Working as a test automation engineer in '91/92 (although as an intern), I wrote a program that controlled a test rig for seat belts.
The machine was basically a home computer running a repl with BASIC, beefed up with a handful of input/output ports to get data from sensors and operate pneumatic actors on the rig.
No graphics beyond what you could do with ASCII on a monochrome monitor.
In the end it came to ~2800 lines of code including comments.
Design principles: a) make it work and b) make the code as readable as possible.
Work-life-balance: it was a normal engineering job, so basically a 9-to-5 thing. Although I did put in a saturday appearance at the end to get everything done (including manuals) before my stint ended.
All-in-all it was as much fun as one could have in test automation at the time; writing the program from scratch and adapting the rig where necessary.
It's always interesting to read such articles. 7,500 Employees? Bah, too much! 100 Engineers will do!!
I raise you to 50 employees, the number WhatsApp had when they reached 1 billion users.
So where's the mistake the author makes? Simple: Twitter is a globally active social media application and, as such, falls under local jurisdiction in a lot of countries. E.g. in the European Union, Twitter has to remove content flagged as "terrorist" within one (1) hour. 24/7. Yes, on Thanksgiving Day too.
And that's what the bulk of employees will be: content supervisors. Moderators.
Or "age verification" agents - Britain has it's "Online Safety Bill" in place, and it applies to any social media site accessible in Britain.
1. AFAIK Google ranks pages (amongst other metrics) by how "fresh" they are. A date given on a web page might count as a measure of "freshness" so it would be good SEO practice to eliminate the date.
2. Google can measure how good its search results are by simply tracking the click-through. So, assuming search term "t" can lead to older results (technology ten years ago) or newer results (technology now), Google can refine results for the term by looking at the click-through rates. And if most of your fellow searchers look for newer tech, you looking for the older stuff might be marginalized.
3. With tracking being as sophisticated as it is, you might simply be in the wrong "cohort". If that's the case, you might try to alter what google knows about you by looking until you find the results relevant to you and then clicking on them. Even if that means going to page 10 of the results.
Am I missing something? Or is this article really advocating to not count the worst thing that can happen to an utility (electricity provider, traffic lights, streaming service, online shop...)?
Namely the unavailability of the service it offers? That is an interesting approach. Well, one thing's for sure: even if you don't count these things, your customers will.
I finished one other project - playing "MasterMind" against the computer (you know, where you have to guess five colour pins) with output done on the internal little printer.
After that I had started one one other project (an 8085 assembly language simulator), when first the controller for the external 8'' floppy drive stopped working, effectively bricking it, and shortly after that the handful of tape cartridges I had. Mind you, at the time everything was 15 years old or so, so I couldn't really blame the equipment.
Funny enough, I think those things were never meant to be a "personal" computer. You could get quite a sophisticated external bus system for these ("field bus" I think) and that made them ideal for lab environments.
I once (1992?) calculated mandelbrot sets on one of these. 400x400, output to an external thermo printer as the one-line display had, well, only one line. With a calculation depth of 256 it took about 48 hours to produce one set.
1. A decade or two ago a story made the news that some guy
was working from some remote place in Scotland, basically
in the middle of nowhere, with just a modem and some novel
idea: do freelance research in subscription-only databases.
Basically just getting accounts for various costly services,
then advertise that for a fee you will do research in these
services for people who shun / can't afford the costly access. Unfortunately, I can't find the story any more.
2. Work as a freelancing developer, but don't accept large
projects, only small ones where you know you can beat the
time estimate in your favour. There are portals for this
sort of work.
3. Doesn't need to be software development. You can do this
as well writing short pieces about almost anything for the
benefits of web seo.
Again, there are portals for this kind of work ("gig economy"). Think $20 to $30 per piece.
4. If the gig economy is not for you: every job where a lot
of stand-by time is part of the job description. Janitor for
a couple of condominiums, maybe. Or you act as stand-by technician for small companies with self-hosted computer
hardware (acting when you get paged).
If you are starting with C++ right now, I'd suggest Scott Meyer's More Effective C++ (and his other books) and the books by Herb Sutter.
Don't worry too much about C++ 17/20 unless you are working for a company that use the newer standards. A lot of companies still stick to C++ 11.
Just a few things you should consider:
- C++ is highly complex. The poster lower down claiming you already know 90% if you know C#/ObjC is simply wrong. The learning curve is steep.
- Your stated experience sounds a bit like "App developer" and while that gives you plenty of experience, the projects tend to be a bit smallish. C++ projects on the other hand can be huge and extremely complex. Think 4 hrs for a clean build, with 10+ people working on the same code base. You should consider if such a change is for you.
- Then again, the salaries you can draw as C++ developer reflect all that, especially the fact that C++ is not an easy language to pick up.
- Since you claim to be from Southern Germany: the automotive industry is particularly strong in that region. And not only in Stuttgart or Munich but also in e.g. Ulm. And they do most, if not all, their stuff in C++.
- C++ is going to stay. Software development for automotive is done in C/C++ as the MISRA standard more or less mandates it. And I do not know of any effort to change that, even by newer players in the field. So: don't worry. Learning C++ to a sufficiently advanced level will be a very good career investment, even in the long term.
- It is difficult to "vet" language in terms of the future they have. But as a rule of thumb you can say: the larger / more complex the code base, the longer the language will be around. C++ has a huge and complex code base, and companies tend to be conservative with such "investments". Shipyards still use Fortran, banks still use COBOL. Perl is still actively used in web development, despite Ruby on Rails.
- Finally: perhaps you are looking at the whole situation from the wrong angle, i.e. career advancement / employer loyalty. Why not instead ask yourself: what projects do I want to work on, and in what kind of industry? Then find out which language is pervasive through that domain and learn that. After all: C++ is modern compared to C. And there is still plenty of embedded development going on in C.
The machine was basically a home computer running a repl with BASIC, beefed up with a handful of input/output ports to get data from sensors and operate pneumatic actors on the rig.
No graphics beyond what you could do with ASCII on a monochrome monitor.
In the end it came to ~2800 lines of code including comments.
Design principles: a) make it work and b) make the code as readable as possible.
Work-life-balance: it was a normal engineering job, so basically a 9-to-5 thing. Although I did put in a saturday appearance at the end to get everything done (including manuals) before my stint ended.
All-in-all it was as much fun as one could have in test automation at the time; writing the program from scratch and adapting the rig where necessary.