loopbit

OP was probably thinking of Finland.

Changed Europe? Changed the UK and very little else...

I mean, it's a cool bit of engineering and it took ages to build. But for most people in Europe means nothing.

> "It put international rail travel back in the game"

Yeah, for England. Again, for the rest of Europe, rail travel was always there.

Depends, code that was not written with testing in mind can be very difficult to cover without some major refactoring.

Adding the first tests can be a slow and painful process.

Now, once you have those few tests? Yep! Add a few tests along the ones for the new functionality every time you touch a piece of code or pick the low hanging fruit every now and again and you can get to a useful test suite in no time.

I'm of the same opinion. I love getting feedback, better if it's constructive, but all kind of honest feedback is useful and welcome. And it doesn't always come from people with more experience, sometimes a greenhorn will see things that a greybeard like me doesn't.

But I've seen people giving negative responses to the best feedback. Hell, I've had people complaining for hours because someone else replaced their manual process that took an hour to do with a script (and copy&paste of the result) that took literally seconds to run.

Management and engineering are two different careers, so I wouldn't call it "upgrading".

Having the technical chops definitely helps as a manager. And knowing what the managers expect and be able to talk their language helps as an engineer. If you reach certain level its easy to jump between them. But they require a different set of skills and the work is different.

If you like it, there are a lot of rewards. If you don't, it can be soul-sucking.

Not sure what to tell you... If I remember correctly, the last time I restarted Firefox was to update it, around the 5th of May (I have version 76.0). Generally speaking I don't restart it (or the laptop) except for that.

No addons other than uBlock Origin, TST and LastPass.

Another one, not mentioned here but one of my favorites:

Psephophorus Terrypratchetti.

Yep, my todo lists are all trees. Even when I'm writing a document, I first put the table of contents as a tree and then fill in the different sections :)

I have one exception, though. Mind-mapping.

I will use mind mapping tools for todos and notes. But for real mind mapping I use full blown graphs.

Really? I have, right now, 290 opened tabs dangling from the hacker news homepage and about 20 other "root" tabs with more trees.

All in all, ~450 opened tabs in 6 different containers.

Firefox is using ~8% of CPU and 670MB of RAM. Macbook Pro retina mid 2012.

Have you ever used a complex database in a formal, by-the-book, third normal form?

The number of tables explodes, the number of joins become a pain and every single data change requires careful planning.

As for the "many database systems support materialized queries", I only know of a few that truly do: Oracle and DB2.

PostsgreSQL supports them, but you need to handle updating them yourself. SQL server kind of supports them, but are limited.

In other RDBMs you can work around that using triggers (or similar concepts), but that IMHO is definitely a bad practice and the times I've used that (usually because there was no other option) has only brought me grief.

I used NN3 and 4 back in the day (and still do, kinda, Firefox is still my main browser), but man, writing CSS for Netscape was a nightmare!

I still remember that weird bug that forced everyone to create a single, empty, invisible DIV at the beginning of the page if you wanted to set absolute positions for the other DIVs in the page.

In Javascript land, we all had our little script to detect the browser and do things like finding the element you wanted (IIRC, only IE had find by id).

All in all, I miss the carefulness webdevs had to have at the time (I remember uglifying my files by hand to make everything weight less than 24KB, which was the self-imposed limit we had at the dotcom I worked at) but, in general, I don't miss those days at all.