wikwocket

Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it.

As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.

Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)

Would you want to date someone who seemed desperate to get into a relationship? Who seemed like they were having trouble getting a relationship at all, let alone a good healthy one? Same principle.

Since these are riffs on fizzbuzz, the goal is just to evaluate whether a candidate can use programming to solve these at all, i.e. whether they can 1) think through how to accomplish a basic task with some data and code, and 2) implement it in a language they know.

The goal of fizzbuzz in a phone screen should not be to see if someone can solve it in an optimal memory-efficient framework-idiomatic way. Clever syntax and data structure use is lovely, but these are really about finding whether someone can use a 'for' loop and an 'if' condition.

For what it's worth, protected branches are pretty clearly listed as a "Github Pro" feature in their pricing page.

I agree that it'd be nice if they warned you about features you're using that will be turned off, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people requesting downgrades understand which features are in which plan.

Maybe this could be suggested to GitHub's Paperclips project, to avoid future confusion?

I get your analogy, but I think there are tons of hammer conferences.

There are conferences for most any language with wide adoption. There's also a Slack conference (not "TeamChatConf," but a "Slack Frontiers"). There's a GitHub conf (not "OpenSourceDevCon," but "GitHub Universe"). There is a Datadog conference, and so on and so on.

Maybe C just doesn't have one big company, or an ecosystem of smaller ones, that stand to benefit from gathering a bunch of C devs in one place.

I'm sure lots of e-commerce companies feel this pressure. Where I work, an Additional Revenue team was created for this kind of thing - sponsored results, ads, cross-sells, etc. It's viewed as free money on the table, since it is relatively easy to estimate the income and the dev work required, but much harder to measure user experience and customer loyalty.

Random unsolicited internet advice: never decide not to apply because you don't feel good enough. We all experience imposter syndrome, and most job postings are just wishlists of unrealistic qualifications copy-pasted by HR anyway (this posting excepted!).

In general, don't disqualify yourself. That's the hiring manager's job. Your job is to qualify yourself: present your best self, and demonstrate professional confidence and competence.

The inability to filter explicit songs out is maddening! And it's a glaring omission to anyone with young children. I have seen it skip from a My Little Pony song to an explicit Patton Oswalt standup bit (perhaps because he voiced a character once... I have no clue) while my daughter was listening.

Another annoying one is how you can choose an exact song to play on tablet or on PS4, but not from your phone - you can only shuffle play there. Try explaining that to a 5 year old.

As a parent, I agree. One should not shy away from talking about "advanced" topics. Kids are naturally curious and bright and I think we should encourage their desire to learn and understand complex things.

I worry that if you try to dumb down things for kids, they might become interested in dumb things. :)

Also, as the OP mentions, it can be a fun "pedagogical challenge" to try to explain free theorems or turing completeness or MySQL sharding to a young child. And you may find a clever way to describe it, that they can easily understand, which is satisfying for both of you.

Nothing really prevents this; a company I work with does something similar, and as long as you engineer your use of the platforms to be flexible and not rely on platform-specific features (for example MailChimp and SendGrid use slightly different templating approaches, and support different amounts of logic in the templates), it's doable.

This is the same idea as making your system work across availability zones/datacenters/cloud providers. At a certain scale it becomes a good idea.

They did not do hard research, since they are still designing their game, but they did present it to playtesters. I think this is an appropriate level of diligence for a product early in the design phase, it's the equivalent of the "hallway usability testing" recommended for agile teams.

It may be impossible to say right now whether this change helps kids get better at programming faster, but presumably, more kids will play a game that they feel is more approachable, similar to how the playtesters responded.

Absolutely. "Programming" with cute icons may not make you a "great" programmer, but that's not the goal. It's to get you interested in the idea of telling a computer to do cool things.

As an example, my daughter had no real interest in doing anything with a computer until we showed her she could move Moana's raft around with some Scratch/Blockly code in a Disney Hour of Code game. Therefore, I think these games are absolutely worthwhile. Let kids start learning the "hard parts" of programming after we've got them hooked!