I started writing code when I was 12 and started doing it professionally at 22. I'm now in my mid-30s and outside of work, I haven't written anything more than one-off scripts for my homelab in close to a decade. I'm already spending upwards of 50 hours with code each week and I need to do something else at night and on the weekends to release my brain from it. I also didn't go to school for CS, and even if I did... it was over a decade ago. So I have ~25 years of experience writing code but could not show you a single line of it. And even if I could, how would you know I was the one to write it?
This is an extremely flawed interview process in my opinion and the last time I encountered it led to an awkward scenario that led to me walking out. Personally, when I conduct interviews, it's a mix of things. We talk about your past work, I quiz you a bit on some topics you'd encounter in your day-to-day here, and then we'll spend an hour doing some combination of a code review of a working-but-flawed demo project I created, a 30-40 minute coding exercise, and/or a problem-solving scenario where I give you a problem and then we talk through how, as a pair, how we could solve it.
I don't often use Sublime for coding nowadays (I'm generally using PhpStorm) but I have it open at almost all times as a scratchpad. It's so dang quick that opening it to jot something down or examine JSON is instant. And so performant that if I forget to close it, my system is never bothered by it. And it retains unsaved files forever – a must for a scratchpad in my opinion, and something many others fail to do. Long term notes get converted to Obsidian, but Sublime is just so easy to get something quick going that I love it and happily pay for a license.
Same goes for Sublime Merge, which is the best Git GUI I've ever used.
Firefox on macOS is also completely borked. At least with my freescrolling Logitech Master MX 2. I'll scroll and it will jump the expected amount, I'll scroll some more and it will jump about 4-5x what I expect, and then I'll scroll some more and it will go backward in the page. The site is pretty much unusable for me.
This is the real key. They have an awful reputation amongst technical people (for good reason) but that reputation largely fades away the less technical you are. The average person knows them for their effective marketing, seemingly low prices, and seemingly decent products. They don't get into the weeds enough to expose how untrue those things really are.
For a long time, I worked in an office across from their (now former) headquarters in the Scottsdale Air Park. The number of clients we had come in amazed that we must work so closely with them and expecting great things made the location of the office so invaluable that when they moved to Tempe and Chandler, we had to seriously discuss internally if we needed to follow them.
Wood is incredibly cheap here in the United States. Estimates I have seen in the past is a stone home will cost 15-25% more per square foot than a wood-framed home in the same location. Making it more resistant to earthquakes (a requirement in California) raises the price even further. At the end of the day, cost will almost always win.
> Some of the homes in Pacific Palisades were 90 years old
90 years exceeds your lifespan, the lifespan of your children, and maybe the lifespan of your grandchildren depending on when in your lifetime it is built. Even if the house is never sold and is simply inherited, it is very likely that a home that age is lived in by someone the builders never met.
So if a house burns down once every 3 generations, what incentive is there to build it to be more fire-resistant? These fires are bad, yes. But LA isn't burning down once a year. LA is massive and only small chunks are affected by each fire. For reference, these fires are the most destructive in history and have destroyed an estimated 12,000+ structures throughout metro LA and Riverside. Per ChatGPT, there's an estimated 3 million buildings in LA County alone with the rest of the greater metro area (San Bernadino, Orange, Riverside, and Ventura counties) have an estimated 5 million.
So while, yes, the odds of your home burning down are elevated in metro LA, they are still quite slim. Slim enough that making the initial building even more expensive is not worth it, especially not in an area that also sees a lot of earthquakes.
> they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck
In their defense, Coffee Stain/Satisfactory makes fun of the player for absolutely everything. They always have. It's just the culture of their studio.
If you're building a system that sends out emails, you generally can't send emails locally. So you instead use a service like MailCatcher/MailHog/MailPit/Mailtrap as an SMTP server that will "catch" the emails as they are sent. Then you just open that app up and you can see what emails were sent, what their content is, who they were sent to, etc. Some of these services also include email evaluation tools for things like identifying unsupported HTML/CSS, checking image/message sizes, headers, etc.
The other use case is when you're in a staging environment. You should generally seed such environments with fake email addresses but you can never be sure those emails are truly fake, and you can never be sure what email addresses your testers are using. So you set up MailPit and A) you never send a real person a fake email accidentally and B) all testers can see all emails.
I also have whole-network blocking via AdGuard running on a Pi. AdGuard also has a hosted option and you can just run it in a Docker container on a machine on the network.
I also have WireGuard setup on my Ubiquiti network so I often will be running my machines through that when remote which blocks ads for them too.
This is an extremely flawed interview process in my opinion and the last time I encountered it led to an awkward scenario that led to me walking out. Personally, when I conduct interviews, it's a mix of things. We talk about your past work, I quiz you a bit on some topics you'd encounter in your day-to-day here, and then we'll spend an hour doing some combination of a code review of a working-but-flawed demo project I created, a 30-40 minute coding exercise, and/or a problem-solving scenario where I give you a problem and then we talk through how, as a pair, how we could solve it.