I hope my first reply didn’t come off as defensive - I did not mean for it to. I think I actually agree with you to a large degree.

I agree that most bootcamps/YouTube courses are probably not enough by themselves, in most cases.

I switched careers in my late 30s. So, I had over 20 years at the hobbyist level to build on. Also, law school definitely taught me how to teach myself things. For me, YouTube and Udemy were a big help to fill in gaps and help organize things I had been learning in a more piecemeal way over the years.

But you’re right - it’s so important to continue learning things after entering the profession. I have made a lot of efforts to try to do that, including going back and learning concepts I have been told are part of most CS degree programs.

So, I’m trying!

Yeah… I’m a software engineer that came to it from a non-traditional path. I did finish college, law school, and practiced law for years before I switched careers.

But I was always a serious hobbyist in IT/programming since I was a kid. When I decided to switch careers, yeah I did a lot of learning (filling in gaps) on platforms like Udemy and YouTube. You can learn a LOT on those platforms if you do a little work and figure out who the reputable instructors are. I found it to be a lot of very practical instruction but also plenty of CS theory available too.

Turns out, it’s a lot like college - the experience is what you make it in many ways.

I have a senior engineer position these days and, sure, I still have a little imposter syndrome sometimes. But my co-workers who have CS degrees insist I’m not missing much and that they often forget I don’t have one until I make a self-deprecating joke about it.

Show me a Montgomery Scott or Miles O’Brien and we can talk…

The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…

Man, I hate it when that happens.

Right, it’s Sisko’s “It’s easy to be an angel in paradise…” from season 1. That’s the main theme of the whole show - how do the Federation’s ideals hold up in significantly less than ideal conditions? What does it mean to be “the good guys” when all of the choices in front of you are varying degrees of bad?

People always mention the later seasons, understandably so, but it carries through the entire series. In some ways, it’s even more prominent in the early seasons when DS9 is portrayed as being pretty remote, Federation back up is far away, the main cast is own their own, and the Cardassian fleet is always nearby.

Hmmm, interesting. I like brew, for sure. And devcontainers worked ok for me when I was working on something by myself.

But as soon as I started working on a side project with a friend, who uses Ubuntu and was not trying to develop inside a container, things got more complicated and I decided to just use brew instead. I’m sure I could have figured it out, but we are both working full time and have families and are just doing this for fun. I didn’t want to hold us up!

Our little project’s back end runs in a docker compose with a Postgres instance. It’s no problem to run it like that for testing.

Maybe a re-read of the documentation for devcontainers would help…

Personally, I have found the developer experience on Bluefin-dx (the only one I’ve tried…) to be…. mixed.

VSCode + Devcontainers, which are the recommended path, are pretty fiddly. I have spent as much time trying to get them to behave themselves as I have actually writing code.

Personally, I’ve resorted to using Homebrew to install dev tools. The CLI tools it installs are sandboxed to the user’s home directory and they have everything.

It’s not containers - I deploy stuff in containers all the time. But, at least right now, the tooling to actually develop inside containers is kind of awkward. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.

I think the ublue project is fantastic and I really like what they are doing. But most of the world of developer tooling just isn’t there yet. Everything you can think of has instructions on how to get it going in Ubuntu in a traditional installation. We just aren’t there yet with things like Devcontainers.

It’s about time!

Yes, though traditional point-and-click GUI apps will also be rendered according to the same rules.

However, a lot of fans of tiling window managers also use things like terminal-based file mangers, have relatively well developed Neovim configs, etc.

So, it’s kind a whole THING that some folks really enjoy.

Veronica is awesome and deserves a bigger following, no doubt.

I used two self-tapping sheet metal screws when we moved from a single-plate-on-the-back state to a double-plate state.

There’s no holder but…. That’s pretty much decorative anyway.

I use Aurora (the KDE version) as a software dev/ gaming machine. It’s great!

Nothing is temporary. Every script, patch, application, and duct tape MacGyver/Scotty inspired fix I’ve ever written will run for eternity….

Yeah, I do all my development in WSL2 (Ubuntu) at work every day. I use VSCode on the Windows 11 host. It’s great!

Would I prefer to use Linux natively? Sure, but I also have to support some Windows-only legacy code and a D365 environment or two, so Windows makes sense.

C seems like an awfully painful way to write the CRUD apps most of us spend our time on.

And any performance gains would be invisible in most situations where network I/O is the biggest bottleneck (almost) regardless of the language used.

Yes, please!

I write C# for a living and I’m the same - Windows at work, Linux at home.

I use VSCode on both OSes. On Linux, I only use VSCode for C# and I have the MS-free version for any other languages I want to use.

I also use VSCode 95% on my work laptop which is a Windows machine. The extension Ms are really good and the dotnet CLI is pretty robust. There are also extensions that can help you deploy stuff to Azure too.

Yeah, I’m a Pop user and like what they do with Gnome now. I can’t wait to see what it’s like when the desktop isn’t limited by the Gnome extension system.

How is it that no one has mentioned the Star Trek Starfleet Command series???

Starfleet Command Orion Pirates is a fantastic game and one of my favorites of all time!