This has been one of my biggest peeves about the WWW since 1993. Please include publication and/or change dates and/or include a changelog on your pages. Do not force your users to resort to reading metadata, the URL path, the Wayback Machine, or dark magic to figure out when and what changed. Diff is a solved problem; why can't I diff a generic web page?
The only thing to which you are entitled–by definition–is access to the source. It is your responsibility to verify what the source does.
The "getting paid" notion is off-topic and has nothing to do with the source being open. If I provide commercial support for someone and implement a solution using open source software, I am the one providing the support and I have no expectation that the original authors will hold my hand.
Happily picking an opinion: I won't use phone apps; I won't buy new computers or devices, though I infrequently buy refurbished; I won't buy new cars; I carefully vet all vendors for quality, politics, and ethics (and have largely automated the process); I won't buy new kayaks; I eat a plant-based diet and try to source it locally/ethically; I won't knowingly vote for or endorse rapists or murderers and do my best to vet candidates.
I abhor Google, loathe Facebook, have considerable contempt for Musk (as a person) and the products his companies offer, use Amazon sparingly and grudgingly, and only started shopping at Walmart during the Great Recession when a) they became the employer of the majority of my neighbors and b) other vendors in my area closed.
@naikrovek may not now be aware of what happens when one makes assumptions about other people and their actions, beliefs, etc.
I fell hard out-of-love with fantasy about the time of the release of Jackson's TFotR, which coincided with a hard "nope" to the fantasy "science" fiction of the Star Wars universe and has grown to a rejection of 95% of the MCU. They feel, to me, as schlocky and infantalizing as the fantasy of the Twilight & Harry Potter novels/films. It is all annoying nostalgia for an era that never existed.
Give me the "hard" science fiction of Herbert, Card, Dick, Butler (especially Butler!), Okorafor, Liu, et al. Dick was problematic, sure, and Liu has said things about Uighurs I can't stomach, but their works look forward and not back.
No. It won't die. In the same way that memory of the Holocaust won't die (hopefully), or that memory of Putin's invasion of Ukraine won't die (hopefully), or that the memory of the corruption of Donald Trump won't die (hopefully), or the memory of the enslavement of Black human beings in the US won't die (hopefully), or the memory of corrupt policing won't die (hopefully).
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
You have no idea of what tools I or anyone else on here use or don't use. You only know that I use git, which I could be using independently of everything. I could be using git to track my personal thoughts every day and nothing more. I make an effort to source everything I use as ethically as possible, though it is ridiculously difficult in the world of modern technology.
More seriously, though, I am not far-sighted. I do not need corrective lenses to read books, newsprint, magazines, or labels at the grocery store despite the possible genetic predisposition baed on the need for reading glasses by my parents and siblings. I often have to read very fine details on nautical charts, sometimes in a seaway, sometimes at night with the use of a headlamp.
Exhaustion definitely changes my eyesight. I'm coming off of two days of kayaking and camping with high school kids followed by an intensive four hour lesson teaching rescues. (Imagine ~3600 boat-poses per hour, then subtract a few hundred and replace them with pulling swamped boats out of the water and across my lap to empty them, climbing out of the water and into the boat to demonstrate a dozen types of self-rescue.) I tried to read last night but my eyes could not focus; I vaguely remember making my way toward bed but woke up twelve hours later downstairs on the floor.
In the same minute that I learned GitHub had been acquired by Microsoft, I cancelled my pro subscription and began moving my critical repositories elsewhere. I'm old enough to remember the MS that tried to choke the life out of GNU/Linux and spread FUD about all FLOSS, the one that engaged in anti-competetive behavior during the "Browser Wars". I'm not suggesting that this blunder of a delay is related to the Microsoft acquisition, but the abusive "Look at me, I'm changing" spiel never cut any mustard with me.
Vote at the ballot box and with your dollars. Do not reward executives, lawyers, or engineers who dissemble or obfuscate.
In our case, there is no "brand dishonesty". In some cases, the front-end is co-branded, in others the front-end is white-label while the resulting product, if used, has our branding. And sometimes the end-user gets the raw data without a need for our branded artifact. In the absolute best-case, the customer automates their interactions and never sees any branding. (I know the marketing people on here blanched when they read that.) Our concern is utility for the customer, growing that utility, retaining existing customers regardless of how we acquired them and who got the generous sales commission, while growing the number of customers and the volume of product used year-over-year.
Affiliate sales have always seemed more dishonest to me than working with a vendor who adds value to our product for our shared customers.
