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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you’re trying to learn.



  • I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.

    Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.

    When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.

    Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.

    We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.










  • My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn’t, SMS was fine because that’s how I was going to talk to them anyway.

    The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn’t work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

    They own and run a pretty large business. There’s no way that they’re staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they “should” do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

    Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.