Internationally where? In Europe we care more about the people US kills with their shitty healthcare and gun laws than some false flag excuse to reoccupy Iraq oil
They strayed too far from the core product and had to be cut. I consider it a sensible decision from a budget perspective? How much does it make sense for a nonprofit to fund a growing language? Now corps can spend their money on Rush instead directly
"Our former system administrator is extremely uncooperative and very confrontational" or "we need to decrypt valuable customer data that we can't afford to rebuild and this is driving us towards bankruptcy" are the kind of words that make most educated people very much unwilling to help, no matter how much money you promise them ;).
It's not a matter of principle, it's a matter of headaches. It's very unlikely that a customer like that would pay enough to make it worthwhile.
There’s plenty of people willing to work at any price point. Just because a $200/hr consultant dismisses the request, a $10/hr one can probably still figure it out.
However if the alternative is bankruptcy I think there IS money to be spent on the solution.
That is also assuming you have the time, the resources, and the general knowledge to pick out a great contractor whom you can trust with the security and safety of a critical system.
^ This. When someone approaches you saying things like "our former sysadmin is confrontational and unhelpful", you don't just have to solve whatever problem the guy who ragequit can't solve. You also have to undo the damage made by the asshole who's contacting you after they tried to solve it themselves, and sometimes by the one or two unqualified people they tried to hire afterwards.
You know how employers are skeptical to hire people who start the interview by saying how awful their last/current workplace was/is? Same here. I've definitely met hundreds of developers or sysadmins that I wouldn't trust, and whose services I wouldn't recommend. I've definitely been wrong and hired some of them myself. But I would never say something like that in public. At the end of the day, who's the smartass that hired these people in the first place? I get it's frustrating but such is life, you still have to be professional about it.
Plus, 200 USD/hour for a quick fix looks like a great deal, but even if the fix itself takes one hour, it's rarely a one-hour job with customers like these. You routinely end up invoicing for less time than you spend deflecting their attempts to negotiate the bill, explaining why it took one hour and itemizing it, and getting them to pay the stupid invoice.
Damn I hope I never have to leave gmail and bother with this self setup crap. Would you self hosting guys feel silly if gmail existed in 30 years and you wasted all this time doomsday prepping for nothing?
You could have best of both worlds: Hook up a private domain to GSuite. If Gmail starts sucking the next 30 years you can move it to the next best thing :)
GSuite isn't free anymore for most though (only for grandfathered in domains). For some the cost is negligible, but it depends.
But ya for me the piece of mind is worth it. The serious risk, as you allude, is probably not gmail disappearing, it's gmail getting worse in any number of ways.
I stopped using Gmail because I decided email was too mission critical for me to trust Google with. I'm now with fastmail and appreciate the fact I can port my email elsewhere easily should I choose to do so. No regrets!
But I'd be pretty fucked if google decided to ban me back when my gmail address was the email address I used for everything.
As for self host, you know that person said they pay for email right? We log in to fastmail the same way you log in to gmail. It's no hassle just a low cost instead of free. Iirc getting it to use my personal domain was a copy and paste job that took like 15 seconds.
Holy shit the amount of made up things you just wrote. "Systematic code review adds friction"? At Microsoft we switched from Perforce or whatever the old centralized system was to gitfs and productivity tripled. We didn't have to manage dumb zip files anymore. We already had code review because what is wrong eith you why wouldn't you have it. Why does continuous integration contradict feature branching? How do you have stable versions of the software if you have unfinished features and hacking in the master version?? I guess this makes sense for very small teams early in the development process but then you can just skip feature branching in git for a while. Git is a godsend
> Why does continuous integration contradict feature branching?
With feature branching, you wait as long needed before the feature is finished. You can only merge when it is fully finished. This goes directly against the continuous integration philosophy of committing early and often.
> How do you have stable versions of the software if you have unfinished features and hacking in the master version?
It requires a strong commitment to ensure that the current state of the code remains healthy (strong unit tests,...). New in-progress features can remain disabled through feature flags, not showing the corresponding UI or not calling the code.
> I guess this makes sense for very small teams early in the development process but then you can just skip feature branching in git for a while.
What is the point of disabled features in master except to not have to have feature branches. Making sure it compiles? You aren't really using those code paths are you? You should have unit tests on your feature branch anyways
