Chronic flow in an engaging project. Start on a Saturday morning, feel like a coffee since you’re a bit sleepy, notice it’s Sunday

I had a team of contractors working on some code. They had learnt in their previous jobs to document everything in the work wiki (aside from the design documents which have their own repository)

And it was good they did, since the project was put on hold due to too much mismatch between backend and front, and all the contractors were fired (a day before Xmas) leaving the useless doco as the best reference for whoever needs to resurrect our code

Ctrl+shift+k and u? I’m pretty sure it’s Ctrl+k and +u

Admin or physical access.

It’s also a new way to compromise a machine you have physical access to

You’re correct. I was confusing the two cities

Your username sounds like a way to become very caffeinated

For that to work, one must pronounce SQL as an acronym, not an initialism

Some people will be constitutionally unable to make that tune work

I’m a scrum master. Drinking now. A lot

Gotta stay at the Ballmer peak

Southern Italy is better at pizza. Florence is about the best

Ubuntu, if I need to reset it, it’ll be Debian/gnome

Linux from scratch was my third Linux, after RedHat, and Debian. That seemed a reasonable point in an interested person’s Linux journey to try a difficult “learning” system

If your budget stretches to a new laptop, framework make laptops (light weight or serious game machines) that come with Linux installed.

If you have no budget some second hand high end Chromebooks can be converted to mainstream Linux (video)

The other comments suggesting old ThinkPads are fine, but they’re heavier than I like to carry

You can make your own for just moderately expensive

Windows to KDE is a smaller change than major windows version changes. Pre-ribbon office to newer office

You know how you make the expertise in a large organisation?

You call for volunteers to run a pilot, move one team or a product to open source alternatives, learn what skills are needed in your tech people, what transition training is needed for staff

Have the pilot group select the desktop environment, change it if the choice generates too many tickets

Take that and roll it out more broadly, possibly aligned with new desktop hardware rollouts

Add to the good - you get to know that the US government couldn’t lean on a single American company for access to your organisation’s secrets

I watched the process where a set of Unix machines we had were up for replacement. The first version of the request had as the preferred option IBM hardware and Linux, the second version - after it had been to the executives - had the preferred option as IBM hardware and AIX

Like the exec knew what either were, but they would have had a consultant check the proposal. Then they pretend to have respect for the professionals they employ

I bet that company hires lawyers for law technical stuff.

It’s not all that bad. I’m sure there are as many youth keen to learn computers and they have easy access to all the tools they need to develop knowledge and skill

It’s just as we have become more knowledgeable, more capable, the difference between us and the normal people seems incredible.

But put us in an area needing different specialist knowledge and we’ll struggle like they do with computer technical stuff

We speak jargon. They don’t know the words, or if they do they use them wrong.

Also it sucks for us in IT work; when you are in an agile team and the manager two levels up doesn’t understand agile they do things like break up high performing teams (mine had been a team for four years - from the day the organisation decided to test agile) to share the people around so they can teach the others how to be high performing

Had they read anything about agile, they would know that longevity of a team is a good predictor for performances — but they wouldn’t read about agile, it’s an IT technical thing