They have a good business selling appliances, electronics, and computers. I think where they really make their money is on the extended warranties and services. It makes me sad they don’t have media anymore, but most everyone streams these days.

I grew up on Blizzard and Activision games, but the good feelings and nostalgia wore off when they started treating beloved franchises like DLC piggy banks.

SQL has been around and evolving since the 70s. It is an ISO/IEC standard and is portable across a multitude of databases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

SQL is a great tool to have in your toolbox. From creating adhoc reports to building any kind of backend, it always seems to come in handy.

There are obviously non relational databases available and other approaches to persisting information, but there are some desirable characteristics of traditional relational databases.

Oftentimes I find if I’m struggling it is because of a missing abstraction. Views, functions, etc. are available to extract higher level ideas and remove duplication.

That’s so wild. A smart company would be begging their employees to learn how to solve new problems on the weekend for fun. Intellectually curious people are exactly who you want.

The only way this would make sense would be if you signed an NDA or something that would prevent you from participating in the specific hackathon, because secrets.

I love that the “Elvis operator” in some programming languages is ?:

It looks like Elvis’ hair if you look sideways.