eludwig

To be fair, the earliest text adventures are brutally, brutally difficult and in many cases, very much unfair! There are nowhere near enough in-game indicators or foreshadowing of what might work in a certain context. Some solutions are obvious, but others are truly ridiculous and won’t realistically be solved without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book. All imo, of course.

Back in the 80’s we used to play these games in a group, with one person driving and a group of others helping out. Even then we used to fall back on hints occasionally.

> An alternative could be a good 5K/6K monitor with a KVM, but this is a unicorn as well...

I use a Dell U3224KB (32" 6K) in this way. Thunderbolt (usbc) is connected to a Macbook Pro and DP & regular usb c is connected to Windows gaming machine. Works perfectly. And yes, the U3224KB is pretty ugly, but I've grown to love it's features.

Closer to a nibble!

This is great! Back in the 60s & 70s, before the digitization of all life on earth, there were a huge number of very ornamental, very hard-to-read fonts that were sold, generally, on sheets of Letraset press-on type (at least for those of us too poor to have our own Linotype machines)

This is very much like that, but turned up to 11. Very slick presentation and a nice, simple website as well. Nice work!

p.s I realize that there are a ton of hard-to-read digital fonts available as well, but I grew up in the pre-"desktop publishing" times for better or worse

Hehe, being a Java dev since the late 90’s meant seeing a lot of bad code. My favorite was when I was working for a large life insurance company.

The company’s customer-facing website was servlet based. The main servlet was performing horribly, time outs, spinners, errors etc. Our team looked at the code and found that the original team implementing the logic had a problem they couldn’t figure out how to solve, so they decided to apply the big hammer: they synchronized the doService() method… oh dear…

Mainly remote, even though I am about a mile from the office lol. They fully bought into the remote first idea. We have team get togethers generally about once a month. Very nice to spend time with the team, but I prefer my home office with my own stuff for daily work.

Actually in Los Angeles, but they have offices all over the world. The home office is in Tokyo.

Usually one at a time, but sometimes they combine. Also, parts of the same task can be one or the other, so you may have to switch from fun (coding something new) to boring/annoying (writing unit tests) in a single day.

It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do.

At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.

I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.

Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.

>> lifelong mix of sarcasm with sincerity, skepticism with optimism

Love this, perfectly said. Or, in the words of Don Martin, Thook Zak Splak KWOP!

Lovely excerpt that gives a good general overview of Mad history and highlights!

I was an avid reader as a child in the late 60s to early 70s. I eventually moved on to National Lampoon as a teen, but Mad will always glow in my childhood memory heart.

I still have a decent-sized collection of Mad paperbacks. Many (most, all?) were written by a single Mad artist/writer. My favorites of these were ones written by Don Martin and Al Jaffee.

I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.

Sorry to pile on to the doom and gloom around this, but I have been at a bunch of companies that tried this and have never seen it work out well.

The problem is that building generalized, actually-in-the-real-world reusable UI components is really, really hard! Generalizing other people's use cases is very tricky without walking in their shoes.

Usually what happens is that a glorious, well-intentioned group within the company puts together a few very short-sighted, yet kind-of-good-looking components for a very specific use case and management sees it and says: "hey, why can't we use this in other projects?" The answer, of course, is that they weren't meant for that! They don't handle about 100 different things that would allow for expanded use in the company. One would need a dedicated team to make it so, which management really doesn't want to pay for.

Trust me, it only gets worse from there...

My advice is to build domain-specific LOB components for your business area and use a real 3rd-party solution for the underlying GUI lib. This actually has a chance of working out. Even doing this is way harder than it sounds lol.