You would certainly be in the minority, Apple profits alone state that people are more then willing to pay an excessively large sum of money for products and then buy $1000 stands.
I'm in the same situation as you (or was, until about a week ago). I'd been looking for a new contract for a couple of months and also had lots of enthusiastic calls with recruiters, only to be ghosted or hear nothing more. A couple of my contractor friends have also had the same experience. Compare to late last year, when I was batting contracts away whilst I was taking a couple of months off. Picked up a new contract when I was ready within a few days in November.
Whilst I'm a full stack dev, I found narrowing my CV, or creating multiple versions (one FE, one BE, one devops) helped sustain more interest/got me through more doors. Being a full stack dev puts you behind anyone that pitches themselves as a BE dev for BE roles, FE dev for FE roles, and so on. It's assumed that since they're 'specialised', they're better suited for the role.
Same goes for tech. Whilst everyone _here_ will appreciate the fact knowing/working/having experience in multiple languages will generally mean your the better programmer, it's not something HR seems to grok.
In short: If there's a Go contract, send a version of your CV that pitches you as a BE Go Dev and that only. Once you're through the door and speaking to the people that matter, you can open up about your other experience.
As for timing, generally now is a good time. Some companies will have budget to use before the end of the tax year. Some companies will have new budgets at the start of the next tax year.
There have been a lot of layoffs, so the market isn't quite as much in the favour of developers at the moment.
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Anyhow, that said, I've just taken a perm role again, just for another year or so whilst I learn some new tech and hopefully the contract market sorts itself out. It's only about £1k/month less. Worth it for the security, for now.
What sucks is that they've gone back and added so much of this junk to older games too. Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys through increasingly difficult levels. The last time I opened one of those games I hardly recognized them.
What's particularly galling is that many of those games had a reasonable up-front cost with an unwritten agreement you were buying a complete product, then as time and updates have gone by, they've totally junked the original product you paid your money for. I'm basically done with anything on mobile that has IAP or potentially might at a future date.
> Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys...
And in the case of the original Angry Birds, Rovio even removed it from the app stores (and renamed it for past purchases to "Red's First Flight") because of the "game's impact" on their portfolio and business model.
I don't play a lot of games, probably so few that even spending on this is a "waste", but this is why I subscribe to Apple Arcade. IAPs and upsells are completely banned and each game in that separate market is included. (I would even consider paying a bit extra to get games through there, treating Apple Arcade like a Costco membership.)
There are some games in there, like the Star Trek one, that are clearly IAP-infested outside of Apple Arcade. You can see the inflection points and the spots where you'd be prompted to "buy" more "transporter power" or whatever. But like watching an American TV show on British TV, where the action fades to black (for a commercial) then comes right back, these are both jarring and interesting. The game would be perfectly playable, and arguably more interesting, without these points but the developers wouldn't be able to hook their whales so they exist elsewhere.
When browsing a listing in the App Store, I always used to jump immediately to the in-app purchases section and pattern-match for two things: “1 month, 3 months, 1 year…” in the case of apps, or “10 gems, 50 gems, 150 gems…” in the case of games. Either would be an instant disqualification.
I say “used to” as I gave up browsing the App Store.
I've barely touched the App Store in the past few years while I used to peruse it regularly. Now instead of browsing for top selling games like I used to, I'm back to using a search engine or reading reddit threads for suggestions.
App stores are too polluted with garbage now, they went from being a unique selling point of mobile platforms to entirely useless and I think IAPs are largely to blame.
I can't help but think I'd buy 10x as many games on mobile if there was a way to filter out all in-app purchases (other than pay once: add-free forever no more asks to buy)
This is why I love Apple Arcade. No ads, no in app purchases, and plenty of classic and big name games too. They aren’t all good, but there’s plenty there to make it worth it.
The best game I've seen for this is WazHack. It is free to download and play, but only to a certain depth. From there, if you want to go further, you pay for whatever type of character you want to use. If you only want to use one type of character, like barbarian, it costs 1$x. If you want to play all 8, it's 8$x.
Straight forward, you can play it to see if you like it, you can play the different characters to see if they match your play style. No other purchases needed.
Love the story. My first exposure to programming was through automating RSC. All I was doing though was writing scripts for SCAR. I think maybe in… pascal?
I remember trying to learn some Java at the time, but could never make the leap between building simple CLI app’s and primitive string manipulation to integrating with the RS client and actually doing something ‘useful’. However, I was only 8, so I’ll cut myself some slack!
Nextcloud being slow as a dog hasn’t helped my opinion. Most fast php sites seem to achieve speed mostly by aggressive caching to serve static content outside of php or having a setup that supports adding infinite servers to scale up.
1. It's great. I'm not sure I've ever heard the fans spin up. I've had very occasional glitches with sound when switching workspaces.
2. The only thing that's been a blocker for me is trying to run an old Terraform release and the lack of some arm64 docker images (in which case I have to target amd64).
3. See #2. In addition, I did experience some poor performance when mounting volumes from my local filesystem, but that has been _vastly_ improved since they added "VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing". Now it's great.
4. I only have 16GB of RAM. My workloads are typically not that heavy, but I have edited a couple of videos in DaVinci Resolve and didn't have any issues. Sounds like it would make sense for you to go for 32GB though.
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
I think they’re saying only backing up _data_ is not enough (S3, GCS). You need to be able to roll out infrastructure elsewhere to, in order to have somewhere to restore said data.
They will most likely be rendering the page in full server-side. This is how things were done in the beginning, but also what a lot of websites are returning to, for performance reasons.
Gotcha, I think that makes sense! Just to make sure I understand -- on server-side, they're pulling in all relevant information from their own database and whatever 3rd parties are needed (maybe for injury reports, etc.). The server then generates an HTML page that it sends as-is to the client, which just faithfully renders the code? Thanks for the answer!
