The paranoid voice in my head is wondering if these forms don't actually opt me out of anything, and instead just confirm to these companies that the information they have on me is correct.
I have large hands -- not exceedingly large, but I wear XL gloves. The MX Master is a bit too narrow for me. It's designed to be held between your thumb and ring/pinky fingers, with your pointer and middle fingers on the left and right buttons, and I feel cramped after using it for awhile.
I wish they made a larger size, because I really like it otherwise.
Somebody I know has one and the hinge felt loose from the moment it was opened. The screen wobbles back and forth like a worn out old Macbook Pro. I haven't seen this mentioned in any reviews -- can anybody comment?
It certainly isn't - the hinge on mine is significantly more sticky than my previous MacBook Pro Retina, which was in turn much more solid than my MacBook Air (at it's best), and when that hinge got wobbly they replaced it.
I have two colleagues that both got 13" MBPE (MBP Escape button version) and none of the screens are wobbly by any means. They are perfectly weighted like the previous versions if not better. 15" may be slightly different due to size, but it shouldn't wobble.
We use JIRA so by default we are shoe-horned into Stash/Bitbucket. I've used gitlab on my own and found it beyond easy to use and very reliable. I see gitlab people posting every once and a while on hacker news and they seem very interested in improving the product overall. Contrasted with Atlassian who seems to have no interest in improving their core product and only enabling new revenue-driving products or costly extensions. So thanks.
I got into professional game development in the last few years and found that the state of good, modern software engineering practices in the game world is years behind, say, web engineering.
Games are still all closed source. Game engineers prefer to sell their components for a pittance (for example, on the Unity Asset Store) instead of collaborating on GitHub. They really, really hate writing tests. There's a deep reliance on manual testing. They still have a "ship" culture ("who cares about the code, as long as we ship by the deadline?"), disregarding the fact that games run live for years now. Multiple managers actively fought me on doing code reviews (I was new-ish, I wanted my code to be reviewed). I saw and worked on games that had no codified version control branching strategy. No coding standards. Multiple issue tracking systems. A pathetic grip on sharing code among projects. Four implementations of a state machine in one game. It goes on.
I'd like to think it was just my employer's problem, but from talking to people who have been in games for a long time, it's endemic to the industry.
I still remember suggesting code reviews to my dev manager in 2003-ish. He didn't know what they were, and scheduled a meeting where he could review my performance, instead. Awkward.
Surely this will prevent determined people from ever getting phones without giving out personally identifiable information! And customers who buy these phones to call home certainly already have SSNs or drivers' licenses.
I've got some nostalgia for Yahoo Games. Here's an anecdote I've posted elsewhere:
I was on a phone interview to be a software engineer for a web game company in ~2013. The interview went very well. At the end I asked what I'd be working on, and they said blackjack.
I said, "Didn't Yahoo solve that problem in the 90s?"
I particularly enjoyed this tetris-style game called Yahoo! Towers, which had powerups and a great multiplayer. I would bug my friends to learn to play it so we could all play it together. It was great.
When I was working my first job as a tech at a weather forecasting firm, I started playing around with Perl for the first time. I gradually automated most of the tasks in my job, after which I got to play Yahoo Games for 2 hours a day. There's not really much else to do at 5 AM, but at least I got to enjoy the virtue of my laziness.
Agreed. I just signed up to try out GitLab and went to browse GitLab's own source code to see what they were using. First thing: Rails, clearly. Second thing: Holy crap, I have to scroll this much on my laptop to browse their project? The amount of whitespace is bonkers. A bit of googling tells me that they made this change a few months ago with GitLab 8.0, but the bug report about the whitespace seems to have been ignored.
I really like what GitLab is doing, but I also really like a powerful web-based repository browser (search tool included). Hopefully they just went a bit wild with the UI and they'll rein it in. (I also checked Preferences and they have a switch for fixed vs. fluid layout, so maybe they've been responsive to UI-change revolt in the past?)
At my company, we'd call the position the author is interviewing for "QA Lead". We subcontract QA testers, so they're not responsible for managing people beyond making sure work gets done.
I think these are great questions for QA leads, not the person who manages them.
The paranoid voice in my head is wondering if these forms don't actually opt me out of anything, and instead just confirm to these companies that the information they have on me is correct.