Before retirement ended my last spell of unemployment, i wondered if the timing of that dismissal was ideal. one month earlier or later might have been better? improving a server log was my last assignment. like many other companies, their senior management believed in their culture, technology, and tools. like other well-funded companies, they used Splunk and wanted to use JSON format. nobody reviewed the pull request that would have established a baseline for my work. their Splunk dashboard code was not versioned. Overcommunicating JSON can be ideal, and creating a data structure to discover if a log entry describes an error is easy and reasonably fast, but computers find strings very quickly. a faster algorithm uses less electricity; computer activity is human activity. ...
Online forums are good sources of information and/or habitats for groupthink. Jean Valjean ignored the smell; so can you :-) forums are biased in various ways. for example, woodworkers' opinions about linseed oil are informed by wood finish products. in another forum, we might find a recommendation for finishing wood with linseed oil sold by an art supply store. sauce for the painter is sauce for the woodworker? Slippery when wet when i became interested in safety razors, forums were invaluable sources of information. they are still helpful, but i learned enough to continue on my own. at one point i bought cheap shaving soap thinking that it couldn't be as bad as forum contributors claimed. they were right, but the soap was/is still useful: it stays at th...