@Grumm This heavily depends on the market you're in. I have been freelance for a decade in the corporate world (banking, government, private fin tech.. my stack is .NET with whatever frontend library is flavour of the month). An unpaid holiday or sickday is not a problem when you earn between 2 and 3 times more than in a full time position.

I wouldn't freelance by taking the odd job here and there. You need to get hired as a consultant sub-contracting through one of the bigger firms out there. Sign 40 hours per week full time contracts 👍

Freelance

I have tried a couple of times (EDIT: as in given it a proper go to learn how) to play CoD with a controller. I have no idea how people manage to get used to that in FPS, but they do.

One of life's mysteries.

@Demolishun Yeah I see that one, but based on the involuntary world wide experiment over the past decade and a half since wifi became normal and every man, woman and dog in developed countries has a phone in their pocket, handbag, next to their head at night - I'd say we're pretty safe. A connection between wifi and testicle cancer / ovarian cancer / dog cancer / head cancer should have been obvious by now I think.

But that's just my point of view 🤷‍♂️

In a world full of pollution, radiation, stupid people, angry people, stupid angry people, traffic hazards and wild weather worrying about whether wifi is dangerous is ridiculous.

You've got wireless headphones transmitting signals right next to your brain..

@jestdotty Yeah, I normally have no problem with letting people go ahead and make their mistakes when I have given them a fair chance to reconsider. What sucks this time is that I have to rewrite a bad design to this new design which is better but still not right - and I know it. I'm just in a shitty position where causing a stir over this is not an option.

@djsumdog Damn, I had a 2006 STI once and a 2003 WRX before that.

They are great fun!

@chatgpt But what if this priest also has a BMW full of candy that he lets the young boys ride around in with him?

@chatgpt Would you agree that a catholic priest with a an unhealthy interest in young boys is not the type of father figure you would recommend?

It depends.

@vintprox Agreed, but there's plenty of very average software out there that we use every day. It does the job for us, we have our tasks moving across the lanes, some Git integration, whatever. We were forced to use LeanKit once which I hated a lot more for instance. 🤷‍♂️

I am not saying Jira is great, I just observe how it always gets all the hate. Seems a bit like the Nickelback phenomenon.

I don't get all the hate for Jira. Are you expecting a piece of software to solve all your problems? Are you trying to use all the features regardless of whether they suit your needs or not? Could it be your PM/boss/whatever setting things up to align with their idea of the work flow, and not the actual workflow? In its simplicity, it's a Trello board with a shitload of options. Options you don't HAVE to enable or use.

And as with everything, just use something else then. 🤷‍♂️

It can make people want to smack the next person who tells them what AI can do.

@retoor I used to prefer Dells, always happy with them and they had the best keyboards (personal preference obviously). Once they sent a technician out to a town in the middle of nowhere where I happened to be at the time to replace a faulty screen within 24 hours.

I didn't have a valid warranty on that XPS (4 years old), hence the DIY replacement. Other than that, great laptop. Excellent screen.

@tosensei My thought exactly.

You can't predict the outcome, the same prompt will give you a different image every time. Suddenly, the cover of Bad Boys 4 is two white dudes holding a carrot because there was a new wave of protests involving race and someone wrote on reddit that carrots are the new weapon against obesety. AI only read the first part.

I thought we abandoned integer IDs in 2010 and converted to GUIDs. 🤷‍♂️

@retoor My XPS had the issue many others have reported as well: the keyboard stops registering random key strokes. Makes wrtng rlly werd fr oths t read. Should have gotten it replaced by a technician, but I thought what the hell - how hard can it be. And it wasn't hard, but I must have short circuited something in the process. 😖

Replaced it with a Lenovo X1 Extreme, and very happy with that.

Replaced a faulty keyboard and got a new battery for a Dell XPS (4 years old). The keyboard replacement required a lot of components to be taken out, and after reassemly everything was fine. For a while, 10-20-30 minutes then dead. No reaction, no lights - bricked. Then I leave it for an hour or two and it comes back to life, might run for hours and then dead again. Put the old battery back in, no difference. Running on battery power or on the charger - no difference. Replaced the RAM, no difference. Can't find any error logs in BIOS or Windows. Someone suggested a screwed up capacitator or whatever, I don't know. Wasn't worth the repair costs and 4 years is a good stretch for a dev laptop. Sucks though, could have been used for other cool projects.

@Lensflare In VS you will get warnings if there's a potential null reference happening and they have what they call null state analysis which existed before but was enabled by default from .NET 6. As for warnings about everywhere a potential error might be thrown.. 🤷‍♂️ There are pros and cons, I am not one for being babied too much but at the same time getting good habits forced upon you is not bad either.

You can write good, solid code without having to handle every unlikely and possibly never occuring incidents. There's a balance. Be pragmatic.

I was there too. Found out it's pretty all right, but if you inherit someone elses spaghetti it's a royal pain in the ass. If you build your app from the ground up or if someone with half a brain did it right before you took over it does the job well.

Do freelancing. Earn more, get more greedy, count "time off" as lost income. Repeat.

It's up to you. You have to freedom to take a break between contracts. You can also take time off whenever the client allows it, because you cost nothing while you're away.

If you are doing freelancing and not reaping the financial benefit then go back to a normal job. Increased income is the key to all those other perks.

If that destroys your friendship I would look for new friends.

@stackodev .. or not monitoring your logs when a simple lambda function goes bananas unnnoticed for a few days. "Alarm? Yes, our alarm is the invoice - it tells us something is SEROUSLY wrong!"

@Lensflare Yep, next it will be "Linux is not for production, Windows is for trad wives. Change my mind."

Clickbait

Yesterday's code is tomorrow's WTFs

@Lensflare 👍

@Lensflare We were on the topic where someone complained about certain keyboard features. Noisy mechanical keys is one I don't get.

@Lensflare I don't get why people have mechanical noisy-as-fuck keyboards either. I have a backlit MX keys keyboard and it's a dream to type on. I just wish there was a hack to keep the lights on all the time, because the soft glow is good.

Most queries I run are for just getting something then and there, why would I bother to specify each column? Wasting seconds to shave milliseconds off a query..

As always, it depends. But it's not about lazyness.