Especially with C work, I explain that adding debugging statements may obfuscate the bug they’re trying to find because of the changed memory map, especially if the bug is arising from an over/underwrite

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is how I see it about my long line of mentors and after 4 decades in the software industry, I have become a mentor showing newbies how to diagnose legacy codebases

Mentors are essential, and more so today as there is too much information around design patterns, tools, processes, and working with management. A mentor sees trends and has a better handle on the rudder, for themselves and hopefully for these going before them

Seek them out and if they leave you knowing you know less, they have done their job

Take a look at Obsidian over at obsidian.md

I started my career on PDP-11/44 and moved to Xenix/Unix/Solaris as I progressed my way through several employers. Windows 3.1 had me as it was a step up from GEMOS and the affair lasted until Windows 95 when I got fed up with having to refresh every computer in my household annually and having to clear out the bloatware. All this time I was missing the low cognitive overhead of running Unix.

An SUSE CD made its way to me and I switched immediately. I was home! And I stayed that way until macOS came out with its BSD core which gave me both a tight GUI and *nix frameworks.

Windows is popular only because of its heavy-handed approach to OEMs and businesses, not because of its technical prowess.

Books: if I can buy a digital version and if it’s not priced over its paper counterpart, I buy. If it’s out of print and there isn’t a digital version from the publisher, I look for the digital version from anywhere. I did that once for a book series and when the publisher finally put out a digital version, I bought them.

It’s about access. The paywall has to be reasonable and the publishers should digitize “out-of-print” regardless of the cost to them. They can recoup the costs over time rather than counting “profits” in a quarterly window.

Blind readers should get the forever exemption. They should have braille/audio of any book, sold or not.