trcooke

I was 21, so circa 2000, and I made a HTML only website to share the photos I took while on a skiing holiday to Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I didn't buy a domain for it, in fact I didn't even know how to do that back then, so I hosted …

While I was at university 20 years ago one of my course friends regularly extolled the virtues of Linux. He was a big fan of Gentoo which I never really got into, he like fiddling with the configuration and I liked a working system, two characteristics that rarely overlapped for …

I've avoided most of the wild variations of source control systems thankfully. My first job was just a team of 2 and the other guy decided rsync would do just fine for us, and it did. Then in my next job we used CVS, then the next SVN, and all …

I'm a bit of a technology hoarder. In my home study I have Technics HiFi separates and B&W speakers that I bought in the early/mid 90s, and they're every bit as top notch quality now as they were then. I also have a Sony MiniDisc walkman, but it has recently …

On a practical note: Are you intending to use an external service to generate these AI Overviews? Or host your own? Either way it sounds expensive. Is it?

I haven't run a desktop computer for about 15 years.

AI is an accelerant for already existing behaviours. Good developers will become more productive, and poor developers will produce rot at a faster rate. It also extends beyond the technology industry, medical research will be accelerated but so will cyber crime.

I've spent most of my career writing Java which uses the semicolon to signify the end of a statement. Using the auto-complete features of my IDE (IntelliJ, naturally) I very rarely actually have to type them out so they're not the burden that this topic implies that they are. In …

I've never attempted to tag a topic. I didn't even realise it was a thing.

I name my devices after family cats. For example my phone is called walter and my old iMac is called duchess.

> Does it count that I didn't expect Blu-ray to win the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war? I was working at Sony around the time this was happening and you might not know that it was the Playstation 3 that won the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD battle. At the time players for …

Not a silly comment, but an unfortunate one. We discovered that a colleague had accidentally pasted the contents of a rather contentious email into the JavaDoc of a Java class. He reckons he must have been scrolling down a file with a wheel mouse and clicked the wheel without realising …

Imperative programming meets document styling. I'm not convinced this is progress.

I'm not opposed to getting an electric car, but only a small one for poking around town. I'd still keep our other car as an internal combustion engine car for longer journeys. One of the biggest deterrents I have with new cars is the trend of sticking a massive iPad …

The first computer that was mine, and not my Dad's, was an Amstrad CPC 464. I used to copy programs out of magazines into it, but they seldom worked, probably due to mistakes because I was an impatient 10 year old. My Dad worked for Burroughs who became Unisys so …

As a fella who learned to drive in the mid 90s, back when cars were mere tools that did what you asked it to do (for good for for bad). I have mixed feelings about modern cars. On the one hand engine development has come a very long way and …

I'm not a keyboard fetishist so don't go in for the whole mechanical keyboard thing. I'm typing right now on my standard laptop keyboard, which is a standard UK qwerty layout. For my more permanent setup I have a Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 keyboard which is very comfortable and has pretty …

I'd be very surprised if Amazon and the other big courier firms don't already have this.

When I was about 10 years old I would copy out code from magazines onto an Amstrad CPC 464, usually unsuccessfully. Later on at college I programmed assembler with a 6502 processor. That was good fun.

When I was at University nearly 20 years ago we used Oberon2 for some of our programming classes. I've never encountered it since but I remember liking it very much because of it's very very strict typing. I like strongly typed languages. I've also long been a fan of Erlang. …

Markdown. I approach markdown like it was the first time I ever saw it. Every time.

My Dad was an electrician (now retired) and he was always buying stuff from a supplier CPC Farnell. I discovered the pattern that they used for applying promotional codes to their products so I wrote a Groovy script that took a product code and then tried out all the promo …

The only browser extension I have installed right now is Proton Pass, which is a password manager tool. I have also used Privacy Badger but don't seem to have it installed right now for reasons lost to history. (i.e. I can't remember)

"Wrong" is often subjective so it's hard to state for sure whether anything I have written was wrong. Our tool choices are a product of the time the choice was made, including our own knowledge, our teams collective knowledge, the tools we know about, the tools we're skilled at, etc …

I wish I was better at Maths. I feel like there's a whole world of knowledge in there that I just have no clue about.

Emotional safety

Java for me. I've spent the majority of my career working with Java so it feels the most natural to use and thus allows my thinking to detach from the language and into the problem domain, which is where the fun really is. In general I like strongly typed languages. …

Let's turn this question around: Do you think programming today is much different to 10 years ago? What about 20 years ago? What about 30 years ago? I don't think that much has changed in past decades, not really, so I don't expect much will change in the coming decades. …

I would create a system of resource referencing that would eliminate the prolific duplication of data that consumes non trivial proportions of all our data centers. The end result being that we need far fewer data centers and thus reduce the damage they cause to the planet and its environment. …

I write more tests.

As a moderator on another programming forum, my main objection to AI forum content is that which is posted purely for the purposes of posting something. I see a bunch of posts that are just summaries of the rest of the thread, which adds no value, or meandering statements roughly …

I think personal websites are valuable for developers, particularly ones who are self employed and work gig to gig, as it's a good place to present information about yourself, your skills, past projects etc etc in a way that suits you rather than in the form of whatever other service …

Profile spam for sweet sweet SEO internet points. Create an account, put a link in the profile, but never post anything thus reducing the likelihood of triggering the spam alarms and getting deleted down by the site moderators. It's the back-link on a public facing web page that they want, …