Interesting. The way I work, variable naming is one of the key areas that I would never want to outsource to an AI – careful choice of variable names is a key part of code quality for me: unimportant things should have neutral, non-distracting names while mportant things often cause me to break out a thesaurus for just the right word.

This article starts off as a response to another article, but doesn’t link to the article it is talking about! I found that frustrating and poor form, community-wise.

Great question – would someone ask that of my boss please? 😉

Thank you.

How concerned should I be?

What are the unspecified policies the developer claims that the company has failed to uphold? Who is this particular developer, and how much should I trust them? (I don’t follow nginx development at all.)

I celebrate the fact that open source licenses exist specifically to allow people to make a fork like this when they have disagreements! But I don’t know enough about this particular case to decide how it should affect my own plans.

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.