• 2 Posts
  • 147 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle




  • For any non-trivial software project, spending time on code quality and a good architecture is worth the effort. Every hour I spend on that saves me two hours when I have to fix bugs or implement new features.

    Years ago I had to review code from a different team and it was an absolute mess. They (and our boss) defended it with “That way they can get it done faster. We can clean up after the initial release”. Guess what, that initial release took over three years instead of the planned six months.












  • General rule of thumb that aligns well with what you do in English: “Sie” goes with last names, “du” goes with first names.

    There are very rare exceptions, for example sports reporters tend to address some athletes with “Sie” and first name for reasons that nobody can explain. Those are not very relevant in everyday conversation, especially not if German is not your first language.

    Is it a big deal to start using the informal?

    It used to be a cliché that you would call coworkers by their last name and “Sie” until that one fateful office Christmas party where your boss gets drunk and asks you to call him Fritz and “du”.

    These days, things are a lot more relaxed. Many companies are adopting a rule that all employees should address each other as “du”, including upper management.


  • Also: you chose the way it’s presented. I’ve always been into history (mainly ancient Egypt and medieval Europe) since I was old enough to hold a picture book but I absolutely hated most history classes in school because the presentation wasn’t right for me. They made us memorize dates, names and what specific event caused a certain war but in the end, those don’t really matter that much.

    The important thing to take away from history is the big picture and ironically, the best way for me to get that is by listening to a bunch of individual, personal stories and figure out how they fit together. These days, I listen to a weekly history podcast (shout out to “Geschichten aus der Geschichte” for those who speak German). For most episodes, I still won’t remember individual names or dates but pretty much every episode there are a few moments where I go “oh yeah, they mentioned that aspect in an earlier episode” even if they don’t point it out explicitly. I’ll never remember what year the second defenestration of Prague was or which Emperor it was directed against but after listening to a couple of episodes that roughly relate to that, I will forever remember the broad strokes about what caused the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century which superficially was about conflicts between Catholics and Protestants but on a deeper level centered around the question who would rule Bohemia and the Empire as a whole.


  • I was a fan of Miranda IM because that’s what I used for everything else (ICQ, MSN, XMPP, AIM, occasionally Skype though that plugin didn’t work that well). If I remember correctly, joining multiple servers was a bit more cumbersome than with other clients but having everything in one application was amazing.


  • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.detoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    Bah, the young ones joining IRC through a web interface. Back in my day, we used telnet, typed the IRC commands by hand and hoped we were quick enough to reply to PING to not get kicked from the server.

    Well, not really but I did it occasionally to better understand how the protocol works.