On a CalDigit TS3 dock, I've had one working off the rear Thunderbolt socket for over a year, but it fails in minutes if plugged into the USB-C one. I've never had issues with a CalDigit Elements (TB4) hub. I've had success plugging them directly into various Chromebooks. On one Windows laptop, they seemed to work on one USB-C port but not the other.

So... reliable once working, but getting there can be a pain.

They promote their cloud controller pretty strongly, followed by the Cloud Key, which is their own preinstalled self hosting setup, but the self-hosted UniFi Network server has stuck around. (It changed names a couple of times; it was the "UniFi Controller", then "UniFi Network Application", and now "UniFi Network Server".)

Collectively these chemicals (the ones that cause digestive issues like the author's) are known as FODMAPs, and cause issues for a lot of people. Monash University is the authority here, having identified them in the first place and produced a ton of dietary information about them: https://www.monashfodmap.com/about-fodmap-and-ibs/

The author says she doesn't have any trouble with lactose, fructose, and gluten, but cutting out sugar alcohols (polyols, the "P" in FODMAP) helped a ton. This is pretty common; people with FODMAP intolerance can typically digest some but not all of them.

The process is basically (1) go on a very restrictive elimination diet that cuts out all FODMAPs, then (2) gradually test each one at different quantities to find out if you can handle it and at what quantity.

Maintenance issues aside, the setup in the linked article looks quite pretty and should have decent airflow for passive cooling, which is nice!

If you want to release it as open source and don't care about owning the copyright, there's a process you can go through to release a new open source project. If you just want to send patches to an existing project, you can generally just do that, as long as the project has an approved open source license and is not on the (short) list of disallowed projects.

This doesn't seem like a big deal, but the first time I went on vacation with my family after getting the 2019 MBP, I forgot that I needed to pack the adapter, and we couldn't watch whatever series we were currently binging on Netflix or HBO, which was pretty annoying. I'm happy to see HDMI ports showing up on more laptops these days!

Programming microcontrollers is done using an in-circuit programmer, which connects to a header on the board. Adafruit has a great tutorial for this: https://learn.adafruit.com/proper-step-debugging-atsamd21-ar...

Another way to do it is to ignore the official process and go make friends on teams you're interested in. If you're looking for Go jobs, maybe just do a code search and figure out who's writing a ton of Go, and see if any of those look like fun. I know there's a lot of Go code in Cloud, which is usually hiring. There's some Rust in Chrome and Chrome OS, if you're into that.

I've never done a 20% project myself, but I hear those are good too. I gather that lots of little teams hardly ever get headcount, and starting out as a 20 percenter is the only way to get into one of them.

Internal transfers are pretty easy too; it's not unheard of to switch teams every 18 months or so, so when you get sick of working on whichever huge distributed system you start with, you can go work on consumer hardware, one of the various operating systems, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, a site like Google Docs, one of the many iOS apps, one of the Cloud products, etc etc.

Working at Google isn't the wonderland some articles paint it to be, but it's definitely not boring, and there are lots of interesting people and projects around. You might not find your job itself to be super meaningful, but being surrounded by thousands of other engineers who all would like some meaning in their lives makes for an interesting community, and tons of fun little at-work side projects.

Their hotspot page shows two which are free with a 5GB plan, but I can't find a deal which makes them free with the 512MB one though.