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Degoogling: Chrome
Moving away from Chrome is one of the easier parts of degoogling. Given the recent developments, I find Firefox not to be an enticing alternative, so I checked out Safari for the first time in ages.
It has been at least 10 years since I last used Safari regularly, and what stood out back then was the clear lack of... almost everything. These days, though, Safari is actually a quite decent browser. The cross-device sync between Mac, iPad and iPhone works flawlessly, several useful privacy features come out of the box and it has some features I wasn't expecting, such as already displaying the top result with a description while typing in the search query, eliminating the need to first visit the search engine and then select the best result.
Migrating all passwords from Chrome to the iCloud Keychain was trivial, and there are dozens of tutorials out there on how to do that.
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The Other Basket: Degoogling & Moving to iCloud
I'm moving away from Google.
For me, that's a pretty big deal: I have been Google and its products ever since it appeared on my radar and lifted me off the burden to scout Yahoo, AltaVista and Fireball for answers. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was never really bothered by the privacy implications that surround Google. If a benevolent dictator overlord AI slurps up all my data and in turn makes my life easier, then I'm all in!
However, in the recent years, enshittification has spread throughout Google's offering. And I am not only talking about deprecating services left and right - like the awesome Google Reader. Google's products clearly haven't innovated in the past years. Like, at all. And competition has kept up and closed the gap to their offering.
At the same time, Google continued pushing ads into their offering, and at the same time they keep proving more and more not only do they not care about the individual users1, but they actively start degrading the user's experience, like the quality of the Google Search, in order to pursue their Ad Sales KPI.
So I'm putting my eggs now in another basket. One of the key strengths of Google's offering is how well everything plays together, so I would not be satisfied to move into a fractured landscape of different apps and concepts. Of all competitors, Apple offers a close counterpart to Google's offering, so I am now moving into iCloud.
I will occasionally post here about how things are going.
I firmly believe this used to be different.↩
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Ramping Up Apprentices
While going through my notes, I just rediscovered a bunch of text files which I used to ramp up apprentices a couple of years back. It's a mix of coding katas, general advice and English lesson (I wrote the tasks mostly in English to get the German-speaking apprentices used to understanding that language they only knew from school)
The context here is that apprentices start with absolutely zero professional programming languages. The tasks were aimed at getting all apprentices to the same level - some quicker, some slower, depending on their previous self-taught knowledge, and to teach them some debugging, abstraction and other skills before they would actually touch production code. Depending on the apprentice, these tasks kept them busy between 2 weeks and 2 months. I pasted the texts online unedited, including all typos and occasional Germanness in between. I only removed some confidential information about the company in which context I was using these.
Here they are: