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Are Chrome extensions still a thing? Probably not but here’s what I have installed. ‘Improve YouTube!’ (Video & YouTube Tools)🎧 because I want YouTube on steroids. I customized the play and made sure I’m always watching the absolute highest quality available. Rotating videos and the screenshot tool are now things I couldn’t live without. Authenticator for 2FA codes. Bitwarden - Free Password Manager is my password manager of choice. If you aren’t using a password manager in this day and change, please start now.

If you ever need an iCal format of the Berlin school holidays calendar (or any other states in Germany), you can go visit this website to get a URL https://www.schulferien.org/deutschland/ical/ And then in Google Calendar you can add it on this page https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/settings/addbyurl The only downside is that you have to do it once a year.

The best way to install Python in Linux when you’re operating system doesn’t support the version you want to install is by using a tool called pyenv. The reason why I am writing this is because I decided to take action this Sunday on this Home Assistant warning that says “Support for Python 3.9.2 is being removed. This stops working in version 2023.2. Please address before upgrading.” sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y python3.

In Germany, it’s quite easy to know what the possible lowest price for an item is as many companies aggregate all the pricing information for us. Take note of these URLs, replace ITEMNAME with the name of the product you are going to buy: https://www.mydealz.de/search?q=ITEMNAME https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/MainSearchProductCategory.html?q=ITEMNAME https://keepa.com/#!search/3-ITEMNAME https://geizhals.eu/?fs=ITEMNAME&hloc=de https://www.mein-deal.com/?s=ITEMNAME That’s it!

Home network v1 is finally done! What’s interesting is that my wife Cess felt that the connection wasn’t exactly “legal” given how pushy Telekom was to get a “compatible router” which, as you may guess, is Telekom-branded too. Here’s my experience. Before we moved in, I should’ve gotten an Internet contract A MONTH BEFORE. The signup form asks you for a date, but expect that to never be true as they will not confirm for another week.

My company offered Home24 discount through Corporate Benefits. We bought this Amla dining table which is quite affordable on top of the discount. After it was delivered, we wanted to quickly assemble it as we were still using my office desk as our dining table that time. Quickly we realized that it was missing the “red plastic bag” that had all the screws and the assembly instructions. We tried calling the support hotline but it was only German and quite hard to understand.

Another aspect of German bureaucracy: in a time when Apple wallet exists, I have several physical cards I have to put in my wallet. visa - Aufenthaltserlaubnis bank’s “Mastercard” debit card not carrying this anymore after adding it to my Apple Wallet bank’s “girocard” debit card - for withdrawing cash VBB fahrCard or public transport subscription card public health insurance card library card Payback card for points Convini vendo card for my quick office lunches office decided not to renew them anymore!

I have never considered a bike as a car replacement until we moved here in Germany. Cargo bikes are everywhere. E-bikes are everywhere. E-Cargo bikes are godsend. I once saw a family of 4 riding a Babboe bike. I hope that was electric. I was looking for a Tern GSD bike at first. Tern is a US bike brand and it seems pricey to get one in EU. But it was exactly what I was looking for: great reviews and I could load my kids and/or my wife.

Agile thinking is the opposite of thinking like an engineer. When we see a cool, new framework, we think about all the problems in our daily life that it can solve. Including the problems that doesn’t exist (yet). This is our engineering mind. When shown a hammer, we look at everything as a nail. Agile thinking is about focusing on the problem. Who are you solving this for? When that problem is done, what happens?

In English: Out of sight, out of mind. We are worried about things. About uncertainties. We are worried about the future but future always come even if we worry or not. We need to put our worries out of sight. To do that, we need to unlearn things. Unlearning both the good and bad things. Everything we thought is good and is working brought us to this perception. We need to unlearn everything.

Google dorks to find apartments in Germany: inurl:wohnungsfinder <cityname> - Google:Berlin, DuckDuckGo:Berlin inurl:wohnungssuche <cityname> - Google:Berlin, DuckDuckGo:Berlin These usually nets you websites of companies that manage many apartments, e.g. Müller Merkle Immobilien.

Is it worth hiring a Quality Assurance (QA) tester in your team? This is a common question to everyone who have tried building development teams. In my previous company, we were mostly following DevOps culture principles and DORA metrics. Every team has the option to hire a QA or not and in our team’s case, we opted out so we are purely developers (and one product manager) in the team.

Total cost: S$192.8 ($145 or ~₱7,000) Components: Dell 22" Touchscreen Monitor S2240T - S$66 Raspberry Pi 400 - S$113 Micro HDMI to HDMI - S$7 SanDisk microSD 32GB - S$6.80 The USB-C PD adaptor I use is from my broken RPi4 so it’s free. The S2240T also comes with an audio out jack where I use my old ATH-M50. You can also use a bluetooth speaker with the Raspberry Pi 400.

Imagine a mini computer with a cardboard case running a very bare distribution of GNU/Linux stored in a 4GB micro SD card. It comes with a cable that has an HDMI connector on one end and on the other is an HDMI/RCA combo connector. The machine has two USB ports where you connect a keyboard and a mouse. It has a wifi chip and an ethernet port for internet connectivity. It comes with 512MB of RAM.

I’m a big fan of file sharing, but not through cloud storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. There’s so much bloat on their UIs that sways from the intent of just sharing a file to someone. I thought of managing my own FTP server but paying something monthly for the few occasions I’m going to share a file doesn’t sound like a good idea. Then came IBM cloud and their free offerings.

I have now successfully setup a development environment on my gaming desktop (Windows 10) that I am able to use for any programming language I choose. All that I needed to do was install Visual Studio Code and the Remote SSH extension. I am essentially connecting to a remote Linux machine and only doing the code editing in Windows. Others might consider this cheating but I think this is a lot better than setting up WSL especially with Docker containers (I don’t want VMs in Windows.

Disclaimer: You might find this elitist, but there is no intent whatsoever to discriminate anyone of a specific background. This is solely based on my experience working with software/test engineers of different skill levels across 3 companies and spending the last 4 years doing recruitment, interviewing hundreds of developers. In my opinion, the Philippine tech industry is catching up skill-level-wise, albeit slowly, to Singapore and Hong Kong tech hubs. The (majority of) push is not coming from the supply of tech talent though (the programmers) but more from the tech companies (usually from abroad) opening offices here and creating a demand for higher quality software engineers.