Ads make nice things crappy. Not just because of the ads and spying that comes along with them, but also because when a product or service is ad-driven, then it becomes optimized to increase ad revenue rather than being a good product.
Honestly, I've long been wondering the same thing. I haven't written much boilerplate code in decades, and am curious as to why others seem to write so much of it.
Just a reminder, "Obamacare" isn't the name of that program. It's the "Affordable Care Act". His administration didn't name it after him in any way. "Obamacare" is just a term the media invented.
> "assume every system on earth can/will be breached"
This.
I've spent years working in network security and one of the core principles is "if a thing can be accessed legitimately, it can be accessed illegitimately". Perfect security is an unachievable ideal. What you can affect, though, is how much time and effort it will take to breach you. What you're practically shooting for is to make the cost higher than the value an attacker would get from breaching you.
Just from the devs I've known personally (so hardly representative of the whole dev population), there appears to be a bit of a correlation with people not having degrees being more likely to be happy with their line of work.
This is entirely speculation, but I think it may be because people without degrees are more likely to have chosen the field because they love doing it, and people with degrees are more likely to have chosen the field because it pays well.
I think the opposite would be just as likely, though.
During the mid-2000s ZIRP, the tech industry was flush with cash and hurling high six-figure salaries at anyone who could use a flexbox in CSS.
With the promise of all this money and high demand came a massive proliferation of coding bootcamps promising to land you one of these lucrative jobs.
That drew in lots of people with zero genuine interest in computer science.
Anecdotally, everyone in my graduating class majoring in compsci seemed to love the field, but this was back when software dev positions were a lot closer in salary to regular engineering (electrical and mechanical).
I avoid software that I know to be problematic. Also, I firewall off all outgoing network traffic by default, and whitelist very sparingly.
For my smartphone, I run a bare minimum of apps and refuse to install new ones without an extremely good reason. I also pipe all smartphone data through a VPN I run at home, specifically so that I can run it through my firewall and make the block-by-default policy I mentioned above cover the phone as well.
> I avoid software that I know to be problematic. Also, I firewall off all outgoing network traffic by default, and whitelist very sparingly.
how do you stay informed about what software is problematic? what are examples of addresses you whitelist? if you feel comfortable sharing.
> For my smartphone, I run a bare minimum of apps and refuse to install new ones without an extremely good reason. I also pipe all smartphone data through a VPN I run at home, specifically so that I can run it through my firewall and make the block-by-default policy I mentioned above cover the phone as well.
what would be an example of "an extremely good reason"? what VPN solution do you have?
> how do you stay informed about what software is problematic?
It's a loose heuristic. Primarily, I base it on word-of-mouth, whether or not the publisher/dev is known to have used tracking/telemetry in their other products, whether it contains ads, whether it in some way requires an external server, that sort of thing.
> what would be an example of "an extremely good reason"?
The last time, it was to install an authenticator app that I needed in order to authenticate for my work accounts.
This is simply not true.
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