Steam is competent at what it does and has been for decades. No other online game store is as good as what it does: Nintendo, Epic, Microsoft, & Sony have all failed to do well what Steam has gotten better at over the course of 2+ decades.
People would likely juggle the use of two stores if the value proposition was great enough. But it isn't, which is why Steam dominates and all their competitors operate in comparatively tiny fiefdoms.
I still love developing for the .NET Framework using C#. However, the number of reasons to keep using anything made by Microsoft continues to dwindle with each passing year.
As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.
Hackatons are commonly used as a way to take credit for & reap the benefits of another person or team's work, without attribution or compensation. And oftentimes, a promising hackathon idea will be "improved" by management & added to the creator's workload with tight deadlines (because the hard part is already done!) -- even if they don't necessarily agree with the "improvements".
Burned through 50+% of my monthly quota today using Sonnet 4.6, after starting the day at 0%. Only used it on an average daily workload, same as what I'd done all last month, and I used maybe 52% throughout all of May.
I don't really care all that much, because my employer is the one paying for Copilot & wants us all using it. Personally, I think it sucks: the tooling is inconsistent across VSCode and Visual Studio, Microsoft caps the context window of Sonnet 4.6 at 200k even though it's capable of 1M, & at this price point there's almost certainly better ways of getting the same results from other models via other CLIs or plugins.
Not so much old school as I was new to JDK, there was no prior art anywhere in our codebase that implemented async (somehow, in 2022), and we started off with JDK 8 (I helped upgrade everything to JDK 17). I REALLY TRIED, OK!?
Even when I was building stuff in Kotlin, I couldn't figure out how to make async -- coroutines? RX? I forget already -- work, either. But that was all in the last few months before I left & moved back to the .NET stack.
So it's going to be an internal implementation change -- that is, it generates the MSIL code that's generate when a developer writes async/await code, and won't require changes to how a developer writes async/await code?
Support for OpenAPI 3.1 in .NET sucks. Up until recently, a third-party library (Swashbuckle) has been the heavyweight, but lagged for years in supporting new features & fixing old bugs. Microsoft created a first party option (Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi) that supports 3.1, but it’s nowhere near feature parity with Swashbuckle yet.
I also find serialization/deserialization to be weak in .NET. Third-party Newtonsoft was king for years, then Microsoft released System.Text.Json. Years later, it lacks feature parity, including an easy way to debug like Newtonsoft did.
Speaking as somebody that spent 2yrs as a full-time Java dev before returning to the Microsoft stack: yes.
Java’s Optional sucks compared to how C# (and Kotlin) implement support for nullable types. C#’s async/await syntax is better than… however the hell Java says to implement asynchronous calls now (Thread? CompletableFuture? idk, I never figured it out). ffs, Java doesn’t even have support for string templates yet — they added it as a JDK preview feature (JDK 21?) and then removed it before final release.
They got the "Google Search Is Dead" part right, at least.
If you want a better search engine, Kagi ( https://kagi.com ) is a good place to start. Yes, it's a paid product -- once you outgrow their free plan, which offers 100 searches -- but they've got a lot of quality-of-life features & they're focused on user privacy. I've been using it exclusively for 2.5 years already -- I haven't touched Google, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or any others -- and I have no regrets paying for it.
The only downside I can think of regarding Kagi is that it's US-based. But until another company is able to do as good a job while operating outside of a Five Eyes country ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ), I'll be sticking with Kagi.
People would likely juggle the use of two stores if the value proposition was great enough. But it isn't, which is why Steam dominates and all their competitors operate in comparatively tiny fiefdoms.