drderidder

Including your future self.

An oldie but a goodie. The site has been around since 2011. What’s great about this site is the general idea that you don’t necessarily need a framework (ie React) for everything.

“Never rewrite” is a popular cargo-cult that sprang from a well known blog article that made the rounds some years ago. The urge to rewrite can be a naive impulse for sure, but there are LOTS of cases where new and better technology can result in tremendous gains, or where a code base is simply too far gone to redeem. The biggest successes of my career have almost all been ground up rewrites of existing products using new technology or techniques that resulted in orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and ROI. If you can make incremental improvements that’s great, but sometimes it’s just not possible to rewrite “a piece at a time” because there are no pieces, just one big ball of mud. To the original author: If you don’t rewrite this mess, your competitors will. I’d say: lay out the case for an overhaul, stand your ground, don’t implement any new features until you’ve got a clear path to reducing technical debt, and if you can’t get buy-in to an overhaul just leave. What you’re describing sounds like a textbook scenario for burnout and there are lots of other opportunities where you can work on things in ways that you’ll actually enjoy.

Sorry, but it’s not out of date. Based on very recent extensive travel and living there. But yes of course there are additional places to get cash (yubinkyoku etc) and various rail passes. The JR pass really is a nobrainer though.

Basically no. But if your company has a Japanese branch and is willing to transfer you there, then maybe. But be aware that visiting Japan as a tourist vs living and working there are very different experiences, and plenty of expats burn out within a year. Visit first, maybe do the digital nomad thing for a bit.

SevenEleven ATMs generally take foreign interac debit cards if you need cash (yen). Most places accept credit cards. When given the option on the debit card machine to pay in yen or convert to USD / CAD etc always choose yen, to avoid high conversion rates charged by the processor. Allow your credit card company to convert to your home currency at a much better rate. Get a Japan Rail pass. Pack lightly and hit a Uniqlo on arrival. Call hotels to book rather than using western-based online booking platforms whose prices are a lot higher, or use Jalan.net. Remember you’re a guest in a foreign country, stay humble and be polite, it’ll get you further. Seriously, get a Japan rail pass. Get an esim for your phone upon arrival using an app like Ubigi or similar (1 month with 10gb for ~$20). Be prepared for reverse culture shock when you return home.

Of course. Foreign keys are elementary. Try recursive CTEs. You can get ridiculous performance gains by not having to marshal data into the application space. It’s all about using the right tool for the job. If you’ve done solid system-level design then running migrations probably shouldn’t be the primary driver of your schema.

This may not be a popular comment, but if you have to ask, then no. In Canada at least, engineering is a regulated profession. No one can legally call themselves an engineer without a four-year Bachelor of Engineering degree from an accredited University and membership in the professional engineering body of the Province in which they practice. Doctors and lawyers are other regulated professions; one cannot simply call themselves a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

Excellent post, if only for the fact that its a great way to share "what works for me" at a time when most of our local JS/Web meetup groups have been put on hold due to the pandemic, or gone onto Twitch / Zoom, so its harder to have those casual "I'm really loving such-and-such" conversations now. Thanks for sharing. FWIW I also like the general keep-it-simple / YAGNI approach. I switched from TypeScript to straight up JSDoc and with the right IDE setup it works beautifully.

Nobody seems to be talking much about favipiravir, which seems a bit like not-invented-here syndrome. If it stood to make a lot of money for some US big pharma company I suspect we'd be hearing more about it.

New motto: "Don't get caught being evil".

It matters a bunch. All kinds of noise can get picked up over cables and bleed into your audio path on a digital rig. It happens all the time just with power cables which is why every musician carries a handful of "ground lifts" even though they're technically illegal in a lot of places. That said, MIDI over USB is kind of necessary in this day and age. Hopefully instrument manufacturers will be rigorous about isolating any interference it could pick up.

Lack of soil accumulation does not mean the soil evaporates into thin air; it is taken up by the watershed and redistributed downstream. The same carbon cycle is in effect; accumulation in any particular terrain has really nothing to do with it.