Cymen

That is me right here... Plus I have some younger kids who have had fun playing with old Nintendo DSes for now. But their friends often have the Switch and I want the updated graphics plus group play (Mario Kart) so we'll buy at least one of these when it comes out. I've been holding off because the original hardware just seemed a bit wimpy when reading the experiences of people playing Breath of the Wild on it. I'm hoping the new model will have enough power to do full justice to BotW.

If you deposit checks, make sure SVB doesn't make it too much of a hassle. I don't know why but a prior employer banks at SVB and they have a real hard time getting my COBRA checks deposited. Sometimes, I'll have 4-5 months of COBRA checks deposited at once. I have a business account with plain old Chase and as long as the funds are in USD, I can deposit via a mobile app. Nobody really wants to deal with checks of course but if you do have to...

If my 61 year old dad asked me how to get into programming, I'd recommend they go to a company that was involved in the Software Craftsmanship model that had a long apprenticeship period. I'd recommend this because I've had prior experience working in such a company (8th Light -- Chicago office) and I think that such an environment would set them up for success because while the learning is very self-directed, there is a lot of oversight and involvement in a constructive way by other developers who want to see the apprentice succeed. That isn't to say you couldn't find the same thing at another company but the Software Craftsmanship approach, if done well, would not be as random as the ad hoc experience you might get on the job at another company. A further benefit of working at a consulting company like 8th Light as, if you progress past the apprenticeship, you would be working on a variety of projects in an environment that is focused on doing the job well so the exposure would be a to a wider breadth of the industry (more languages/stacks/team dynamics/etc).

I think Ubuntu server is a fine choice for your needs. I tend to use it on small VPSes as it's easy to setup and get running, relatively up to date and in wide usage.

But how do you translate that into (short term) OKRs and work that engineers can build a career upon as an achievement (for promotion)? I think there is a cultural mismatch between how engineers grow and what they work on at Google versus the quality of the search results. There seems to be very limit upside and huge potential downside to working on this at Google.

That said, I don't work for Google and my conjecture is based on the hand wavy details (from engineers that do/have) posted online.

So here is how it works: The program runs on each computer. You plug your USB devices (presumably, a keyboard and a mouse) into a USB switch and then plug that into each computer. Then you plug each computer into each monitor (so you're limited by the minimum total number of inputs on the monitor(s) for how many computers you can switch).

When you press the button on the USB switch to go to another PC, the software detects this and sends data commands over the monitor connection (using DDC standard) to trigger the monitors to switch inputs. You can use this same data communications standard to do things like adjust the brightness of your display. For example, I have these setup on my Mac to adjust the brightness of my two attached displays (complexity increased with multiple displays and desire for each to change at same time, simpler commands with a single display):

alias day="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 80' sh" alias evening="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 32' sh" alias night="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 10' sh"

Does that make sense? As mentioned earlier, you're limited by the minimum number of inputs on the monitor(s) and/or the minimum number of computers the USB switch can be connected to. The simplicity of this system is that the display connections do not go through any switching layer and are instead directly connected to the computers (which avoids a number of compatibility issues).

I should be clear that I haven't used this yet but I'm going to try it. The Acer monitors I'm using have two HDMI ports and 1 DisplayPort so I can in practice attach 3 computers assuming I buy a USB switch which can connect to 3 or more computers.

I experienced dilution as a former employee of a startup. Teespring did a 13:1 down round a year or so after I left (2015?). If you weren't an accredited investor that could afford to invest in the round, you had 1/13 of your original shares after the round finished. I experienced both being pushed into AMT when exercising the options (they didn't offer early exercise) along with having 1/13 of my shares later on. No idea if I'll ever see any money out of the deal so I've chalked it up being a lesson learned -- many say to value stock options as $0 but they can have negative value.

It does depend on what you mean by CPUs but the Ryzen G 5000 series are able to play video games at 720p (sometimes 1080p) with the graphics integrated on the CPU.

One option is to do some contract work either direct if you have the connections or through an agency. I've been working through Facet at facet.net for a couple of years and I've found them reputable, they put their fee on top of the rate you set and are transparent about that to the clients, you pick what to work on, etc. I'm sure you could find direct employment (there are monthly "who is hiring" and "who is looking" threads here for starters) but if you want to get your feet back in more gradually, contracting is nice in many ways.

I am in agreement however I suspect many developers have never seen the usage of "git bisect" to track down a bug and fix it. Once you see the power of that, I think one can come to appreciate more the granular git history that is present when not using squash commits.

Of course, git bisect still works with squash commits it just makes your job as the bug fixer much harder because typically squashed commits are quite large so you have to figure out what in the N lines of code introduced the defect.

This is my experience too. I was audited and they do send you a "shock" letter or at least they did in my case claiming I owed roughly $15,000 USD. After fixing my mistakes (and submitting an updated filing), they sent me a check for a bit more than $1,500 USD. Plus I learned about my mistakes so it was a win-win (as I learned with just enough time to not repeat the same mistake for the next year's taxes).

I had an A+ experience being audited after my initial shock. They even have a secure message system where you can communicate via a website with the IRS including uploading files instead of having to mail letters back and forth. Definitely some clunkiness but overall it was solid and worked.

Not sure I'd recommend the experience but I definitely found it nothing to fear. I also found I didn't need professional assistance with being audited (I did seek it out but due to the time of year being so close to the next year's tax due date, I couldn't find someone right then so I decided to try fixing it myself).

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Maybe we (myself and the other contractors involved) have been unlucky but we haven't been able to get anything done the lawyer route. I'm happy to try again but I've realized which lawyer is important and would love a referral if you have one (my email is in my profile).