MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:
* You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
* You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
* You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.
> It would take 2 seconds for anyone at Google to confirm this.
Not really... Google is literally too big, and the fact that they've offshored and/or automated support away and compartmentalized it all where no single IC employee could possibly do much.
I had a billing/tax issue come up with my small biz Google Workspace, and I was getting nowhere via the normal support channels... So I asked my brother in-law who literally works at Google (but not in that team) for help. He could not help me as he had no idea who or what department could handle that and neither did his team members, and it would take weeks apparently to find the right person. I'm not the only paying Google customer with that experience. Google products are great, until you run into an issue you need to talk to a human.
They could have been Slack if they didn't transmogrify it into a social media platform (Google+) and then throw out the baby with the bathwater when it failed.
I’m talking about something much more fundamental, the entire company would pretty much implode within 24 hours (or at most a week) if they couldnt verify who is who.
You're really giving credit in the wrong areas. Google is impressive for its ability to exist beyond the point of dysfunction. It's simply not the case that any Googler would need to verify the identity of any other any more than it is necessary for every server to verify the identity of every other. They only need to verify the identify of the tiny subset they are communicating with at any given time. This doesn't mean everyone has access to a coherent org chart, or that one even exists.
> Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?
It's a hierarchical org chart. If you're really not sure ask Sundar.
It's likely any Googler can verify the identity of any other by looking up their username but it's unlikely that the same tool would do something like tell you how the YouTube recommendation algorithm works or who would know that.
They will know the names of frequent collaborators and something about the scope of relevant work but it's not like everyone at Google needs intimate knowledge of every workstream. At that scale it's unlikely anyone has the full picture.
We agree an org chart of some kind probably exists. We disagree on the capabilities. For example I am not confident that it has a concept of a team and if it does that a team would map to a product or feature.
Going from person to team is fairly easy, but going from team to person is hard. That is, you can often confirm a person is a member of a particular team or organization just by looking up their email address, but the reverse direction of finding the right point of contact for a particular team or organization can be difficult.
Searching for the tree root starting from a tree leaf is easy, but searching for the right leaf starting from the root takes a lot more effort.
Aside from the huge array of stuff they've built in house, the "List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet" wikipedia page has 264 entries. Some of those bought other companies.
>If googlers dont have an internal org chart they can check, then how do they verify who is on what team?
You really think some guy in some offshore office for low pay, with his boss hounding at him about his KPIs, is going to go out of his way to bother with this?
I recently started making the switch from docker (and docker compose) to using podman and quadlet, but holy crap is the documentation for podman quadlets a big f-you wall-of-text mandoc that would make Torvalds proud. I've read thru that and am still not quite sure of how to get from point A to point B.
To replace a single docker compose file, sounds like one needs to manually create a number of .container, .volume, .network, .kube files correctly so systemd can spin up a container pod? Is that what I'm reading? Is there nothing that can generate that from a docker-compose.yml?
I agree. That documentation really needs some love. But if you see the discussions on github issues about quadlet features a common theme is maintainers dismissing requests because "that shouldn't be done in production" or "that won't scale". It seems they can't wrap their head around people wanting to do simple things or someone doing things by themselves at home and not for work at a big company or corporation, and that reflects on that documentation.
Working for one myself, which does have a support contract wit Red Hat, I kinda get where they're coming from--if they make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, dumb people shoot themselves in the foot in production and they have to fix the mess later. But for that they could have a sanctioned build for clients and a community build for everybody else, just like they have Fedora and RHEL.
I've been on a quest to tame the bookmark monster. I have bookmarks (collectively over 10k probably) all spread around in different devices, different browsers on different computers, and event in text messages I sent to myself, via whatsapp/sms, over a period spanning 6-7 years.
While I'm not close done curating (the dead/expired/out-of-date links)... I needed to collect it all in one central place, and [linkding](https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding) is fitting the bill quite nicely. I'm using the tags and description field to annonate and sort the mess of bookmarks. It has a simple to use rest API, uses SQLite, and you can import/export bookmarks using the Netscape bookmarks html format. Best of all, it's OSS you can self-host on a RaspberryPi or even for free on say fly.io.
There's a whole series of ebooks by Syncfusion that are exactly what you're describing. Matter fact I think they call them the "Succintly" ebooks series because they tend to introduce a technology or topic in a short 100-200 pages. Check em out here: https://www.syncfusion.com/ebooks
I'm seeing free E-books. That $2.5k must refer to their services.
I just downloaded a free book. In the intro it says:
> Free forever. Syncfusion will be working to produce books on several topics. The books will always be free.
Any updates we publish will also be free.
Sorry for your loss. I know it's hard, and the cold computer-automated world of today will mindlessly still remind you of your loved one in a million different ways. You just gotta be patient, take a break, or perhaps delegate some of those tasks to friends or family.
Many companies don't know how or haven't thought about how to deal with the death of a user or subscriber. As an estate admin, I've had trouble dealing even with established banking institutions who may or may not train all their employees on what to do or who to contact when a customer has passed away.
One thing, I discovered was Hereditas (https://withblue.ink/2019/03/18/what-happens-to-your-digital...), a project that's sort of like a "deadman's switch" which may help the survivors deal with all the digital loose-ends that one's death might leave behind. This, combined with proper estate planning might hopefully make things easier for those we leave behind.
funny, cuz that's what I call VB programmers...
lol jk
This is an interesting project, but in my experience with companies that still use VB6 or VB.net (they have no idea about linux nor a desire to learn anything new... hence why they are still on VB6)
Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!