I just watched that episode last night!

It also has a great scene with O’Brien and Worf (not related to the union story) where Worf complains about things on the station being broken down all the time. O’Brien explains to him that DS9 is this weird combination of Cardassian, Bajoran, and Federation technology that was never meant to work together.

He got bored waiting for something to break on the Enterprise and says (paraphrasing) “They need me here!”

Gotta love the Chief!

Yeah, I do all my development in WSL2 (Ubuntu) at work every day. I use VSCode on the Windows 11 host. It’s great!

Would I prefer to use Linux natively? Sure, but I also have to support some Windows-only legacy code and a D365 environment or two, so Windows makes sense.

You’re damn right!

I work at a place that uses Azure to run everything (not my choice…).

Everything we have runs on Linux containers, Linux Azure functions, and a VM that runs Ubuntu.

You can run Windows on Azure but you certainly don’t have to.

Debian’s website….

I do a lot of .NET development at work (back end web APIs). It’s all done in Linux via WSL2. All my code runs in Linux containers on Azure.

Personally, I’ve always preferred Scotty with his TMP era mustache.

Why not level 2??? WHY???

I thought Voyager had great characters - it was the only reason I watched the show. I always found the premise of the show to be very uninteresting. But that’s just my personal taste.

That was my question…

About time you showed up!

I’ll be in my bunk…

I’m using 1080p at 144hz. It’s great!

I think that, in many cases, “what” and “why” are very similar to each other or are closely related.

I’ve had an experience like this on more than one occasion - I come into an established code base for the first time. I’m working on a new feature/refactor/bug fix. I am reading through a function that is relevant to me, scratching my head a bit, and thinking “I think I see what this function is doing, but why did they do it such a screwy way?” Often there are no comments to give me any clues.

In the past, I have foolishly changed the code, thinking that I knew better… But what often happens is that I soon discover why my predecessor did something that looked so weird to me. They weren’t stupid - there was a reason for it! And then I end up putting it back…

Point being, in a situation like that the “what” and the “why” are going to have a lot of overlap. So, personally, I try to write comments that highlight assumptions that won’t be obvious from reading the code, external constraints that matter but don’t actually show up in the code, and so on.

I am far from perfect at it and I probably don’t write enough comments. But when I do, I try to write comments that will be reminders to myself, or fill in gaps in context for some hypothetical new person. I try to avoid comments that literally explain the code unless it’s particularly (and unavoidably) complex.

Glory to you and your house!

“Why” comments make more sense as application complexity grows.

You also have to consider interaction of the code with other external systems - sometimes external APIs force you to write code in ways you might not otherwise and it’s good to leave a trail for others on your team (and your future self…) about what was going on there.

C seems like an awfully painful way to write the CRUD apps most of us spend our time on.

And any performance gains would be invisible in most situations where network I/O is the biggest bottleneck (almost) regardless of the language used.

Whether you use Windows or Linux, the Windows key is the foundation of many useful keyboard shortcuts. You know, hold it down plus some other key.

Whatever your preferred OS, look them up! You may find a few you would like to start using.

But yeah, on my work computer which is a Windows machine, I often use it to open the start menu and start typing the name of the app I want to launch. It’s faster than clicking on an icon somewhere if your hands are already on the keyboard.

There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!

The product may have been useless, but they had some awesome art for their advertisement!