The basic electricity coverage that you are getting if you have no contract with any provider was around 74 €ct/kWh beginning of the year (maybe even 80 €ct, depending on where you live). But some are reducing that to around 54 €ct/kWh again, since it was just to cover the surge of new users that required them to buy energy for high prices. Having a proper contract with an energy provider it's currently around 46 €ct/kWh last I checked.
Previous prices were around 31 €ct/kWh on average (seen them as low as 26 €ct/kWh).
People that have ongoing contracts are the lucky ones currently.
But here I have to ask what your experience with such remote setups is? I used the remote features of Visual Studio Code a while back because I needed a beefy machine that was integrated into a specific remote service landscape. I have to say I couldn't really notice that it was running remotely. But that probably depends on your company and how weird their network setup is.
You mentioned RDP which I wouldn't even start comparing to a setup like this. Obviously streaming individual frames, video and the likes over the network is a different beast than having an editor running on a remote machine and only stream commands and keystrokes. For example my ssh sessions don't usually involve a lot of lag and work just fine.
I have to say that I strongly believe that the hate for Jira doesn't come from Jira but from misconfigured workflows. I used to use a stock Jira in my last companies and never understood what people were complaining about. I had boards with the simplified workflow and the team had free reign.
I first started being annoyed by it when I joined a large corporation with a central department that would enforce specific workflows and processes. Now I can't move tasks into a sprint without assigning them to a person first, can't move task from status x to y and have a 100 custom fields in there. It's no fun anymore. At the same time the projects are owned by project management and it doesn't feel like home anymore. Where I initially opened up my Jira Board first thing every morning it now has become a chore.
At the same time I have to say that I kinda understand where those processes come from. I now work in an industry where accidentally using a wrong issue type or forgetting to assign issues to specific code changes can become an actual issue due to traceability requirements mandated by law.
Same here. I'm one of those people that try VSCode every few weeks because "it's free and it would be nice to have a more lightweight IDE for some stuff". But coming from IntelliJ it is really hard. It feels like a lot of convenience and stuff "that just works" is somehow there, but not working on the same level the "old" full fledged IDEs. You can notice the optimizations that gone into the auto complete features and similar. Tried Python, Go, Java and Kotlin in VSCode. Just couldn't compare. Granted. At least Java and Kotlin might not be languages that work well in non specialized IDEs.
I really loved the remote execution feature of VSCode. But in the end it resulted in me programming in IntelliJ and then copy and pasting the code over to VSCode...
For me it feels like the modern Eclipse. The one IDE/Editor which is basically a container for thousands of plugins. And it's great. Everyone uses it. There are a lot of plugins that cover every imaginable use case. Even more than e.g. IntelliJ or Visual Studio could cover (ok maybe not). But in the end it's just not as great as an IDE with most core features already build in and tuned against each other.
But then there are also people using unmodified vim installations for programming. So the expectations and ways of working really seem to differ a lot.
I also see a value in being in the office and meeting the colleagues face to face. But I also like to have more free time and choose my neighborhood based on my own preferences and not based on where my work is.
I totally okay with traveling even longer distances for occasional meetings if I can otherwise be flexible and choose on my own. I hate the "being forced to come to the office" aspect.
For me there is a high chance that I might switch companies after the pandemic to retain the gained freedom I now have. Albeit "gained freedom" might be a bit much. Since I currently have to assume that it's "back to the office" again after the pandemic, I'm not yet as free as I could be with a true remote job.
Interestingly, reading this blog post, this doesn't seem to be common knowledge. The first comparison of global variables inside a process and environment variables left me wondering. It just felt wrong.
A gripe I have with environment variables is when they are used to modify a programs behavior deep inside it's belly and aren't treated like configuration input similar to program arguments.
Otherwise they are a universal way of configuring applications. Universal is good, universal is nice.
From what I’ve seen up until now it’s often the last option. I’ve seen comparisons between the major cloud providers, but those have often been on the level of “I can boot a VM with x cpu on provider y and z”. With these kind of comparisons a major deciding factor then is discounts. And that’s an area Microsoft excels at.
I'd like to second this. From where I'm sitting it feels like Microsoft is prioritizing marketing more than engineering.
It seems like most larger customers that use Azure do so because management got shiny presentations from Microsoft and now it's their "strategical partner".
A lot of overselling with huge discounts gets them their in. Already seen this at multiple companies. Azure is a nice platform for your Windows administrators to shift some load to the cloud. But to build large applications on?
Edit: And I kinda feel bad for saying this, since I assume that there are indeed pretty competent engineers working on Azure. But somewhere something isn't right.
Previous prices were around 31 €ct/kWh on average (seen them as low as 26 €ct/kWh).
People that have ongoing contracts are the lucky ones currently.