Read other people’s code… particularly code by experienced developers. One good way to do that is to single-step debugging through the test code in a well-known package, stepping into the code being tested.

I suppose if you don’t know how test frameworks like pytest work, tackling how they work and how to do single-stepping with some toy example code will be a prerequisite for the above, as will spending some time studying how packages are made. (The latter may seem unattractively tedious, but the knowledge will pay off even if you never become an expert at making your own packages.)

These exercises are very likely to expose weaknesses in your understanding of all sorts of things. Be patient and keep studying!

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

Published in the Journal of Improbable Research?

I didn’t say it was unobtainable. But it might look/behave quite different than the tools you are currently using.

As for Microsoft Exchange, I only use that for work, and my employer would not allow me to connect from my personal machine anyway. I am not saying that you that you have to give up your favorite tools… but I am saying that it you are putting up so many fences then you might as well stay with what you have.

No.

If you ever so carefully paint yourself into a corner then the corner is where you will be stuck. How badly do you want out of your corner?

There are FOSS and SAAS options that could work if you wanted them to… but whether they will depends on you.

Meat eaters trying to become vegetarian for ethical reasons often fail because the “un-meat” options out there don’t meet their standards. Success almost always requires some letting go and re-adjusting. If you are not open to that then don’t force yourself to put up with something you don’t really want.

I would say you are lucky. I lived in my college town for 20years and it started out chock full of co-ops in the 80s and by the time I moved away they were all hardly recognizable or gone. Food co-ops, housing co-ops, internet co-ops… all mutated away from shared labor or were replaced by sole ownerships.

My wife works for an employee-owned engineering company, but they are anything but FOSS in their culture.

I hope these intermediate management structures that combine expertise and collective ownership grow more. But it still isn’t a slam-dunk that should be assumed to be the stupidly-obvious approach unless such organizations compete with the grifters… and then their success won’t be due to the fact that they are using FOSS but that they present a track record of success as an organization.

… and there are a gazillion examples where no community forms and the founder burns out. Cheers where it works, but some projects aren’t sexy enough to attract a self-sustaining community, and when you don’t preselect success stories but choose according to external needs that hit-and-miss experience starts to look less obvious and more like the thing only “smart” people can succeed at.

My objection is to the idea that FOSS is easy… it does require some smarts to succeed with.

Don’t get me wrong… I am all for FOSS and I avoid walled gardens, but people have a hard time remembering to take the trash out to the street on the right day. Spending time driving garbage trucks monthly in the local waste management Co-op is not going to fly well. That problem gets solved using money… homeowners are taxed and the local government either hires garbagepeoples directly, or more often they hire a company that takes care of the problem.

Upshot there is money rather than co-op ownership, and frequently for-profit contractors win the day over government ownership. Contractors supply GaaS, we just have to get the bin to the street. So the equivalency here is the need for the public institution known as city government to retain ownership of the waste management system. Not quite “the people”, since getting co-op volunteers is, well, erratic at best. And there are a ridiculous number of people out there who are vehemently against government management of actual organizations like this. I am for it, but over and over I see “privatization” win elections.

So I am not seeing how pitching this as “stupidly obvious” will win when “obvious” means hiring a contractor nearly every time.

I see discussion under blocked individuals using Connections. Maybe related to the client?

I know, I am just someone on the Internet, but I was acquainted with someone who fasted for 40 days… twice (a little over a year apart I think)… in pursuit of some kind of spiritual enlightenment. He started out a little on the heavy side, and ended up, well, emaciated. Anyway, he did have water, which is where I think this woman’s story falls apart.

bit of a cutthroat way to characterize what you “like”. Might actually make the interviewer downvote you for threatening their position.

Having used the web version of Office at my job, I know I would not pay for it. It is compatible-ish, but severely lacking in features, enough so that I don’t trust it to render properly or maintain the formatting entered using the desktop app. If that is good enough then there are lots of alternatives.

NPR sez Florida law would disallow him voting, but he wasn’t convicted in Florida, so they defer to the law in the state where he was convicted. New York allows felons to vote up until they are imprisoned, which doesn’t seem likely to happen before election day since he is appealing. Skin of teeth again.

…especially the knowledge that your gold was taken.

Way too late for that. Every language I know makes some kind of auto conversion for numeric comparisons… and sometimes for strings as well.

I stopped buying phones from carriers 15 years ago for this very reason.

Using sudo when it isn’t necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su… Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files… and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental “sudo rm -rf /” command.

Seriously… sudo is not a “habit” to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.

Noob question?

You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.

It is amazing how much you can learn when the only way to get OpenOffice working is to troubleshoot outdated C syntax errors in the output generated while compiling with clang. Time solves even the most abstruse problems, whether you planned for it or not.

jk

Nope. When you use sqrt to solve y=x^2 , you are expected to recognize that sqrt is only the inverse of the right branch of the parabola. Likewise, arcsin is only the inverse of the sine limited to +/-pi/2, so you have to use it intelligently as a tool, not blindly as a black box.