In a way, this post gives me the same feeling I had when I read the story of Terry Davis, author of Temple OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis), and his gradual slide into homelessness.
OP: I've been homeless before, I don't really care if post is truth or a lie, a scam or a sincere cry for help. Desperation takes many forms and I'd like to help either way.
A $5,000 pledge would unfortunately be a terrible financial decision at a time where I'm saving for a house, but I won't hurt purchasing the yearly newsletter subscription for $50. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, especially if it helps you get on your feet. Send a payment link to shane at my username dot com.
My ADHD was diagnosed last year, around the age of 30. I started medication in January and I've been able to turn my life around - I no longer have that awful feeling that my next crisis is constantly flying towards me, just waiting to happen.
I was open and honest in my interview with my current company about my ADHD, and that I didn't need any form of special treatment (with the exception of a keyed locker to keep my medication in - it's a controlled substance in the UK). Everyone was understanding about it, and I have a lot of support on offer from them, but ironically I no longer seem to need it, my medication has completely removed my symptoms.
Large companies these days want to appear welcoming and care about things like diversity. We have a disability, and it's important we see it that way. Without my medication, I struggle to integrate with society, I struggle to focus on tasks (or obsess over them to an unhealthy degree).
There's also a lot to be said for hiring developers with ADHD who are being treated: We spent decades learning behaviors to allow us to focus on tasks, once we're being treated, the issues goes away but the behaviors remain. It can be a superpower sometimes.
I spent my life wondering how people focus on work for 9 hours a day: It turns out that they don't, but decades of trying to emulate that combined with "performing enhancing" medication means that we _can_.
A little bit different to software, but the big kicker for me was a standing desk.
When I'm on calls I compulsively wander around the apartment with my wireless headphones on, I can't stand still. If I'm in a call for 4 hours, I will be walking constantly for 4 hours (often covering 20km in small circles in my apartment).
I got a powered sit/stand desk with presets so I can press a single button to have it raise up or lower down, and it's made me a lot more present at my desk during discussions, because I can sort of fiddle about on my feet while still being in front of my screens.
Strongly considering adding a flat, miniature, quiet walking machine underneath my desk for this stuff, if I can find one which meets my specs.
I've just been emotionally effected by this work at a deep, almost uncomfortable level.
I've worked as a mental health support worker, and this short story poked at some of the darker parts of the field: the dream of people getting "better" and wanting to "fix" them, the subtle (and not so subtle) jokes made out of their failings, having to deal with the basic human urges they don't fully understand, subjects consenting to treatment they don't have the capacity to understand, etc.
In myself, I see my own inevitable cycle of depression and elation. I'm disabled not mentally, but emotionally. I could be happier than anyone, but in the end some part of me is always dragged back into anguish. Charlie was a genius, but in his infantile state it's brought him nothing but pain.
The saddest part of all of this is that even when Charlie became smart enough to understand the world around him, he spent so little time in the relatable range of intelligence that the people he cared about struggled to communicate with him. They didn't understand, they were worried. Charlie never truly had a friend. Ms Kinnian cared for him, but they spent so little time able to meaningfully interact that friendship didn't have the chance to properly form.
I'm going to go and pet my dog, I think, until this reaction passes.
This is run by BunnyCDN, I've been one of their smaller users for a few years now (live video hosting and delivery, mostly .m3u8, mpegts, HTTP Live Streaming type of stuff) and I've always found their service reliable and cheap. One of the primary reasons I liked them was that their API is REALLY fast at making changes to the files (you make the call and 100ms later the file attributes / content have been updated throughout all their delivery locations) and the interface is pretty easy to use.
This isn't an advertisement, I had a very specific use-case, but it follows into this:
Of course, just like with Google, we are the product here. Google Fonts is an analytics data collection platform, Bunny Fonts is an advertisement for their CDN services.
I'm going to stick with a /fonts/ directory, I think, despite being one of their current users. It's really not very much bandwidth for the fonts, it's not 2010 anymore, and I prefer the control (and the local development environment being the same, I don't always have internet and I don't want a dev toggle for something as silly as fonts).
Gosh, you weren't kidding. Even ignoring the painful contrast and small text, the background characters not being regular (lined-up) is setting off my ADHD something awful, I keep getting distracted, couldn't make it through the first paragraph.
Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't.
From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact
They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.
By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.
Generally I prefer a mid-saturation blue-tinted grey in the #111111 horizontal line for my base text colours, which is basically indistinguishable from black but works better with the other hues on our website.
That being said, it's easy using the prefers-contrast CSS property to override that to #000000 for people who are hard of sight.
It's supported by edge, safari, chrome, opera but it's a bit finnicky in Firefox.
OP: I've been homeless before, I don't really care if post is truth or a lie, a scam or a sincere cry for help. Desperation takes many forms and I'd like to help either way.
A $5,000 pledge would unfortunately be a terrible financial decision at a time where I'm saving for a house, but I won't hurt purchasing the yearly newsletter subscription for $50. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, especially if it helps you get on your feet. Send a payment link to shane at my username dot com.