I would say I’m a very ideals-driven person as well. I had hoped to get a job with a company whose values aligned with my own upon graduating.

My experience was that it was really difficult getting my first job when I was being fussy with who I was sending my applications to. This is despite having both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree with the highest possible grades and also industry experience.

Eventually I gave in and started sending applications to all sorts of companies and took the first job I got offered. I’m still early in my career and I’m still working with this company.

Honestly I think for a first job it’s just worth taking whatever comes your way if it will offer you valuable experience. Then you can always apply for other jobs whilst you’re earning money and experience. That’s my plan anyway.

Other than that, I would recommend checking out this website: https://80000hours.org/

I often think about the learning pyramid and I find it lines up with my personal experiences.

The experiences which have made me better at programming are when I’m teaching others or when I’ve been working on projects in my spare time (practicing).

For example whilst I was still at university I decided to make a Discord chatbot and it really helped me build on what I’d already been taught.

Other than that I like reading coding standards documents, like this.

I encounter something similar to this often.

There’s a lot of cookie banners where “Accept All Cookies” is a single button but in order to reject cookies you have to press a “Manage Cookies” link which will have something similar to a “Reject All Cookies” button in it.

It’s very annoying.

Yes this would make sense.

Quote from “What methods can we use to obtain consent?”:

If you are asking for consent electronically, consent must be “not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided”. You need to ensure you adopt the most user-friendly method you can.

For a website, hiding rejection behind a link should class as “unnecessarily disruptive”. If you can provide consent with the press of a single button then rejecting should also be the press of a single button.

I think you’re referring to healthline: https://anon.healthline.com/

Not allowing users to access a service at all unless they accept cookies is often against GDPR. See: Can we use ‘cookie walls’?.

To quote:

In some circumstances, this approach is inappropriate; for example, where the user or subscriber has no genuine choice but to sign up. This is because the UK GDPR says that consent must be freely given.

If your use of a cookie wall is intended to require, or influence, users to agree to their personal data being used by you or any third parties as a condition of accessing your service, then it is unlikely that user consent is considered valid.

The key is that individuals are provided with a genuine free choice; consent should not be bundled up as a condition of the service unless it is necessary for that service.

These cookie banners often violate all sorts of GDPR rules even more explicitly than this example. For example did you know it’s not allowed to have pre-ticked boxes on cookie popups for non-essential cookies?

Using AI to refractor COBOL code sounds interesting to me, as the article highlights this may make it easier for COBOL code to be reused by making the code more modular and having it be called by other languages (e.g. having a Java API which calls COBOL code). But of course as other people in this thread have mentioned there are huge risks to rewriting mission-critical code.

I’m not convinced about rewriting COBOL code as Java. COBOL is very good and efficient at performing the tasks that businesses need, such as extremely large quantities of precise numerical calculations and transactions. Java doesn’t excel at this.