1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]

2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.

And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.

Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?

Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.

This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.

I have an iPad and downloaded PDF Expert and got an Apple Pencil to sign digital documents and I've only occasionally had issues I can't get around - Amazon return labels are the biggest pain in the ass.

If you're from Amazon, sort out a way we can ship returns without needing a printer!

It's funny how we just keep reusing the same ideas and calling them new... it makes me wonder why the history of relevant technologies aren't taught in software development classes so we can actually forge a path forward instead of keep doing the same things over and over again...

It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.

Admittedly computer systems have come a long way in ten years, but given the attitudes and technical expertise of a lot of the people I worked alongside, I would say there's a reasonable chance the needle hasn't moved very far.

They're excruciatingly good at getting oil out of the ground and getting it to market, but they're not going to be winning capture the flag at Defcon or Blackhat any time soon...

Living close to the U.S. border, it's quite easy for me to do a 24-48 hour jaunt down to the U.S. - long enough to qualify for the customs exemptions and bring cheap electronics back to Canada. The only down side is that if anything goes wrong with them, I have to cross the border back to the U.S. to deal with warranty issues.

Having an address in the Netherlands and parents in the UK also means that I have similar benefits in the opposite direction, sometimes stuff is way cheaper in the UK or Europe and if I need it I just pick it up there when I'm there. The down side there being that they're obviously cabled for European or UK plugs which means I either need to replace the cables or, thankfully, most stuff is rechargeable via USB-C now, so all I need are European, British and American USB-C charging units and everything carries on as normal.

I've cut off my cable/satellite TV. I don't listen to any other news sources. I read BBC's headlines once a day.

Cutting off the "mainstream" media and advertising from my life has done more for my mental health than my gym membership, diet, meditation and fresh air combined. Not to say those things aren't important, but they didn't have nearly the impact that cutting off the constant drama, heightened emotion and propaganda have.

Whatever you build on will be ripped out from under you and you'll be forced to evolve, just as we all have had to since the beginning of software engineering.

One thing is true as has been since the beginning - the next generation always knows better than the previous until life bites them in the ass and they learn their lessons the hard way too. As sure as the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow. There's little point in complaining about it. What will be, will be.

https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illne...

I have from 25-50 or maybe more things I need to get done in my normal everyday life - most of which either improve my life in some significant way, or improves someone else's in a way that pays my bills. I run out of spoons about 15 before I need to learn a new something that will add minor improvement to my life in some way. This includes things like holding down a key longer gives you the alternative characters for it, or a new operating system or device, or all the little features on my TV or the many thousands of ways Alexa can be harnessed to do some really cool things.

On a day where I have nothing to do and I feel particularly inclined, I might learn one of those things - but chances are I'll spend it doing something else that brings me joy. Cooking, spending time with loved ones, going for a ride on my bike or a swim. These are the choices and trade offs I make. Admittedly, that hampers my ability to use certain devices because I don't understand them completely, but it gives me time to enjoy my life in other ways.

Most of my devices are used almost exclusively for Teams meetings, communications or actual software development. When I'm raking through other software, I'm often exposed to UI concepts that make zero sense to me, yet they seem intuitive to many others that are beyond my comprehension. I wonder if this is because I'm getting old or if it's because people being forced to learn bizarre UI concepts and just accept it and go along with it.

It's weird to me that people just seem to accept complicated systems and I'm still stuck on the "This is too complicated to be useful to anyone. We're supposed to have computers working for us by now, not us working for our computers!" model.

Invalid use cases would be things like social media platforms where children are able to communicate with unknown parties.

Could something like that work? How could a system like that be protected from abuse? Obviously pedophillic doctors and reporters would have an immediate loophole that would need to be considered...

There has to be a way where we can have legitimately end to end encrypted systems while preventing illegitimate ones. There's a massive grey area in between "ban encryption" and "let pedophiles do what they want without any oversight." There must be a solution that falls somewhere in the middle of those two things.

Sometimes just the writing is cathartic enough that once you've gotten it off your chest, you don't really need to hit submit.

mIRC... those were the days. Good times, indeed!

I used to use it a lot, although I've not used it in quite a while. I don't recall the last time I even needed to write a regex. Somehow it's still stuck in my head.

Well worth having it if you want a tool to hack around large blocks of text and play with regex in a "live" environment.