I often hear, especially from folks working at younger companies and the tech giants, that the 40 hour workweek is a lie. That “the company” secretly (or not so secretly) always wants you to work more hours and doesn’t care if people are unhappy or burn out. That “they” will keep piling on work with no regard for mental or physical well-being. And while that is certainly true in some places, I think it is the exception, not the norm. More often than not, I think reality is far more ...| thesquareplanet.com
Review season is approaching, as it always is. Peer reviews, self reviews, upward reviews, quarterly reviews, and yearly reviews, need to be written, read, and relayed. For some, this is a much-appreciated time to celebrate your co-workers, give constructive feedback, learn how you can grow yourself, and (hopefully) get confirmation that overall you’re doing a good job. For many, it’s a time of endless feedback-writing, filling out form after form with the same couple of prompts, trying t...| thesquareplanet.com
I’ve wanted to upgrade my video setup for a while now. The [Logitech C920] I’ve been using is quite decent, but I figured that if I’m only going to produce more video content going forward, the upgrade would be worth it. And I figured that doing the upgrade before I record my thesis defense might be a good idea.| thesquareplanet.com
Now that an increasing number of people are staying at home, more people are asking me for advice on how to get started with live streaming. I think this is great (yay for sharing knowledge!), so I want to share some of that advice here to make it more broadly accessible. This advice is primarily targeted at people live-streaming technical content, but may also be applicable beyond that.| thesquareplanet.com
Okay, so, you are trying to install Windows on a laptop or something for your friend. But you use Linux, and don’t have a Windows box easily accessible. You’re armed with a USB drive, a Linux system, a Windows ISO, and little more. Now what?| thesquareplanet.com
I’ve been playing around with the idea for a new podcast along with a couple of other Rustaceans recently, and a little while back we decided to go ahead and record an episode on the newly release Rust 1.36.0 (stay tuned!). Yesterday, I spent some time trying to get all the “stuff” set up to actually release the podcast, and it resulted in perhaps the most frustrating few tech-related hours I’ve had in a few years.| thesquareplanet.com
Aleph One’s excellent Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit article from 1996 has long been the go-to for anyone looking to learn how buffer overflow attacks work. But the world has changed a lot since then, and the original attacks will not generally work on modern 64-bit machines. Some of this is due to many new defense mechanisms that are now enabled by default (see Paul Makowski’s Smashing the Stack in 2011 for an overview), but those can be disabled if all you want to do is understan...| thesquareplanet.com
A while ago, I built a system-tray application in Rust to notify me of new e-mail called buzz. It was working fine, but every now and again, it would fail to connect to the mail server on boot if it started before my network connection was up. Sounds easy enough to fix, so I just added a loop around my connect (even made it have exponential backoff!) and considered the issue dealt with.| thesquareplanet.com
Rust has been seeing increased adoption, both in academia and industry, over the past few months. This is great news for the language and its community. However, it inevitably also means that a number of people with relatively little experience in Rust are exposed to Rust codebases, and, in many cases, are asked to modified them.| thesquareplanet.com
Every month or two, I get an email asking whether I could enable captions on my YouTube videos. I also get asked on Twitter, [on Reddit], and even on the orange site. Unfortunately, every time I’m forced to give the same answer: I already have auto-captioning enabled on my videos, but for some reason YouTube sometimes simply does not generate captions. The most common case appears to be because the video is too long (somewhere around 2h), but I’ve seen it happen for shorter videos as well.| thesquareplanet.com
This past week, during a team off-site at work, I was re-introduced to the Eisenhower matrix; a handy device for prioritizing tasks and deciding how and when to handle them. It gets its name from this quote from US President Dwight D. Eisenhower:| thesquareplanet.com