monitor is the most frustrating, sometimes won’t even recognise it, sometimes after blanking the display it’ll come back with the wrong resolution but still display like it was the original, it’s super bizarre. Literally never had an issue with my personal Asus zenbook in either Debian or w11.

I’m certain the access database living in a broom closet that someone setup 20 years ago is still going strong at my last job. It was also fed by mainframe dumps, I’m super glad I never had to go anywhere near the thing personally, different department and it was explicit that they owned it.

Heck, there are already ISO language standards, and there’s ISO Software Lifecycle standards, it’s absolutely not a leap to move into standards adhering processes. It’s not like there’s no desire to do it either, code standards alone, how many times have you had discussions about style guides and coding standards company wide? It makes things more consistent and easier for different developers to maintain.

Semi related, I see a lot of non-iso standard SQL that’s a pain if you do migrations or refactors, often even just sucks to read through (old school oracle joins look really strange and aren’t clear compared to iso standard joins). I really wish people would adhere to the standards as much as possible.

I realised you meant this over lunch, I’m a mech eng who changed disciplines into software (data and systems mainly) over my career, I 100% feel you, I have seen enough colleagues do things that wouldn’t fly in other disciplines, it’s definitely put me off a number of times. I’m personally for rubber stamping by a PEng and the responsibility that comes with that. There’s enough regulatory and ethical considerations just in data usage that warrants an engineering review, systems designed for compliance should be stamped too.

Really bothers me sometimes how wildwest things are.

Edit: see my response, realised the comment was about engineering accountability which I 100% agree with, leaving my original post untouched aside from a typo that’s annoying me.

I respectfully disagree coming from a reliability POV, you won’t address culture or processes that enable a person to make a mistake. With the exception of malice or negligence, no one does something like this in a vacuum; insufficient or incorrect training, unreasonable pressure, poorly designed processes, a culture that enables actions that lead to failure.

Example I recall from when I worked manufacturing, operator runs a piece of equipment that joins pieces together in manual rather than automatic, failed to return it to a ready flag and caused a line stop. Yeah, operator did something outside of process and caused an issue, clear cut right? Send them home? That was a symptom, not a cause, the operator ran in manual because the auto cycle time was borderline causing linestops, especially on the material being run. The operator was also using manual as there were some location sensors that had issues with that material and there was incoming quality issues, so running manually, while not standard procedure, was a work around to handle processing issues, we also found that culturally, a lot of the operators did not trust the auto cycles and would often override. The operator was unlucky, if we just put all the “accountability” on them we’d never have started projects to improve reliability at that location and change the automation to flick over that flag the operator forgot about if conditions were met regardless.

Accountability is important, but it needs to be applied where appropriate, if someone is being negligent or malicious, yeah there’s consequences, but it’s limiting to focus on that only. You can implement what you suggest that the devs get accountability for any failure so they’re “empowered”, but if your culture doesn’t enable them to say no or make them feel comfortable to do so, you’re not doing anything that will actually prevent an issue in the future.

Besides, I’d almost consider it a PPE control and those are on the bottom of the controls hierarchy with administrative just above it, yes I’m applying oh&s to software because risk is risk conceptually, automated tests, multi phase approvals etc. All of those are better controls than relying on a single developer saying no.

I was trying to get on the list at mt work when I got a hardware refresh this year, I dislike large laptops and the dev spec is a 17" thinkpad (which imo has the left CTL and fn keys backwards, breaks muscle memory when changing between computers) but I’m docked most times but when I’m not the battery is terrible, maybe a handful of hours. Probably due to corporate crapware, but at least the arm macbooks stand a chance, my partner has an m1 mbp and she doesn’t bother charging it most workdays or work with it plugged in, she doesn’t need to. We were playing factorio the other night and she was moonlighting into her desktop, she got through a day’s work, a bunch of hours of game streaming and some of the next work day, that should be the expectation for a normal device.

Apple in my view really understood mobile devices, they had the hands down best trackpad for a long time, a fantastic keyboard, great display, a form factor you can actually carry around and as far as I recall, even the intel macs had better battery life.

There’s drain guards you can get that work pretty well, I got tired of cleaning out hair from the shower drain.

Engineering prof in uni was big on journals/log books for cyoa and it’s stuck with me, I write down everything I do during the day, research, findings etc, easily the best bit of advice I ever had.

I just really like KDE, been between that and XFCE for years. Ubuntu’s version of gnome when they went to that side bar layout that looks like it’s meant for tablets turned me off of trying it again (though probably be great on a tablet). KDE’s super customisable too, totally done a faux osx look for my laptop and use more or less stock KDE on my shop computer. I didn’t mind older gnome though, isn’t that what cinnamon or mate are meant to feel like?

Imagine if securom was everywhere again.

Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel - Barenaked Ladies

I’m always personally wary of storing blobs in a database if for no other reason it’s going to totally be more expensive to store on a server rather than in some sort of blob storage.

Same, the big box should still be at my parents so have some hope, they gave me a lot of the stuff they still had in my room when they moved, but not everything, maybe it’ll turn up when I finally unpack all my stuff.

The Universim from the brief looks I’ve given it seems to fit the bill to me, my partner’s been playing it and it’s made me want to replay bw2, I’ve got all my disks but can’t find my cd key so… Prey 2006 same thing.

I think I did it back in xp, I was trying to figure out when support was added.

I don’t think it’s super advertised that it’s a capability which definitely doesn’t help its usage, heck I kinda forgot about it even though I used it until your comment triggered a memory.