lastangryman

> Meta-meta-comment, but "horrible" is your value judgement, which isn't shared by everybod

> I do feel Rakuten's website is "horrible"

Sorry to hear you're in that situation. Having been responsible for hiring at a few places I would stress to keep yourself busy and your tech skills active. If you have a big gap with no explanation or activity it's hard to justify bringing you in for interview. Find things to do, and put it on your CV but in a way that shows this is part of a work gap and you're looking for FTE.

You could contribute to open source. This can take a few forms. A few small PRs on well known projects can go a long way. Many projects are looking for docs and better test coverage, these can be easy ways in.

You can make something on your own and open source it. I'd suggest something small but complete with some sort of interesting novelty to it. Make sure any projects have interesting READMEs. Don't just follow a TODO list tutorial in language X and stick it up GitHub.

You could volunteer your tech skills somewhere. Even contacting charities and seeing if they need help with anything.

You could try write a blog, but with a specific focus on an area that interests you. I was out of work for a while and planned to do this for horizontal database scaling for example.

Any of these things look infinitely better to a potential employer than a blank space.

Finally, it's really important to own the narrative. Put on your CV you've been out of work but looking for a new opportunity. List the things you've been doing. Maybe there's a framing you can put on it, like a career break. Don't be ashamed by it, stay positive. Good luck.

> Say “please” and “thank you” a lot.

I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old.

> "Can you run the SQL update in prod?"

Vs

> "Can you run the SQL update in prod please?"

The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is fed up giving the instruction.

I'm also starting to get really sick of emojis everywhere. I don't think they added to this article at all. I hope it's just a temporary fad we are going through and this isn't the future of written communication.

100%. That's the first thing I want to see after a brief intro.

Amazing. I would absolutely love to sit down with the Secretary of State and test their knowledge of what does of does not consist of of computer.

This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing?

Buy from a book shop.

Full disclosure didn't even read the article. But if you wanted to know what programming as a game would look like, play Factorio. Refactoring, decoupling, debugging, it's all there. I played it intensely for 3 weeks then had to force myself to put it down. It's a one of a kind game.

> Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. They don't want spam games to be pumped. There's already enough indie trash platformers that nobody wants.

I find this hard to agree with. A game engine is a "shortcut" too, I can imagine people saying at some point anything developed with Unity would "tend to be shit games".

Associating quality with visual fidelity anyway is wrong, look at Terraria, I'm pretty sure anyone semi competent with AI generation could produce better assets, but it wouldn't help them produce a better game.

People will use gen AI art in good games, and people will use gen AI art in terrible games.

I chuckled at:

> NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites...For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles …

`if str_contains(body, "Sorry, I cannot")` thanks NewsGuard, you've solved the problem pats NewsGuard on head while giving them an encouraging smile

I find it extremely upsetting that `networkQuality` is the only command that is not entirely lowercase. How did this get through PR??

I actually feel embarrassed for Amazon when I'm trying to checkout and can see all the deceptive tricks they implement to make you sign up. This is one of the richest companies in the world acting like dodgy internet scammers.

Good to see this is finally catching up with them in some way.

Apologies, I'm not up to date in this space, so probably a stupid question but how does this differ to docker compose?

My understanding of the value of codespaces was instant start up, literally zero to download locally, and centralised definition. Does this mean I would go back to have to downloading everything locally, albeit in a nice sandboxed package with a neat definition language and convenient command?

With all the those leetcode-style interviews and dynamic programming problems in the interview process, surely the genius "Googlers", the worthy few, that make it through this process wouldn't need to use AI to generate code.