Thanks for the pointer to this fantastic talk. The excitement, thoroughness and dedication they put into this project along with their entertaining presentation is wonderful.

Back in the year 2001/2002 (I think) I remember doing this with a Wikipedia plugin for Rockbox (https://www.rockbox.org/), which I had running on my Archos FM Recorder. It was truly awesome to have all this knowledge in the palm of your hands without omnipresent Internet.

I do the same and transactions work well most of the time. I use ZFS as filesystem for my DBMS (Postgres), which allows me to do consistent snapshots. Being able to rollback has been helpful for testing complex or large queries as well.

I am interested in your use case where you have a situation with multiple databases, possible with different schemas, where you want to run the same sql on all of them. Maybe some kind of data lake? I have not come across this. But admittedly I have not worked in enterprise (I take to mean thousands of employees)

In enterprise environments this is pretty common. I've worked at places with over 100 developers and 30 testers. So you have a situation with hundreds if not thousands of databases and then multiple schemas in each database. So imagine trying to manually validate if your script will work on all those databases and against all those schemas. How difficult of a task that is.

Works very well in my experience. I never get unwanted ads. The only time this is mildly annoying is during election time. Parties usually distribute flyers/pamphlets with their ideas (which are otherwise known, but still interesting to compare to each other).

I was recently surprised to see CS 1.6 running in the browser: https://play-cs.com Makes it way to easy to get sucked into a game or two.

Yes, this helps a lot! For me, it also helps to have a training plan, or simply calendar events that remind me what exercise I should do at a given day. Usually this allows me to trick my mind and avoids the decision whether or not I should exercise and I will "stupidly" do what the calendar says. This made it much easier to develop a habit.

Very useful, thank you!

For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.

With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

I feel like this quote is why I can't have a removable battery, a headphone jack and an sd card in a new phone.

Perhaps. I always assumed it had more to do with offering better waterproofing, but maybe that's naive.

Or maybe more to do with users buying more of a particular brand of Bluetooth headphones and not having an arbitrary and universal input (you can do a lot of crazy stuff with an audio jack see square).

I swam for three hours today with my stock iPhone taking incredible 4K video of our diving and surfing adventure.

that advanced waterproofing is awesome.

Wouldn't sea water be corrosive?

I suppose that might be one reading, though IMO the battery, jack, and card slot have just been replaced by more bells and whistles like more/fancier cameras, biometric sensors, NFC, and other gobbledygook that was more important to someone than being able to plug into the cassette adapter in my car. Not exactly what I think of when I hear "nothing left to take away."

Absolutely! Noticing that it usually takes ~20min for me of getting into the groove was a profound revelation for me a few years ago. I noticed a pattern that if keep on powering through those initial 20min, there is a good chance you can continue being productive for a few hours or even the whole day.

That’s what makes pomodoro so powerful imo. I only need it to start the day, then I can drop it.