I've been battling RSI and stuff for the past two years and am starting to make progress although it's required me to get both of my wrists fixed and potentially both of my elbows in the future.
It's easy to just say "Oh, do this workout" but it can be very difficult to do that if you either lack the time or have other health issues that prevent you from doing them.
For me, I have rods in my legs and fused ankles so even though I try to hit the treadmill regularly, doing so means I wind up in a lot of pain.
None of this has got in the way of my passion for building software, although for me there is a distinction between what I do (or want to do) in my own time vs. what I have to do for work.
It's a good day when I can really apply myself to a problem at work.
It's less great when for whatever reason, I'm prevented from being able to do a good job.
And the sad thing is that often, you're not prevented from doing a good job because of any technical or time constraint, it's usually all political.
Right. I'm not even old, I'm in my prime; I exercise and eat healthily. My working deadlift weight is about 350 pounds. I keep a dumbbell next to my chair, and I use tools like Pomodoro. Whenever I need to take a bathroom break, I also try doing some squats or push-ups.
But younger kids seem oblivious to what kind of damage this line of work does to your body, and it's pretty much unavoidable. They'd be "Ah, so what that I've been typing for fourteen hours straight? My knees are fine; I can just walk it off...". Yeah, well, try figuring out your Python dependency conflicts or broken GitHub Actions, or focus on some concurrency bug when your sciatic nerve is pinching or your neck hurts like you received a bullet straight under your shoulder blade.
I'll see how they sing their "the easiest job ever" song when they get to experience chronic pain and become nearly incapable of sitting in front of the screen, not even for forty minutes, let alone hours.
Lots of talk about removing the parenthesis, using things like Tree-Notation and such.
Really, all I can say is that you can pry the parens from my cold, dead, cantankerous hands. :P
Maybe it's because I've been playing with Lisp, in one form or another, on and off for several years.
But I never found the parens really all that bad.
It's no problem at all as long as you have basic paren matching support in whatever editor you use.
And if you happen to use an editor that supports the structured manipulation of S-expressions, well, it's a pretty neat experience.
I think the only time the parens bother me is if I print source code out. But even then, there are clear conventions on how Lisp source should be laid out and indented, so you adapt pretty quick, even in the "worst case."
As someone who has a pretty serious visual impairment, I find the attitude of so many of these comments really... disappointing.
You wouldn't believe how much effort people with poor vision have to go to, to consume the modern web.
You can't even take simple things for granted like being able to zoom. So many websites pollute their page with pointless navigation elements that block most of the content when the page is zoomed.
Or say pages that try to be elegant, centering everything with some margin. Sure, it looks "great" if no one zooms it. If you do, you wind up consuming the content in three or four word chunks...
Or even worse: Elements that have hardcoded minimum widths. When you zoom, nothing reflows and you wind up having tons of content "off screen."
At best, this is annoying because you have to constantly scroll horizontally.
At worst, you're screwed because for some bizarre reason, scroll bars never appear.
I'll wrap my rant up here but I'll leave this:
Do you really want the web to be like reality, where the needs of a few are so often ignored simply because of some trait?
"Oh, there are so few of them, why bother..."
"Oh, they don't matter because <whatever>"
Sound familiar?
I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.
The web gives us a unique opportunity to improve on the real world in so, so many ways.
I'd like to throttle the first person who ever decided that if the window width would not 'comfortably' accommodate their vision of the page, certain elements would just DISAPPEAR. Like GONE. When you have to zoom out to make hidden elements (not just hanging off the edge, as in never drawn) appear... someone has been naughty.
Just a week ago I wanted to factory-reset an old router before dumping it. Because my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector, I used my old Eeepc with a 7" display.
Everything worked just fine until I was on the page where I was supposed to press the 'Confirm' button for the factory reset. It just wasn't anywhere and I was wondering what I was missing. So I started to dig into the framesets and finally found a frame where the code looked like there was that button.
Took me a while to find out how to press it (simply opening the frame in a separate window didn't work because there was some JS magic involved). The solution was to zoom out. So much fun when a task that was supposed to take 15 minutes takes 2 hours because someone built an over-the-top web-interface.
I thew a head banging spittle-fit when laptops no longer carried RS232 ports. Then my boss handed me a 'modern' laptop without an Ethernet port. The theme seems to be, let the things evolve forward with LSI/VLSI/ChipsetBuiltins until the port costs a mere 19 cents... then drop it... to save 19 cents.
I wouldn't have any issue justifying spending reasonable time making webpages as accessible as possible (even with image replacement text, blind people are going to miss some of the info in the image), but I miss exact guides as to what that means. At present I can throw in some Aria tags, but I don't know when that is needed (can webreaders figure out that <article> means an article?) and I don't know when that is enough.
I am also not in the US, so I can't tell my boss to spend disproportionate amount of dev time on something that doesn't make money.
Drive-by poster here but I was wondering if you had spent any time looking into what IO scheduler you're using on Linux?
Some time ago I encountered issues similar to what you mention in your posts. I solved it selecting the "Deadline" IO scheduler when I built my kernel.
I've been battling RSI and stuff for the past two years and am starting to make progress although it's required me to get both of my wrists fixed and potentially both of my elbows in the future.
It's easy to just say "Oh, do this workout" but it can be very difficult to do that if you either lack the time or have other health issues that prevent you from doing them.
For me, I have rods in my legs and fused ankles so even though I try to hit the treadmill regularly, doing so means I wind up in a lot of pain.
None of this has got in the way of my passion for building software, although for me there is a distinction between what I do (or want to do) in my own time vs. what I have to do for work.
It's a good day when I can really apply myself to a problem at work.
It's less great when for whatever reason, I'm prevented from being able to do a good job.
And the sad thing is that often, you're not prevented from doing a good job because of any technical or time constraint, it's usually all political.
That's the thing that sucks most :)