After convincing my employer to move away from MS office

I'm curious how you managed that

Modern Java is exciting. I choose it willingly for personal projects. And it remains my preference for professional ones.

I feel that setting up and administering Linux is still out of reach for most people. But for day to day use? Considering most of that is web browsing? It's totally there.

I'm actually kinda astonished at how polished the GNOME desktop environment is

Peer to peer payments are going away

FreeTaxUSA is free for federal. They charge (a reasonable amount) to file state taxes.

For me it was the UI. Replies to comments on Lemmy are offset by, like, a single pixel. They're more obvious here. Yup, that was the biggest thing for me.

Happy Linux desktop user right here!

I guess Java saw the writing on the wall and shifted into high gear. The rate of language development has shot up. Check out all these changes to the language.

I get the sense that the people who think these out are smart and deliberate. I like deliberate.

And there's more coming. Value classes (custom, compound primitives is my understanding) is only one example. The fact that that document even exists is exciting to me. I like reading the instruction manuals for my tools!

The standardized documentation, the culture, the tools, the libraries. After stumbling around C++ all of that was a breath of fresh air. Java is a joy for me. I've been doing it since the 1.1, 1.2 days.

And so y'all know, right now I'm being paid to write Kotlin. I fully intend to integrate its styles and idioms. I get why people like it. Every now and then I do go, "Huh. That's neat." I'd still pick Java over it if I were given a choice. But I gotta pay the bills.

You can pay friends with Pay. You can't do that with Wallet.

I'm actually Latino and I don't hate Latinx. I feel it comes from a good place and I also feel genderless language is important.

I'm gettin there myself; I took a closer look at Lemmy the other day. But man do I prefer the UI of Kbin.

I'll take the compliment, thank you!

When I do it on my terms, yes, I do enjoy Java in particular and programming in general. A lot. At a certain level it's not complicated or mystical at all. All you're really doing is simple math (adding, subtracting, etc) on numbers, bunching them into representations that make sense for your problem (how a point is an x coordinate and a y coordinate, for example), moving little arrows that point to said representations, etc. You combine these very simple primitives into a predictable system that solves whatever you're working on. Yeah, you do have to be able to abstract this in your brain. Pictures on paper helps sometimes; I do that myself.

I come in with a maintainability mindset. I enjoy writing simple, to the point, straightforward code that most importantly, I can read and understand in 10 years. Java's "verboseness" is a feature in that respect. Have you tried maintaining someone else's Kotlin? Forgetaboutit.

Yes

I do have a smartphone but I tend to only use it as a consumption device. I prefer to use a laptop connected to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse to produce stuff.

I prefer the laptop even for simple things like filling out online forms

This is sad news but I respect your decision. Thank you for what you've done for this community.

I learned dependency injection as I went along in my engineering career and I've become a huge fan of it. And yeah, I strongly prefer to do it "manually" without relying on a framework.

I push hard for it in code reviews

I recently watched it and didn't regret doing so. Picard was way more fun for me than Reddit had me thinking it was going to be.

Debian testing

I'm in a Discord server. I'd love for some folks in there to try out Matrix but I'm too scared to ask. Even if I wasn't there's still the issue of Matrix being too techie.

I would call Coherence (2013) grounded scifi. It had been out for a while before I discovered it and I absolutely loved it. Watch it, but go in completely cold.