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  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’d finally finish some of my personal projects.

    Over the last few years, I’ve had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I’m experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I’d love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

    On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures… one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t get bored any time soon.


  • My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

    For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

    • MS-DOS 5.0
    • Windows 3.11
    • Windows 98 SE
    • Windows XP
    • Windows 7
    • Windows 10

    On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

    For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.


  • Learned that the hard way. Within less than a week went from happily living in the house that I had grown up in, that I was renting from my father and that I was planning to eventually buy or inherit to having to look for an apartment because he sold it. The worst thing? That he never gave me a reason or even acknowledged how much he had hurt me. Quite the opposite, he later asked me to help the new owners set up their tv as if it was nothing.




  • It’s the IT department’s job to make sure you have all the hardware you need to do your job. While not being able to track your time is something that affects you more than it affects the company, it’s still part of the job.

    It is certainly not your job to buy new devices with your own money. Also, I would highly advise your IT department against letting you use a private device that you carry around in your free time and even on vacation as your second factor. Anything that can be used to access your work data should never be with you when you’re getting drunk in a bar.

    If you’re financially stable enough that getting paid a few days late doesn’t hurt you too much, I would recommend you ask IT for a new phone (that you will only use for work!) and hand in your time sheets in whatever form is the least convenient for HR until the problem is resolved.


  • Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

    I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

    It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.


  • Definitely not a strict rule and I wouldn’t want to force anyone to do it the way I do (maybe I should have marked my comment as a joke) but as far as I understand, downvotes were originally meant for spam or low-quality/low-effort comments. Stuff that just doesn’t add anything to the duscussion and isn’t worth reading. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often on Lemmy.

    Downvoting comments that you disagree with just to bury them, especially without even leaving a comment that explains why you disagree, just feels petty.

    Overall, I’d rather upvote a well-written comment even if I disagree with its contents and downvote ten “yeah, same” comments that agree with me but add nothing to the discussion.