Lori M Olson 
OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
Last time we wrapped up on the university part of my origin story. Or did we?
Getting that first job coming out of university is both exciting and scary. Exciting, because I would finally have a full time job, probably making more money than my parents ever did. Scary, because…it’s a full time job! What if I make a mistake? What if I hate it?
Most schools have some kind of hiring office, and some kind of job board to go with it. The University of Calgary was no different. Of course, when I was graduating it was an actual board, with actual printed job postings pinned to it with pushpins. So every week after the winter term started we’d wander past the board, make note of the interesting postings, and type up another job application. Yes, with an actual typewriter, which was painful beyond words, but we had to fill in the job application form, and it was a damned folded sheet, so no photocopy would do.
Then we’d have to wait to find out if we got an interview. That was posted on a separate board, with dates and times to show up, so you had to check that one more often. They try to call you, too, but…no cell phones, and most of us didn’t have answering machines either. Anyway, I had a number of interviews to navigate.
One interview always made me laugh. Every year (because summer jobs pretty much worked the same way) this one company picked me for an interview. And every time, the interview would end abruptly when they ‘discovered’ that I didn’t know COBOL. I avoided that language (used primarily by banks, insurance companies and few others) like the plague. Every time I figured they had some other language in mind when they picked me for an interview again. But nope, it was the same story every year.
In the end I received a single good job offer very quickly after the round of interviews. It wasn’t my top pick, but it was the offer I had, so I accepted it. It was a large oil company. As soon as I accepted the offer, I started getting mail from the company with dates and times, and sign ups for all kinds of benefits programs. So it was a bit of a shock to get another job offer from one of my top picks (a high tech company) almost six weeks after I’d accepted the other offer. In my defence, I was young and idealistic (AKA innocent and idiotic), and I figured I had accepted the other job, so I owed it to them to carry through. In retrospect, #largeoilcompany is still going strong and #hightechcompany went belly up years ago, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have learned a lot of more (personally) interesting things if I’d taken that other offer.
And that, my friends, is the lesson from today’s story. You don’t owe a company anything, unless they’ve already started paying you. And even then…no one is going to look out for your best interests except for you. If a better (for you) job comes up, you need to put your own interests up front.
‘Til next issue, be careful out there.
FITS — Featured in the School
As I launch into 2022 with my new branding, you will see a lot of changes in the WNDX School. My goal is to have a consistent brand—not random crap I threw together in a rush—and to improve the usability and user experience. That means new colors, new fonts, new workbooks. If anything happens to make things less usable or less readable or less watchable…please let me know!
TALK — Talk of the Tech
As usual we have a little something from each of the two DRD-oriented chat zones to report on this month.
First, from the Discord, nothing sets the DragonRuby world abuzz than new releases and there are no less than two to throw into the mix. V3.3 came out on the 7th of this month, whereas V3.4 dropped just a week later. We have linked the release notes so you know what to expect for each.
Then, we have an interesting discussion from the Motioneers Slack team regarding whether accessing the underlying variable is thread safe, as is the case when you access it through its setters and getters. The short answer is no, it is not. But the ensuing conversation is worth a read.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) has been around since 1998. One can’t help but wonder if Sam Lantinga could have possibly visualized it would still have an active following 23 years later. The evidence of that is that they have a their own Discord with over a thousand members. What’s more it’s administered by a regular ‘round these parts Ryan C. Gordon. Clearly a many of many talents. So if you are into all things low level, this is your community. Join today.
APP — All Things App
Although it was published this past November, we just came across How ruby_memcheck Finds Memory Leaks in Native Gems by Ottawa-based Peter Zhu. It’s a great article. But what we really want to know is how this might work with RubyMotion gems. So here’s your opportunity to give back to the community—anybody out there want to figure it out and share?
Way back when we were first getting our beaks wet with Ruby, we ‘discovered’ (much to our delight) that MacOS already had Ruby installed. Candidly, we were always a little afraid of cluttering up and bogging down our hardware resources, so we just went ahead and used the one we found. However, we could have saved ourselves some subsequent heartache if we had followed the advice Do Not Use the MacOS System Ruby. Rather, use the Install Ruby 3.1 · macOS to install your own. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.
SPOT — Spotlight On…
We’re not above hopping on a hot trend to tick up DRD engagement, and there’s nothing hotter at the moment than Wordle. So how about a Wordle clone written using DRTGK? But better jump on it right away, because the excitement may have already begun to fade by the time you finish this article. We didn’t think it was possible, but TikTok has made our attention span even shorter.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
And you thought there was only one way the execute shell commands from within Ruby? Turns out there is a bunch. How many do you know? And we bet you’ll recognize some annoying bugs you may have encountered!
HAHA — And They All Laughed
We relate best to #8 in 10 Ultimate Programming Jokes. Which one is your favourite?
That’s a Wrap!
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“Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.” — Homer Simpson