As a mobile app developer I promise that you want to have push notifications that are capable of doing meaningful work on your phone. Apps are often entirely dead but a push notification from a central server will still get you X/Y/Z functionality.
Companies abuse this to then track you, and harvest endless amounts of information but the alternative is your phone no longer notified you of anything and the majority of background functionality for your apps dies entirely.
What I wish would happen is that mobile OSes have another set of location/network permissions for push notifications.
GameSpy was a bloated piece of garbage that is only fondly remembered because the other options were worse. It crashed constantly which ripped you out of your game and it performed this trick especially often right when the game launched.
Ping was always wrong, lobbies displayed as full when they weren’t, server filtering was non-existent, required login every time you disconnected…
I was thrilled to move off of it to basically anything else
Android apps can declare which urls they accept as deep links. Once that is registered with the system (ie after install) then links of that type can be opened by the app. It doesn’t have to match the package name.
I enjoy laboring. I do not enjoy working for others.
I’ve got endless amounts of side projects that I never have enough mental energy for because the job saps it all.
When I got laid off last year I had about a month between jobs where I got to just do whatever I wanted. After about a week of decompressing I started working 5ish hours a day on side projects, because I wanted something that was more mentally stimulating.
My background: staff level eng at a moderately large company with experience in both tiny scale (12 man) and massive @Google (that January layoff was so great 🫠), 7YOE in Android + 2 in iOS dev
Getting your first 2-3 years of experience under your belt makes finding jobs much easier in the future: no companies want to hire juniors and train them but most companies are looking for seniors.
Whichever software stack you start on will tend to improve your chances of getting better jobs in that sector and it’s hard to leave golden handcuffs as you get more and more experience in a field.
Were I in your shoes: I’d take the job at (shot in the dark here) Chase Bank over the job through Insight any day. I’ve loved every contractor I’ve worked with but the companies see you as an expendable resource to cut as soon as possible.
What matters most for you is years in the field. Job experience. Skills and technical experience comes from time working on projects more than anything else.
When it comes time to exit Chase Bank be sure you’ve got your algos down and your soft skills on point. Being charming in an interview is as important as your algorithmic knowledge, for better or worse. If you’re charming, have 2-3 YOE and ace your technical questions you’ll be in good shape to move into realms you find more interesting.
Prisons are a nuanced topic that cannot be boiled down to categorical statements, but I’ll do my best here to clarify.
You have 2 different cases for prisons: prisons as a concept and prisons in reality.
Conceptually prisons serve 2 important roles: separation and rehabilitation. Both roles are important for the continued functioning of society. You cannot have a functioning society with no separation of criminals from the population. Similarly without rehabilitation the separation needs to be permanent. In some cases there is no rehabilitating someone, so life sentences exist.
In reality: only a very small subset of prisons match the conceptual purpose because there is still a strong group of voters who think a prison should be a punishment.
To consider a specific case, let’s take the infamous US prison system. In the United States rehabilitation is the exception, not the norm. Beyond that the carceral system has perverse incentives to perform that role of societal separation on the maximum number of humans possible without concern for innocence. It’s not an accountable system and it is not democratic.
Even with those perverse incentives: you still have prisoners in prison who would need to be there even in the most perfect system. Plenty of people in prison need to be there. The system fails to rehabilitate them and only serves to separate them from society, but that role of separation is an important one.
I’d argue that the US prison system is overwhelmingly negative for the society but it still performs a core societal role. Despite that: I personally know excons who have had dramatic changes from time served and are better people for the experience. Some percentage of the population benefits.
I don’t buy into anarchist utopian handwaving that states that prisons aren’t necessary: people suck and would suck regardless of governmental style.