is he STILL at it?

yeah I went to Tennessee on holiday in 2017 (from Scotland) and thought I'd managed to time it perfectly for a brood emerging, but one of the locals said it was a yearly occurrence. It was still fantastic to hear that constant background noise

before reading "is it malware?" after reading "it was malware"

:'(, 61 is no age at all

Crypto by Steven Levy is a great overview of the history of modern cryptography, but Serious Cryptography by JP Aumasson is an excellent technical place to start - if he's interested in coding things up it has a lot of useful examples and walkthroughs

it's certainly not as popular as I'd presumed it was going to be. I was on it for a while but didn't have the same level of engagement with it as I had with twitter, it was a much quieter place. I presumed it was just because twitter had managed to turn everyone off the idea of that level of engagement, but I then set up accounts on Mastodon and BlueSky, and between the two found almost everyone I'd valued on twitter. Bluesky's UI is rubbish but its nice to be able to have conversations again

I'm still happy letting people do code submissions at home. The important thing is that the candidate understands the code and can explain the thinking behind it. I also tend to use the follow-up interview to ask them how to extend it in various ways, but that's been my standard approach for a while.

"Rich students at prestigious organisations are delighted to work for nothing for now in order to get a paid role later" - fixed that. It's nothing new

yes I love coding and would totally do it again - but I would maybe pay more attentions to design patterns than I did the first time around.

I would also sigh and focus on javascript over other languages. It's such a bad 'main' language but it's everywhere, and it's good to have a handle on the idosyncracies.