My main thing are roles where I get to talk to users and clients and work closely with devs at the same time, plus I have a strong knack for UX, so e.g. product work in a hands-on environment, or engineering that needs someone product-minded, might be a good fit.
My main thing are roles where I get to talk to users and clients and work closely with devs at the same time, plus I have a strong knack for UX, so e.g. product work in a hands-on environment, or engineering that needs someone product-minded, might be a good fit. Have also recently freelanced and am open for more of that.
In Switzerland, Teletext somehow proved popular enough you can now access the content (with the same nostalgic look and feel, modulo some advertising) online and on a mobile app.
In my view Teletext has a great property: A single page is short. Thus news articles must be compact and straight to the point. Unlike the text here, which I can fill with fluff, unrelated side remarks and repetition, a teletext author has to find the essence in the news and focus. That makes scanning Teletext news quick while giving a good view on what is "important" (by the standards of that broadcaster)
It is quite different: Having such a limited channel as Teletext one has to be even more selective on the news being reported and then which aspects of it to report.
Over here in Germany I got some TV stations discussing on celebrity news, some station focusing on economy/business news, others on political things, some in sports.
But yeah, USA has this "two sides" issue with a touch of zero sum (it's always either this or that side and either helping one or the other side)
The actual infra-backend of the swiss Teletext is quite cute, just a single, Windows 2000 (if I remember correctly, maybe Server-edition) PC, running in a Datacenter-rack, on the floor of course, with about one dude who knows how it all works. Not sure how other countries do it, probably with similar, archaic setups.
At least that was the state about 10 years ago, maybe they upgraded the infra since then.
There's something about the short-form just-the-facts writing that makes information and news much easier to read than the puff pieces you find on many websites these days.
Love this. Many years ago I provided Teletext as a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget using content provided free of charge by a friendly Dutch guy who extracted it from the broadcast signal using some special hardware. Good times.
It seems like it would be a pretty neat little hobby project to develop a common teletext viewer / aggregator for all of these links people are putting up!
Tangentially related to this issue: I went back to university for a CS undergrad in my mid-20s after already having some experience writing code. One thing that really struck me while both TAing and informally supporting others in an intro programming class with somewhat subpar teaching was how many people went through the whole thing never grokking how the code was actually parsed by the computer. They would sort of learn how to solve problems, but many would still constantly get tripped up by things like confusing meaningful keywords and function names with arbitrary naming of variables and so on. At the beginning, the course just sort of jumped straight to showing finished code for simple problems, introducing python library functions, and so on — without ever really having students develop a low-level understanding of what was going on (by which I don't mean "what's the machine code this turns into", just "how is this code structured at the low level").
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Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)
With Thymer we really care about performance, but Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted because we don't want to compromise on privacy. And it's real-time collaborative and offline first.
Thymer has optional self-hosting. Then you can upgrade (or not) at your own leisure, or intentionally stick to an older version you like better. Enshittification is a big problem in our industry. We've all been burned by it -- we certainly have -- and being able to opt out of a "new and improved!" version is a real feature.
Thymer will also be very extensible. Today we launched our plugin SDK: https://thymer.com/plugins and https://github.com/thymerapp/thymer-plugin-sdk/ with a bunch of examples. With Thymer you will be able to "vibe code" the very simple plugins and with VSCode/Cursor you can make more complex plugins with hot-reload.
