I've had to write regex for deeply proprietary SQL-like (the word "like" is a big BIG stretch) language. This really is nothing. The regex itself was 4 pages long. AFAIK they still use it in production, almost 10 years later with 0 modifications.
That agile-let's-hold-hands-together-and-sing type of development is total and utter crap which doesn't improve the workflow in any way and simply acts as a shield from the management for everyone that loves to slack about and is scared of taking even minor decisions.
I couldn't agree more with all of those, despite the fact that 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 are incredibly frustrating and depressing. 10 is also bumming me out to a certain degree...
Exact thing happened to me one or two days ago. I was driving home and on a small street near my apartment a crow flew out of the bushes and dropped something right in front of the car and then it landed on the other side of the street. When I looked back in the mirror, the crow had gone back to collect what looked like a walnut.
On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...
Talking from a developer's point of view, I've thought about this for a while and I think it has something to do with what I refer to as "anti-imposter syndrome" - the notion that anyone can make software. You see, over the past 10 years or so, self-proclaimed "educational" services/websites/institutions have been shoving down everyone's throat the idea that anyone will be able to create the next FAANG from scratch after just 3 months of training. Which is the same as claiming that I can become an F1 driver in 3 months. Where do I sign up?!?!?! The thing is, F1 results are a lot more visible since you have a point of reference - the top dogs. Chances of scoring a fastest lap or coming even close to them - little to none. Software - not so much - you have a shiny interface and what it does underneath is always a mystery to the end user. And people who have gone through those magical 3 months of training are often lead to believe that the way they are doing things is what everyone is doing and that is how it should be done. Often people who have signed up for those courses are people who have just a smudge above average technical knowledge - they have no idea how OS'es work, what should be considered safe or even why. Don't hate me for saying it, but essentially Windows users. And this is the software they end up building and distributing. 10 years down the line, thousands have picked up random scraps of knowledge from here and there and tried to mash something together. Don't get me wrong, I think technologies like Docker are astonishing and an incredible tools in the hands of people with knowledge and experience. However way too many people have picked up some scraps from there and created the unholy mess the author is talking about.
While I do agree that this space needs competition, I can't see a scenario in which this can happen. The combined user base of all the facebook apps is a considerable percentage of the world's population. Take out people with no access to internet or living in dictatorship or dictatorship-like regimes and you get probably north of 90% of all internet users. I know people in their 70's and 80's using facebook at this point. And while some countries are more skeptical about it, my country has fully embraced it. To the point where "having a website" is a synonym of "having a facebook page". In reality almost all businesses use facebook exclusively(which is a huge problem for people like me who have blocked all facebook services from my network but that's my problem). The only way a competitor could come into existence at this point the way I see it is a complete collapse of facebook as a company(as in bankruptcy). No one will ditch something that is essential to their existence for something that will only drag them down. Look at G+: IMO as a product the execution was absolutely flawless. Yet it's no more.
Native Bulgarian here. Better candidate: yes. Good candidate: no. Yes, it is considerably simpler but it is also vastly different from the larger Slavic languages: I have friends from other Slavic countries and I've observed that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians for instance have far less difficulties understanding each other than understanding me. I would assume it's the same story with Russian but I have almost 0 interaction with Russians. And even for me, it took me days in Poland to start picking up on words, phrases and sentences. Then again I can understand over 70% of Serbo-Croatian without even trying but again, those make up for a very small number of the total Slavic population.
Truth be told I have 5 or 6 raspberries. In all seriousness I think I'm actively using 3:
* A rpi zero running several scripts(hooked to slack, telegram and a private mattermost server) to monitor the health of some production services at work from home(in case the network at work goes down and all the services there fail to notify the right people). Has never happened but having it makes sleep at night a tad better.
* Rpi 3 b for some throwaway code/testing/place to store stuff at home and using it as an access server to access my home network.
* Rpi 2 b pretty much glued to my parents' router so I can access the network at their place every time there's one of those "My computer is telling me something, what do I do?". I'm sure most of you are aware that those messages are surely gonna cause the end of the universe and need to be resolved as soon as possible and could not possibly wait 2 hours.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