I try to work seven days a week four hours a day for the last ten years. It is an attempt to avoid burnout, but I also find I solve more of the truly hard problems away from the keyboard.
My fantasy setup: waterproof 13"-15" e-ink linux device with 16GB of RAM and mobile connectivity and a Twiddler X Lendal collab on a 210cm Cadence. A rollup waterproof full-size bluetooth keyboard would be adequate. The keyboard and e-ink device would both need tether points and/or internal flotation.
I know the estuarine river very well in my part of the world and the approximate distances between various landmarks and aids to navigation. Places I don't know as well, I use nearby features: cars, houses, aids to navigation, etc., to approximate. Exact accuracy isn't critical as normal cruising speed is around four knots. I know the distance from the George Washington Bridge to the Statue of Liberty is about 12 miles, and about ten miles from the GWB to the Battery. It is about six miles from World's End to Anthony's Nose and the Bear Mountain Bridge. It is about 1.5 miles from Little Stony Point to Pollepel Island and another 1.5 to Denning Point.
I also know about how large the various adult birds appear at various distances, recognizing that there is some variability. If it really mattered, I could carry a range finder.
Navigating in the open ocean, with no landmarks, is a little different. I have two compasses: one on my deck and one in my life jacket with my marine radio. I keep a charged phone with GPS and local marine charts in a dry box in a dry bag in a dry hatch in my boat, but have yet to rely on it. I look up the velocity and direction of the predicted currents and keep a chart of that on the deck along with my navigational chart. I plot my course on the chart and note the headings to my next waypoint. I keep a duplicate of the predicted currents and headings in a waterproof notebook on my body in case the chart gets separated from my boat. I note my departure time and calculate my velocity based on my normal cruising speed, adjust that for conditions – wind, current, company – and go for it.
I practice this on my local waters because I've been enveloped by fog off the coast of Maine. In September 2019 at low tide in the morning, three of us in a line with about twelve inches between stern and bow, we were unable to see the other paddlers in their cockpits, which means visibility was no more than seventeen feet. We navigated by instruments, ocean swell, and wind direction for two hours before the fog burned off.
Totally agree! I live in my own bubble and discount everything written on the internet by some (often arbitrary) percentage. (Dons flame-retardant suit.) I double that percentage if Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen have skin in the game in the last five years. (I admit they both had good ideas and implementations, but those feel like ancient history.)
Straight talk, though: software engineering feels like a "hack". I spend a few hours a day making modest adjustments to a SaaS (that adds real value for our customers) and the income feels passive. I spend several hours outside, where the solutions to the software engineering problems reveal themselves.
I take Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" as a metaphor for, in my case, "Kayak Driven Development".
I wore glasses for a few years in high school because I had trouble seeing the blackboard from anywhere but the front row. I started hiking and kayaking every day, especially in places where I could see for many miles. I also migrated from CRT to LCD to LED screens, and more recently to e-ink devices when possible. Very fine print in a dark space is hard to read, but I can read a moving US license plate from six blocks away. Yesterday I recognized a friend a mile and a half away by their paddle-stroke. I am able to differentiate a bald eagle from an osprey at two miles based on the shape of the wings, and see a fish in talons at about a mile. (Friday I observed an osprey dive, catch a fish, head towards the nest, then get chased for thirty minutes by a bald eagle. Nasty, opportunistic birds, bald eagles. I get why Benjamin Franklin held them in such contempt. I lost the pair when they went behind a mountain about three miles away.) In speaking with ophthalmologists, there is wide support for my hypothesis that the near-daily outdoor activity and frequent change of focal distance–from a nautical chart on my foredeck to the bow wave of a tanker eight miles out–has preserved and likely improved my vision. The data: 20/20 in primary school, 20/23 in high school, 20/20 during my higher education, and 20/13 and improving as I approach retirement. A fun trick is to describe an approaching vessel before others have seen it.
We are careful not to play favorites with customers, whether the relationship is direct or through a reseller. Success for our resellers translates into success for us. Every unit sold matters. Every relationship matters. Critically, every re-order matters. We prefer to smother every relationship with unfailing responsiveness. We never say, "no", but we do say, "not now". The (vanishingly) few customers we have lost, we go through an all-hands soul-searching to understand the "why". Our group and individual integrity is, at the end of the day, the only thing we really have.
I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty word. I introduce myself as a professional sea kayak instructor and guide with a side hustle as a founding software engineer. My colleague introduces himself as a sea kayak instructor and guide with a side hustle as a high school math teacher and director of the school district's drama program. Autobiography is a skill we should all practice; how you write and speak about yourself translates quickly into who you will become.