I mix British and American English all the time. Subconsciously I type in British English but since I work in American English, my spell checkers are usually configured for en-US and that usually means a weird mix of half and half by the time I've fixed the red squiggles I notice.
That's a tad frustrating,.since Imgur is now blocking all UK traffic. VPN is my main saviour these days for sites that don't also block the main VPN providers or data center IPs
It's not the default. You cannot buy a new house today without being on a meter. That is the default.
It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter!
There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
This has to be a vast gulf in terms of usage patterns for different users - I’ve managed at times to get up to six icons in my menu bar; what are you doing that fills up half the screen?
This gap is filled by the likes of Couchbase where a single org controls the majority of the stack (spoiler/disclaimer alert: I've been working on Couchbase's Sync for 8 years)
You get local the document-level atomicity for sync. Multi-document transaction support on server side, KV access, SQL inside JSON docs or even across multiple documents, Full Text Search, and fine-grained/RBAC for document-level synchronization - but the cost is as much lock-in as it is financial. You can't mix and match storage, query or sync without pretty big tradeoffs.
This space is very much alive and well and I'm really glad there's more competition cropping up from smaller projects like OP.
Disclaimer: I have worked on a sync backend for a company in this space for the last 8 years. You can probably find out where if you look, but this comment won't be a sales pitch.
Competition like this has incredible value for communities with poor internet access but reasonable development capabilities. Think about travelling doctors in the lesser developed countries and areas of Africa for instance. Quite often entire villages get medical checkups done, with data being recorded on a tablet. This can be synced once the doctor gets to a town with internet access for follow-up. Of course, projects like the above do not have big budgets. Unfortunately they are priced out of using a lot of tech to solve these problems (my company included in this statement)
On the more enterprise-y side, which is where I mostly sit, a lot of airlines, cruise ships, retail and field-based industry use these technologies, since they are prone to periods of being completely offline or in a P2P mesh only. Cloud databases or even regular replicated databases running in-situ are a non-starter, since there won't be anybody around to administer it. Replication is a difficult problem at the best of times, let alone in periods of comms downtime.
UK tech job pay is very bimodal and unfortunately both modes suck in different ways...
In the major mode, it feels like 90% are gambling, crypto or traditional finance. The remaining 10% are US tech companies getting a bit more for their money over here. Not sure how much longer that last subcategory will last. Most of these jobs will leave you wanting a good scrub in a scalding shower. Even the US ones.
The minor mode are where you'll find roles at UK-based tech companies, non-tech companies requiring programmers, web developers, etc. etc. The scope is vast and the pay is meh... and maybe my sample size is far too small and time-biased here, but I find the people at these places are so much more down to Earth, operate in a wider spectrum of fields and life experiences, and are just way more interesting and varied day-to-day than endless tech hype drudgery.
You wouldn't have guessed, but for the last 7 years, I have not been in a job at a minor mode company... and maybe the greener grass is glistening rather brightly right now!
We have a pretty abysmal tech landscape really given our involvement in computing history. It has all been sold off and gradually moved offshore. Europe has a reasonably heathly and open tech industry, albiet at a smaller scale than US, but of course us British are not allowed to play with them any more!
I would go further and separate tech jobs between (a) commercial banking and (b) "markets" (trading) at investment banks. There is a huge pay gap between them.
I assume it had live data at the time of Black Friday, and the loading bar is showing progress towards them publishing a replay: "FINAL DATA COMING TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3"
