Shlomi Fish

One of the kids I've met on IRC and admire, seems both very mature for his age (I think he's 14), incredibly clueful about adult stuff, and still very fun. He's been learning Perl, he jokes a lot, has had several girlfriends, and does fun stuff that I remember as a kid.

On the other hand, a certain underage girl I met on IRC (back when she turned 15), seems immature, very "heavy" for her age (i.e: takes life too seriously and does not have a lot of fun), and miserable. She's been raised as a Catholic and home-schooled and while a Linux geek, seemed very lonely. She also seemed to know the basic facts about sex, science, etc.

They are both from the USA although the boy is from Louisiana and the girl is from Pennsylvania. They both enjoyed this story of mine - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/human-hacking/ - that talks about high-school teenagers in early 2000's Los Angeles. The girl, on the other hand, thought that it was real and said that she would really like to meet one of the characters there. While I feel flattered that I'm a good writer, it has many non-realistic elements in it.

In any case, what I meant to say was that you have a point that people can stay innocent while knowing a lot. I believe I stayed innocent and a child at heart. By child at heart I don't mind that I'm immature, just that I'm excited about life, am not sarcastic, am open-minded, despise Fatalistic attitudes (including PG's), and believe that people are essentially good. However, I feel that…

> Programming a library referencing an RFC seems kind, the rules are already there.

Depends.

Is there a reference implementation? A format/protocol validator? An interoperability matrix? What's the ratio of SHOULDs and MAYs to REQUIREDs, SHALLs, and MUSTs? Does the RFC reference other RFCs? What are the answers to these questions regarding those?

I mean, I wouldn't ever describe the task of implementing a SOAP[0] or WebDAV[1] library as 'kind'.

Oh, and if you're working at a sufficiently large org, be prepared to battle it out with a competing internal implementation for the coveted position of 'company standard'.

Note that you (or your boss) may not actually want to win that battle, as internal customers will make all sorts of unreasonable demands[2], and implementing them all will cut into your real work and negatively affect your evaluations and career advancement. Also, refusing to implement those requests will get you labelled as "not a team player" and negatively affect your evaluations and career advancement.

Fun times!

[0] https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/s-stands-for-simple/

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/tobyS/webdav-the-good-the-bad-and-the-evil

[2] https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17

Gentoo has a special place in my heart as one of the earliest distros I used and one that I ended up using for many years. Days were spent compiling packages. I'm still fond of the documentation, package system, and init system, among other things, though I have switched to distros that require less effort.

It was also the distro I used when I first started contributing to an OSS project. And it was the reason why that project eventually added filters to limit what CXXFLAGS were used, since we got tired of having to debug weird bugs caused by crazy combinations of GCC flags:

https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html

And yes, I also went through a phase of having tens of options in CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Good times.

For my projects which are written in C or C++, I use cmake which can generate BSD makefiles among other targets. For some other projects (websites/etc.) I use gmake directly because they are not related to C. Since some of my makefiles (e.g: https://github.com/shlomif/shlomi-fish-homepage/blob/master/lib/make/main.mak ) have become quite large, I've started looking for better build systems - see my current research at https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/software-tools/#build .

I tried using meson for https://github.com/shlomif/mini-factor , and while it worked fine locally it turned out to require python 3.6 which made it hard to install on Travis-CI. I ended up created a complementary cmake build system.

Gentoo has continued to be one of my favorite GNU/Linux flavors because it makes me feel like I'm fully in control of my system, across package feature flags, compiler flags, init process, disk management, and window systems. It leaves you with a blank slate to truly make your own. Make no mistake--it does take significant work and understanding to do so, but for me the satisfaction is immense. On a cold winter's night, compiling dev-qt/qtwebkit can even keep you warm.

One of my favorite tongue in cheek sites from Gentoo's earlier era:

https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html