hawgietonight

Myth: code can be ugly as long as it works, don't spend company time on making it look good or on minor optimizations.

The truth is that you can tell when effort has been put into a job. Even if it just works, the lack of discipline means that in the end it will be difficult to maintain and probably will fail in unexpected situations.

Every language has its conventions, but if I spot more than a line of separation between blocks of code, that is a common telltale sign of noob. Run from that shit.

Quite bad. This was over 10 years ago so the details are muddy... It was on BQ hardware and the first weeks it couldn't even work outside on GSM or 3G (or whatever was at the time). It was clearly developed and tested solely on Wifi. Using cellular connection make it fall apart and constantly hang.

Then it never was able to get WhatsApp working. Everyone uses WhatsApp, and had to get by using old SMS or whoever I got to trick to install the then unknown Telegram.

Eventually got tired and got back to an Android phone. An Alcatel if I recall correctly.

After some time, BQ offered a way to revert the hardware back to its Android version, did that and had a backup for many years.

It was a very messy and buggy launch, but being on the bleeding edge, it's expected. If they had offered a WhatsApp app I would have hung on way longer, it was the only deal breaker.

I used an Ubuntu Phone as my daily for about 6 months.

Be careful, you may have it good now. For the next generation, they will make them pay a subscription to the police and firefighters service.

I only use 2 PCs with windows. An old laptop with XP I use for vehicle diagnostics and repair manuals, and a Win10 laptop my employer lent me for work. Option number 1 for both.

Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.

The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it's spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.

The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.

A 19" monitor was quite big for the day, and expensive! I hope your gf didn't beat you up too much for that :)

Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most "funny" fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.

The monitor didn't die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.

I get it, it makes you feel that you have the control on whatever is happening and certainly feels cool to successively heel-and-toe and rev match. But a gearbox (man or auto) has always been a mechanical band-aid for a motor system with a narrow torque band. On electric motors this isn't necessary and adding simulated shifting is just adding a layer of complexity for no real reason.

Of course I'm speaking of theory and mechanics, people have their own idea of what's best sometimes don't follow logic, and that's fine!

Being fluent in English and native Spanish, my first choice would be Chinese, because it opens your reach to another half of the world. But a language I would really like to learn is Japanese.

It isn't as chaotic as it looks. Going in the pit everybody is prepared and shouldn't be any problem. Going out there is a mechanic that signals when it's clear.

Sometimes there are screw ups, of course. Some bad and others quite funny, like when the driver stopped at his old team by mistake!