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After graduating from college in 1979, I bought a then-new Apple II+ with what little money I had. Little did I know that everything that happened after that was not what I expected. I went to graduate school in Chemistry, but my faculty advisor resigned after being denied tenure, leaving
This is not my week for using technology. None of these problems was my fault, other than my existing in the universe and the attraction that brought. Today, I wanted to review my Verizon mobile account, and I noticed that the website had changed since my last visit. I clicked
My eyesight is generally OK, but I have trouble reading small text, especially medium gray on light gray backgrounds. I usually code in 16 or even 18 point fonts, currently Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono. Every new release of Xcode makes seeing various UI elements harder, as if the designers all have
Am I a good programmer? The short answer is: I don’t know what that means. I have been programming for 52 years now, having started in a public high school class in 1973, which is pretty rare because few high schools offered such an opportunity back then. I
Having spent four decades as a programmer in various industries and situations, I know that modern software development processes are far more stressful than when I started. It's not simply that developing software today is more complex than it was back in 1981. In that early decade, none
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Multiple concurrent writers. Multiple processes. Same SQLite. No modifications.
New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds: Bake PDF File New Bake PDF File command (CmdPdfBake) in the Ctrl + k command palette turns interactive form fields and annotations into static page content and saves the result as a new PDF, which then opens. Show PDF Outline New Show PDF Outline command (CmdShowPdfOutline) in the command palette shows the document’s outline (table of contents) as text in a window. Tab Groups menu Saving and restoring tab groups now has its own Tab Groups submenu (in the Favorites menu) with Save Tab Group and Restore Tab Group. Both are also in the tab right-click menu. There is also a window for managing saved groups (#4402). Screenshots include open menus Take Screenshot also captures open menus as separate windows you can pick. Menu bar improvements with tabs The custom menu bar shown when tabs are in the title bar works more like a normal menu bar, and toggling the menu bar is more reliable (#5442, #549). More: changes from April 4, 2026 and the full changelog.
Brilliant jerks, ZIRP-era managers, and how psychological safety lost the plot. Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Cat Hicks.
Say you're deploying an AI assistant that processes online order returns. For it to work, it would need access to your store's purchase policy, item…