This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
Congrats on a big win at your new job this past week, @fossheim:
Started at my new job and immediately got the tech lead role on an exciting project 🤩
@cicirello has a favorite less-common programming language:
I'd have to say Scheme. Back in the mid 1990s, I learned functional programming in Scheme in a course on Programming Language Concepts. In the same course, we had a project to implement an interpreter for Scheme. The project was fun. I haven't used it since, but is a nice memory of the Scheme language.
Thanks for telling us about your inspiring mom in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, @sergix!
My mom!
She's the reason I got into coding in the first place when I was a kid.
My mom ran a photography business for a few years and she started working on a WordPress site. I was curious on how websites were made, and so my mom and dad bought me a book on HTML, and from then on web dev has been a huge part of my life.
My mom is a wonderful role model and has kept encouraging me on my programming journey; even though she doesn't herself code, she always loves seeing the new web projects I'm working on and provides a little input here and there.
@mrsaeeddev brought a valuable, global conversation to this conversation about current salary inquiries in interviews:
Hey Jean
Thanks for writing on this topic.
But let me tell you about the situation of South Asian countries. Here even the top companies of the region ask for current salary and if you don't reveal it they will upfront back off. They see it as a criterion for evaluation of technical skills and think 'if this person is so good at their work, why he/she's working on a low salary'. So, it has happened to me as well. When industry leaders in a country follow such bad practices you are left with no choice.
What do you think about how can we deal with this?
Thanks for sharing a comprehensive look into your Linux setup over the years, @dwd!
I've used Linux as my primary development desktop since THE LAST CENTURY™, which makes me feel very old indeed. Back then, "IDE" was a hardware interface for hard disks, and so we only had "editors". Javascript hadn't been invented yet, and I was cutting-edge by programming in that fancy ANSI C. And I had, I kid you not, almost a whole Gigabyte of disk space, and 40 MEGABYTES of RAM - this was at a time most people had perhaps 4 - my parent's machine had a 40M disk...
Obviously I've upgraded a few times since, but always to a hand-crafted behemoth, hewn from stone, with chips I made myself from the finest potato, and microcode inserted using deft gestures whilst holding a hand-wound electromagnetic wand.
Well, that's half-true, anyway - my current Linux development desktop is actually a 6-core Haswell i7, with 64G of RAM and a sort of random collection of SSDs. I bought the machine about 6 or 7 years back, and I had a single 2.5K screen (bought at the same time) and a pair of 1600x1200 Dells in portrait on either side - all driven by a pair of 660Ti's which were linked in SLI mode for when the machine (called Jekyll) is dual-booted into Windows 10 to play games (whence it becomes Hyde).
It's got a water-cooler, because, you know, it's a frigging water cooler. How cool is that? Real reason: It's quieter, which is why it's built around a Fractal Design sound-proofed case, too.
Since then I've upgraded the monitors to three 2.5Ks (Two Dell U2715H's and the original Dell U2713HM, now in portrait), powered by a nVidia 2060 - one of the 660 Ti's lurks within the machine, perhaps used for PhysX, I don't know. Maybe it's the thing that randomly slows the games down?
For several years, I've used clamp-to-the-desk monitor stands rather than the stands the monitors came on, because it gives me a lot more desk space and put the screens at the right height.
I also have a work laptop for when I'm on the road (like, going into the actual office), but I use Windows 10 on there, with WSL2 for the Linuxy stuff, because the hardware was much better supported. Don't tell anyone.
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (2)
Thanks for sharing these valuable insights with the community this past week, @fossheim , @cicirello , @sergix , @mrsaeeddev , and @dwd !
Congratulations to all!
I think it would be cool to also have a top 5 underrated topics. (not the most popular) but a top 5 coming from the dev team of interesting not well seen topics.