I'm considering to build a powerful, small/semi-portable mini-ITX PC. Just small box you can easily travel with, kinda like a laptop but a lot cheaper and without a screen, keyboard and battery - I can't really work on laptops anyway (ergonomics!). Stuffed with something like a 4400G when Renoir (mainstream Zen2) comes out, so lots of processing power. Add 32GB+ RAM and one or two SSDs.

I'd say the reason is that I might work from abroad (remotely) next year, but honestly, it just gives me an excuse to break my piggy bank!

What do you think?

Toilets and race conditions!

A co-worker asked me what issues multi-threading and shared memory can have. So I explained him that stuff with the lock. He wasn't quite sure whether he got it.

Me: imagine you go to the toilet. You check whether there's enough toilet paper in the stall, and it is. BUT now someone else comes in, does business and uses up all paper. CPUs can do shit very fast, can't they? Yeah and now you're sitting on the bowl, and BAMM out of paper. This wouldn't have happened if you had locked the stall, right?

Him: yeah. And with a single thread?

Me: well if you're alone at home in your appartment, there's no reason to lock the door because there's nobody to interfere.

Him: ah, I see. And if I have two threads, but no shared memory, then it is as if my wife and me are at home with each a toilet of our own, then we don't need to lock either.

Me: exactly!

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

So basically there's this guy, that work with us that relocated from a small village south of Italy to the city where we have the HQ.

So after a while this guy has found a girlfriend here and after few days we discovered that he never had sex in his life. you may ask, how did you discover it? Yes, basically he disappeared for a week, his phone was off, no slack, no Facebook, nothing. We couldn't contact him in any way. After a week he gave a call to our cto saying sorry about what happened and explaining that he spent the whole week having sex with his girl, day and night. This story has also a good end because he still has his job.

Best Buy sneaking in a recruitment ad in the response header when their servers were sucking ass.

Best computer/hacking/tech TV and movies?

I'll start the list with some of my favorites.

1. Hackers
2. The Net
3. Jumpin Jack Flash
4. Antitrust
5. Swordfish
6. Wargames
7. Mr Robot

Anyone else?