> My decision to sell it was met with a lot of backlash but was successful enough to launch me into a self-sustained career.
As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.
For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.
I assume the author is mainly referring to the video by Dave's Garage [1], at least the items listed match up pretty well with the points made in the video.
I seem to remember Dave making some of these points as examples rather than asserting them as the truth of what occurred with CrowdStrike, but it's been a couple days since I watched the video.
A friend of mine was a Program Manager on Xbox that worked on some HCI projects like the original Kinect.
He told me there was once an experimental keyboard that used the two thumbsticks on an Xbox controller like a dual radial menu to input text - the left thumbstick would select a character group, and the right thumbstick would input a character from that group.
The learning curve was deemed too steep for the average customer, but apparently those who spent enough time using the prototype were able to type an order of magnitude faster than with traditional on-screen keyboards.
The memory sticks out as an amusing idea, and potentially a really cool "power-user" input modality for game controllers.
I had a Sonim XP3 "dumb phone" that I used for a year and successfully drove my screen time down from 1-2 hours per day to <10min.
The key for me was that the input (T-9 keyboard) and output (tiny non-touch display) modalities were so constrained that any task that wasn't completely trivial was made so painful that I would put it off until I was in front of a computer, if I did it at all. This was a great way to filter out tasks that weren't truly important enough to work on immediately in the moment.
The downfall was my new job which required travel for work, which meant needing a phone capable of managing flights, navigation, and coordinating with my coworkers.
If my circumstances change, I fully intend to switch back to the XP3 or something similar.
I do wish there was something available that could perform those tasks I need for work, but not give me the "full throughput" to get distracted.
I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so.
The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.
> a lot of the Windows shell and apps have been slowly rewritten in C#
I worked on the Shell team until late 2022. There is very little C#, if any at all.
The vast majority of the Windows Shell is still C++ with a significant amount of WinRT/COM.
I really like this navigation model - it reminds me a little of the Panorama control [1] that Windows Phone attempted or the column-based, horizontally scolling UIs of the infamous Windows 8 Metro apps [2].
Sadly these more creative approaches seem to be forgotten in place of lazy hamburger menu/pages with back-stack style approaches.
As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.
For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.