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As someone with a Polish partner, who also fluently speaks my own weird minority local language (Irish), I'm more than well aware of pluralisation pitfalls; Irish may have one of the most complex rulesets, so much so that I'm almost certain it isn't represented in CDLR (possibly can't be). But I see the plural pitfall brought up in so many of these guide - I've always been curious about other unexpected/unintuitive pitfalls across languages out there. Would love if there was a simple reference of the most interesting (starting with plurals I guess).
In quickly scoping out what needs to be worked, and where the inherited setup clearly falls short. Don't think knowing a great deal about other languages is necessary though for the same effect, just enough to smell something might be a bit trickier, like know say the case system in X language shows up in different ways, verb + pronoun order is not predefined.
My mother turned 60 late January this year, she received a bowl cancer screening kit which she did and they recommend she come in for a colonoscopy, which identified she highly likely had bowl cancer. 3 Weeks later she received the results for a CT with contrast scan which found no evidence of cancer else where in her major organs and nodes. 3 Weeks later she is having surgery to remove the cancerous bowl.
All for free.
Tell me again why America has the highest rate of Stage 5 Cancers over 65.
Note, I'm neither from the UK nor America, and looking in from the outside this aspect of the UK discussion comparing and contrasting with America seems to be the wrong idea.
Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost.
We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them, and switched DNS. Trickiest part was the database failover and ensuring updates would be retried transparently after switching master.
Upside was that afterwards they had a setup that was provider agnostic and ready to do transparent failover of every part of the service, all effectively paid for through the free credits they got.
I would say feeling ok with a certain level of personal experimentation, but don't let it neurotically consume you. You have already managed to navigate life to this point. Not everything needs to be changed and not everything needs to be queried.
Trying to dramatically change things can perhaps backfire. Fitting in something related to your existing interests, but with an extroverted forcing function aspect can help.
If you know a technical topic pretty well already, seek to present on it, or teach some intro workshops. Generally, seek to find things that would exercise certain anti shyness muscles.
One thing I found personally helpful was learning a language via immediate focus even at the beginner stages with talking, there are numerous online language learning sites with lessons delivered via video chat. Would say 30 minute lessons initial are ideal.
For me shyness feels like a certain analytical process turned inwards, like I'm DDOS my own brain. The excessive nature is the issue, not necessasrily the mere act of self analysis. Finding activities where I had to moderate that excessive tendency helped for me to recognise the difference
Therapy is always an additional option, but dependent on the person and the needs of course.
Nothing major to add, since there are some good comments from other commentators. Retrospectively I have realised ADHD has been perhaps an advantage in some areas. But additionally an absolute self sabatoge generating machine for the seemingly simplest of things.
Currently near the end my contract, being thinking more about the future. Full stack dev too. If you ever just want to chat and share stories of ridiculous periods procrastination, self doubt and future plans I'm always willing to chat.
I know speaking things out loud for me has lifted the veil of self doubt that can descend upon one after a bout of ill directed attention.
Personally, I find it really fun. It's a nice mix of development, design, and organizational understanding.
What I want to do is divide up the project. Usually, these legacy systems don't have clear division points; it's all a big bundle of interdependence. But in my experience, there's usually some less impactful secondary functionality that can be spun off.
That will allow you a few things:
Figure out what you quantify as success for such a project. Its limited scope makes it easier to identify the endpoint. Allow learnings about the legacy system, and perhaps identify what elements you can extract from it—not necessarily code, but in previous work, I've been able to wrap or scrape data in certain areas to provide a sort of external output. Figure out how to work with devs, manage your own time, and educate your organization about what you're trying to do. The third and last point is critical. The failure modes for development are obvious, but the political and design impacts are less so:
1. Lack of experience
2. Poor scope
3. Overly complicated solution
etc.
But the real failure mode is political. You need a developer with some political acumen as well. There's going to be a lot—and I mean a lot—of interviewing people about how exactly subsystem X fits into their workflow. You need the political skill to navigate that, in terms of getting buy-in and quality information.
Downstream of the political dimension, in my experience, is the possible design solution. The actual interviews with people and the regular, constant contact with staff about their job are critical to building something that replaces the existing system but doesn't replicate its design failures.
One mistake you want to avoid is building something too similar to the old solution and missing out on critical information about how the job is actually done.
Also, I'm not currently looking for work—enjoying my current role—but if you want to hit me up, feel free. I can at least impart some experience on what to do.