Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.
A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.
In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quotes and newlines. That was probably the last time I ever saw ASCII control characters used as intended in the wild.
There is no technical reason why CSV should have won out, except that keyboards have a comma key and almost never a ^A key.
Another n=1, but it depends. Outside interruptions when I'm on a tear are horrible. I don't often distract myself with a full-featured computer. In fact I often spin off into "research" or fiddling with fonts as a way to let my background brain do its work. I do a fair amount of editing on my phone (!) when on transit or generally goofing off.
A SIM card is an often-overlooked "what you have" second factor, yes leaving aside phone company social engineering hacks.
I made the mistake of buying an iphone on a trip to US, which is eSIM only. The tech works fine --Google Fi is a pretty good example-- but I later traded that phone for the exact same "international" model, traded even plus cash, to get my slot back.
I discovered French drains while trying to dig a hole for a fruit tree a while back. The land was on a hill and about 30cm down I hit this huge pile of dirty gravel. Ok, so maybe someone filled that spot with gravel. Sunk another hole a bit farther down. More gravel, etc. It took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure it out.
Turns out it was the main drainage for the whole neighborhood. Heh. Moved my tree to the side and it thrived on all that lovely water.
About ten years ago I got my hands on some of the last production FusionIO SLC cards for benchmarking. The software was an in-memory database that a customer wanted to use with expanded capacity. I literally just used the fusion cards as swap.
After a few minutes of loading data, the kernel calmed down and it worked like a champ. Millions of transactions per second across billions of records, on a $500 computer... and a card that cost more than my car.
Definitely wouldn't do it that way these days, but it was an impressive bit of kit.
30 years is a lot of time. I agree with GP. Starting back then would have been best; starting now would be second. I live in a country that has twice the number of medical school graduates per 100k population than the US, and unsurprisingly compared to the US it's easier to get general medical and specialist attention.
I made a hobby of writing intro posts on deep technical topics, from DNS to concurrency to cutting cloud cost. From 2009 ish onwards all my gigs have been at least helped if not initiated by someone reading a post and saying "we should talk to this guy".
Not a magic spell. I had been writing for almost ten years prior before anyone noticed, and only a fraction get any play.