Yeah but there’s clunky in the way where its big but still a single unit as designed and intended, and clunky when its got some extra growth hanging off the back of it like some technological parasite.

Of course, my advice is only that, and you should choose the approach that works best for you. But advice is why you came here right :)

I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.

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In the UK at least, mobile phone ownership per household was only 16% in 1996 and didn’t reach 50% until the year 2000.

To have a phone in '92 you’d need to either be wealthy or have it through a company for business.

My dad had a phone in 95 for work and it was an absolute brick.

As for mobile internet, that wasn’t really a thing until smartphones happened with the iPhone. Yes we had WAP and other precursors to the full internet but it was awful and nobody used it, ever. In 2007 I was a geeky nerd at uni doing Comp Sci and had a Windows Mobile PDA in a belt holster, with full internet! But most people didn’t have Internet until about 2009-10

If a tree falls in the woods…

Haha yep. Not the support process you want. Glad you managed to let them eat some humble pie at least.

The support process you want is this: “We’ll make you a channel on our Slack, if you’ve got any issues you can talk with our devs direct!” - yes please!

Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.

What does that advice mean to you, in practical terms? Like with an example?

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Yep, and conversely someone is a “bus risk” if they are that single critical person.

I work in IT and if you need to call someone when they are off, that’s a huge embarrassment.

Nothing should fall apart because one person on the team isn’t there. Nothing should ever be so critical that their absence is life and death. Never should there be a problem where only one person has the answers.

If you have to call someone when they’re off then you didn’t manage your team and their work properly, and you fucked up, big.