On some days, exclusively in the morning hours, the printer would fail to detect the start of a new label, printing over several labels.
After connecting remotely and checking the usual (queue, network connection, drivers etc), I asked my colleague to call me, as soon as it happened again.
When I went there, I saw that a ray of sunlight hit the printer.
The windows had shutters, but there was a gap.
Label printers detect the gap between labels using a laser.
And for some reason, the printer's case had a clear window at the top.
I printed an empty label and stuck it on the little window.
For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.
I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.
Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.
For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.
Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable.
I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.
Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast, multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc.
Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day.
Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.
The legacy app is absolutely NOT fast if you have a significant amount of notes. Still worth using because the current app simply lacks the functionality (they "solved" the costantly freezing problem by preventing people from selecting more than 50 notes at once, for example). But certainly not fast
That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my uses of it, I went from really liking their service to tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.
I'm not sure whether electron itself is bad, or if it's the fact that any company who would use it has made an executive decision to cut corners and sacrifice user happiness for development velocity (Microsoft/VS Code excepted, mostly). Any such company would put out a bad product no matter what. Electron might just be the common subpar solution that these types of companies all gravitate towards; without it, they'd probably still build bad apps, but in a million different frameworks instead of just one.
Electron is a great tool tbh, I'm not on the hate train, but let's not pretend like electron is some bastion of quality or performance. People's grievances are legitimate, and part of that reason is just how low the bar is to ship something with it. Great for tinkerers, but sours normal users.
I can remember a lot of applications just not being available on Linux or Mac and you just had to suck it up. An Electron app beats that. And it’s not like Java UI apps were so much sleeker.
Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow changing product with a consistent price. I’ve been a subscriber for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled that it hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it’s job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce some changes but seem very careful about it.
I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.
It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.
I actually did set up replication to another database, several years ago.
But at the time, for some reason the databases would de-sync to easily (often when changing the db scheme).
I'm not so much looking for efficiency, but for simplicity.
This contraption of scripts that get called by cronjobs, that then access some account on DigitalOcean etc. just seems to complex to me.
If I want to check if everything works, I have to check several places.
My own documentation of this backup process is several pages long.
Considering how many people need to backup databases on linux, I was hoping there'd be a better, simpler practice.
Well, 2 of them are hard, the others are the kind of thing you get if you let a developer take a week or two to solve them at the beginning, but almost impossible to create after the system is built.
So, 3 months of up-front work. It very likely won't break any project/company, but it's enough of a drag that most people will say "fuck it" and not target large enterprises. And, well, there are plenty of other reasons not to target enterprises that the GP isn't talking about, so it may be a good choice.
Having worked at a large enterprise I agree that there are many good reasons not to target 'us'. However far too many companies are rocking up to sales meetings with large enterprises and have no idea about their actual needs and the scale and problems of selling to large enterprises.
Having also sold to large enterprises, you have to be willing to sometimes spend 3-6 month developing a really obscure feature that will only be used by that one customer to get the sale.
It's not slavery: you are free to quit your job and work for another company, or start your own business. But if you DECIDE to work for a company and take the thousand(s) of dollars each month so that you can live a comfortable life, then you owe them your loyality.
I wonder if you would agree with your statement on loyalty if the roles are reversed:
"If the company DECIDES to hire you and use thousands of hours of your life each year so that the company can enjoy a profit, the company owes you its loyalty."
Rare is the company whose leadership feels that any meaningful loyalty is owed to employees.
Edit: I want to add that your 4 guidelines are wonderful if you work for genuinely good, moral people who want to "do the right thing" and who have the luxury of setting such priorities. But caution is necessary. Far too many employees devote decades to a company only to find when they're ill or older that loyalty was a one-way street.
I agree with your reversed statement. The company needs to be loyal to it's employees too.
But in my opinion, some principles should not depend on how the other side acts:
"If my company is not loyal to me, it's my right to deceive them as well."
-> No, I will stick to my principles. I might bring it up to management. I might quit. But I won't act destructively because the other side does.
Otherwise it's a downwards spiral:
you will meet many toxic people in your life. If you lower your standards everytime you do, at some point you will be one of them.
I think this is a weak argument, because you could just as well use it to argue for conducting these experiments on humans:
Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not.
You certainly could. If the naturally suffering humans are in the same country as the experiments, then they probably should be given priority. As long as they can actually be helped as easily as ending human experiments. If they're in a different country then the people of each country will think their own population is more deserving than the other so it'll be unfairly skewed, as it currently is.
Yes, we devote X resources from stopping the suffering of humans at the expense of other humans. We currently only spend Y on stopping the suffering of humans from other causes and Y is not massively greater than X. However, the reasons for that are mostly due to the fact that spending on X also works to preserve the power structures (various government) that we use to direct money toward Y.
This is not the slamdunk you think it is. If you could ensure the human population lived to exactly 70 years old and didn't suffer during that time, there is a very fair argument it would be a moral imperative to implement this social order since it would be a massive improvement over the current state of world affairs.
Scale down that number to find where you think the line is.
On some days, exclusively in the morning hours, the printer would fail to detect the start of a new label, printing over several labels.
After connecting remotely and checking the usual (queue, network connection, drivers etc), I asked my colleague to call me, as soon as it happened again.
When I went there, I saw that a ray of sunlight hit the printer. The windows had shutters, but there was a gap.
Label printers detect the gap between labels using a laser. And for some reason, the printer's case had a clear window at the top.
I printed an empty label and stuck it on the little window.