'Coon Cave

The problem with coding bootcamps is pretty much that their business model revolves around analyzing the skill requirements for high income jobs, building courses to re-train career jumpers to meet these requirement, then hunt for low income people with big dreams, but little patience, that can be piped through the system.

Naturally, those courses always consist of the latest hype in programming languages and frameworks, but little else. That’s not teaching how to program, that’s just teaching how to cheat past job interviews and hoping for the graduate to stay employed long enough to pay off tuition.

In other words: coding bootcamps are a matchmaking service for people with unrealistic expectations on both sides.

The thing about luring low income career jumpers into coding bootcamps is that, contrary to what market and politicians belief, you can’t simply re-train anyone to be a programmer in the same way you can’t just turn anyone into an Olympic athlete. Learning a programming language is not the same as learning how to program in the same sense as knowing how to hold a paintbrush doesn’t make you an artist. Creativity is not something that can be taught.

Writing software requires abstract thinking and problem solving skills. Coding bootcamps cater to a clientele that prefers to follow step-by-step instructions and is mainly motivated by the prospect of a higher income. So, what could possibly go wrong when we use money to bait people, with a mechanical way of thinking and a willingness to take shortcuts, into that career path, then switch by telling them that they don’t quite cut the mustard, to actually earn an engineer’s wage, were mainly hired to do grunt work and are utterly replaceable, but should probably stick around to pay off their tuition fees?

Yes, of course, I am heavily prejudiced against micro degrees. Why would I not be? That’s basically telling low income people that they could embark on an engineering career within a fraction of the time and employers that they could hire an engineer for a fraction of the cost. Obviously you can’t make that proposal with a straight face when both parties are present in the same room and those who buy the pitch deserve each other anyway, but comeon!

Would anybody take a “doctor” serious who says that he used to deliver pizzas and didn’t attend med school because 4 years of studying is way to long, but he really wanted the higher income, so he signed up for a bootcamp where they trained him to handle scalpels in a matter of weeks? That’s the level of ridiculous, everyone involved in bootcamps sounds.

Just had an argument with a career jumper about signing up for a coding bootcamp and becoming a software developer. Sure software engineers are in high demand and well paid, but here’s the catch: you can’t become an engineer in a couple of weeks (a degree course takes 9+ semesters) and therefore won’t land one of those jobs. If anything, you demonstrate willingness to take shortcuts which is precisely what you are not suppose to do as an engineer. So basically you just pay tuition fees to be rushed through the latest hype and be useless to the industry upon graduation.

Of course, there are also those bootcamps where the course comes bundled with a job offering, but the thing to understand here is that you are not trained for a(ny) job in the software industry, but exactly this job. You graduate with the narrow skillset that particular employer is looking and willing to pay for. In other words, you end up locked into the job no one else wanted.

So, Google Analytics is now illegal to use in France and Austria, with other European countries likely to follow suit. Not sure, a lot of people understand the gravity of what that means. Analytics is at the core of Google’s business. It not only powers personalized ads, but also things like search and Youtube suggestions. This is going to ripple back and forth: less websites using Analytics means less profiling, leading to less relevant video suggestions, fewer videos watched, fewer ads seen (and clicked!) and less money earned.

That’s Google’s (as well as Youtube influencer’s) problem though. The more interesting problem is that Analytics is not only used for tracking on websites, but within Android Apps as well (and it is much more pervasive there). The Playstore doesn’t allow for distributing different APKs based on country, but it does allow for restricting apps on a per country level.

The EU cannot tell Google to shut down the Analytics backend (that’s US turf), but it can tell the company to restrict access to apps, integrating Analytics, in its territory.

Blockchain is not the answer. It is the question and the answer is always: NO!

Come on, it is a no brainer. Even if there was a meaningful application for the technology, it would always mean legitimizing a giant waste of resources/environmental pollution and accepting crypto scams as the cost of operation.

I just had a horrible business idea:

1. Create a shitty, low effort Android app (dunno, something like a weather widget, horoscope, or calculator knock off).
2. Publish on Play, let it rot ripen for a couple of months, then buy 100k+ installs (see email spam folder for offers), add some 5* reviews for good measure.
3. Sell that app to those asshats that keep spamming me about buying my apps for a song.

Yes, those scavengers DO annoy me. Especially when having a disclaimer in their footer, informing me that I received their offer because I subscribed to some mailing list.

Dear Santa, this year, I wish for world peace and a pony Facebook and Twitter to shut down.

Well, since Log4J has just blown up with an Armageddon level remote code execution bug and a lot of people are unhappy about having to take their servers down, I’d like to reiterate that if an open source component is mission critical for you, then consider contributing back by paying for support.

What if… social media is actually Santa’s naughty list these days?