My team had migrated about 35 codebases from a mix of Play, Scalatra, Ruby, and Python, to Akka HTTP. The unification definitely made it easier for juniors to start work on unfamiliar codebases, but the same could be said if we unified on something else. That being said, a portion of the services did make use of Akka streams & actors and we’ve found a lot of success there that otherwise would’ve been complex code with locks or synchronized blocks. Stuff that I’d rather not have to onboard engineers with or review their PRs and miss an unlock(). It’s probably a steeper learning curve by teaching them about actors and futures, but it means they’ll be writing safer code by design, and reviewing their PRs becomes easier for me.
Just make sure the actors are small and have one focus. When they get too large and do too much is when they become unwieldy and difficult to maintain.
I've had a similar phase and just switched back to Ubuntu a week ago after having used a number of different distros since 2011. As a software developer myself, I think there is a mix of two emotions that lead to this; fear of missing out (FOMO) and imposter syndrome. I was trying to learn as much as possible for a while, adding skills to my resume, thinking my peers were doing the same. (They were not). All that time I ended up suffering from some pretty poor UX issues (Audio/Bluetooth/Wifi) that I tried fixing unsuccessfully or ignoring for the longest time, that I forgot what it was like to use a system THAT JUST WORKED out of the box.
> The best part is that the cubicle doesn't have tall walls so I can literally see/hear everything, including other people's monitors.
Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't interrupt you as much.
I originally hated open spaces. But eventually I grew to love open spaces for being social. In fact, I had one of the most enjoyable times I ever had at a big tech company being in an open space!
But I was probably producing about 10% of what I normally produced in a closed space. I was OK with that :-) My company probably wasn't, but hey, I was salary; that's their problem.
The book Peopleware had a nice description of cubicles:
"Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; indeed in some cases, sources of noise and disruption are actively piped into your space. You’re isolated because that small lonely space excludes everyone but you (it’s kind of a toilet stall without a toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible to participate in the social unit that might form around your work."
I have a mild case of tinnitus which I attribute to headphone use for 9 or so hours a day (commute plus time trying to work in the office).
At home these days I rarely have music or anything on, I can work for the most part in comfortable silence.
Means that music is saved for when I actually want to listen to it and can give it my attention, instead of while I'm trying to debug or avoid someone's armpit on the train.
A lot of the time I had my over-the-ears headphones on in the office, I wasn't even listening to anything - it was just nice to block out the environment noise a bit, and let people know not to bother me.
I wonder if wearing a reflective face shield would be a more effective deterrent to interruptions. If people can't see your face then they would probably be much less likely to engage in conversation. You could just take a normal face shield and put reflective sunscreen window film on the inside.
You make a good point. Maybe it would need to also be worn with hearing protection until the novelty wears off. And adding a chin strap would prevent other people from removing it.
I did this and still feel gross about it even though I don't regret the decision. Accepted an offer for a Java/Spring developer, but a week later I got a better offer for a Scala engineer at Apple that had swept me off my feet. I don't know why I still feel gross having to renege after accepting the first offer; I think its because I annoyed the recruiter. That even if the first offer had salary-matched the other offer, I'd rather be programming in Scala than Java/Spring and that wasn't something they could compete with.
It really boils down to trust. My manager trusts I will make up lost time after my doctor's appointment, as they generally know if I've been falling behind work or not. We also give daily standup status updates so its obvious if work isn't progressing after some time.
This also works in reverse. If I work on Sat/Sun for some system maintenance then my manager tells me to swap time off during the week. But in my experience, What usually happens is I work my full week anyway because something important arose and I push that "time off" to the next week until I forget I had it.
It won't cut it for the average commuter, but it'd cut it for the median commuter. Really it only needs to cut it for, say, the 10th percentile commuter to have a really big market.
I’ve changed jobs four times since moving to the bay area in 2006, and none has ever been within thirty miles of the next. If people bet on always having a short commute, I think a lot of them will be sad.
One of my complaints is California's housing market and zoning makes it difficult for people to relocate close to work. And work to locate close to workers. So instead we have people wasting vast amounts of time and resources commuting.
I've probably spent 5000 hours and $100,000 on commuting over the last 30 years. It's all been fundamentally a waste.
You must have very different preferences than what I have. I live about 5 miles from my (former) office in SF, and it was also one of the cheaper options to do so.
I had a commute like that (from the Mission to Market St.) but they slowly went under and my next job was in the South Bay. I wouldn’t want to hesitate about career opportunities due to the range of my car, after relocating 800 miles from Seattle for my career.
If I remember right, GrubHub/Doordash will undercut restaurant prices to gain more customers for short-term, then later adjust prices back up once they establish a more stable audience.
