The Life of a Professional Programmer: Reflections from 26 Years on the Job As a journalist, I have interviewed many professionals in various industries, but rarely do I come across someone with such a long and diverse career as a programmer. In a recent post on Hacker News, a professional programmer shared their reflections on marking 27 years in the field, with over 40 years of programming experience overall. The post reveals the evolution of their career, moving from small companies to big corporations, from being a programmer to a manager, team lead and CTO, and back to a programmer and software architect again.

Python: A versatile but imperfect language Python is a language that has been gaining popularity for many years now. Its versatility has made it a favourite of developers who need to explore different areas of computing. However, this versatility comes with certain drawbacks. One of the main criticisms of Python is that its typing system is not as developed as those of other languages. Some developers assert that if you must use types, you should use another language altogether. However, this misses the point that Python is not meant to be the best at anything, but rather good at most things. Optional typing is available, and it can offer decent safety if needed. You can approach quick scripting or design in a shell or commit a public API into a file, and you can start with untyped code and add some later. These features make Python a versatile language.

Writing a browser from scratch is no small feat, but it’s something that has been done before. From the open source project Uzbl to the more recent Nyxt, these browsers have sought to revolutionize our interactions with the web. However, there are still some major issues with these projects that need to be addressed. The issue of keyboard layouts is one of the most important things that needs to be taken into account when creating a new browser from scratch. As we’ve seen from projects like Vim and Nyxt, many browsers are designed only for US keyboards and thus become unusable on other layouts like QWERTZ or even custom 20% HIQPK layout numpads. This makes it difficult for people who use other languages or different keyboard layouts to use these browsers effectively and can cause a lot of frustration.

Credit card rewards: A regressive tax on the poor? Visa and Mastercard, the world’s largest payment processing networks, have long been the target of criticism for their high interchange fees. Interchange fees are the charges that merchants pay to accept credit and debit cards as forms of payment. Typically, these fees, which are levied by the card issuer and passed on to the merchant, range from 1.5% to 3% of the transaction amount.

The proliferation of electronic gadgets is a major environmental issue in the modern world, but few people really stop to think about it. The latest “memory-in-pixel lcd device” is a perfect example of this trend. On paper, the device looks great: it has a much better refresh rate and power consumption than e-paper devices, and its low power consumption makes it theoretically capable of running on battery power for weeks.