I appreciated finally having a seat at the table in regard to project decisions and team direction. I got to introduce a lot of ideas I had to improve developer experience and really went to bat for my team addressing the gripes I knew they had.
What I didn't like? Finding out "how the sausage was made." I found out very quickly that decisions weren't made on real metrics like we were always told. Everything was literally just "X screamed the loudest this week and I need to impress them for my next promotion so this is now a priority." In more than a few meetings I found out that a lot of the non-technical managers just looked at the dev team as an assembly line of labor to be pushed to the breaking point just so they could pretend the needle was moving (which often led to a lot of shoddy code that was just made to 'get it working now').
I made it a point to still be a hands on developer by taking non-critical path items on our projects... but even then I eventually had to step back for a while as I discovered in some orgs, any empty space on your calendar will be filled with another inane meeting where nothing is actually discussed or solved.
Going back to being a senior developer in a new org in a few weeks and looking forward to it. I am leaving my team in a good place, got a lot of farewell messages thanking me for always going to the mat for the team and showing them my appreciation even when upper management wanted me to chop heads off. I knew how hard they were working, the long hours they were putting in, and how exhausted they were.
I like leading and mentoring, but I will never ascribe to the school of dictatorial / machismo fear-based leadership. A good leader is a servant that reduces friction and clears the way. A good leader has empathy and compassion. My management above me wanted to beat that out of me and it left me burned out and exhausted. Don't sell your soul to the company... remember your team is made up of people.
I actually moved over to Linode because of similar anomalies. I had a container I was running my personal site from. Paid my bill on time every month. Got distracted with work and hadn't updated it in a while. One day I go to check on it and the site is down. Head to DO to restart it... and it is just gone. Like it never existed. Didn't even bother trying to communicate with them I was so angry. Been really happy with Linode.
I'm pretty happy with Linode after migrating from DO as well. Their billing seems a bit more on top of things, noticing situations where they owed me a small credit that I would have likely missed. I've been a customer since before the Akamai days and feel that their service has only improved when I expected disruption (as one does when companies merge).
I mean, yeah, if you don't pay your bill you should fully expect them to stop providing the service which was being paid for (which includes the storage of the associated data).
I would say it depends on how long the bill is not payed. I wouldn't expect them to remove everything when a payment is late for a month, for example. But if not payed for more than 6 months, then it is understandable.
My first paying client when I was 19 (so around 1998?) commissioned a local high school graphic design student to hand paint this crazy village scene with stores. She then had it professionally scanned and gave me the files... which I then used to create an image map for each of her little "store fronts". She couldn't accept payments online (they didn't teach me that in my community college HTML course), still had to print out an order form and send in a check. I will never forget the horrid repeated plaid background she made me use.
Getting away from time wasting things like mindlessly scrolling Reddit. I realized about a month ago it has slowly grown into an addiction... nothing to do? Pull out the phone and scroll.
Now I'm limiting myself to consuming content differently. Checking HN once or twice a day. Using RSS to subscribe to blogs I find interesting instead of having my content fed to me. With the time I'm getting back, I'm putting a lot more energy back into personal learning and finishing my MSCS.
Also fell of the "staying fit" wagon near the end of the year so I plan on getting back to the gym and getting outside more.
if you happen to use NextDNS or an equivalent, i added reddit to my list of blocked domains so if there is something i want to read on there it has to be worth disabling my ad block temporarily.
I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that the average Chinese student isn’t a daily victim of insane “culture war” political BS and actually are encouraged to learn. I’m aware this is more complex, but to me it seems like lately certain political entities are ok with dumbing down our education systems.
Maybe make a list of fields or areas that interest you... and then see if anyone in your social network or friends group are in those fields? Buy them a cup of coffee or a beer and pick their brains. See what the like or don't like about it, how they got started, what they would do different, etc.
Unfortunately most of my friends were in a worse position than me prior to the layoffs. Most are more educated than me, but work menial office jobs that don’t pay well.
I remember talking to someone working in insurance claims processing, offering that their company was hiring, but apparently you need a degree to do that.
It makes sense. It is an array. When you remove the first element, all elements in the array have to shift to their new indices "left" (one less than their previous index). When you unshift, all elements must move their indices up by 1, to the "right". In theory it is staying at the same memory address (unless unshifting causes the array to double in size to account for further growth... then it will be given a new memory address).
