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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Unfortunately the software industry (at least in the US) has applied the term “engineer” basically across the board to software developers instead of only for properly trained and licensed engineers as in other fields (civil engineering, mechanical engineering, etc). Part of this is due to a lack of a formal software engineering licensing system, but the desire for fancy titles is certainly something that played a role in this.

    My understanding is that other countries, like Canada, do have strict requirements for the use of the term “engineer”, but unfortunately that ship appears to have sailed in the US due to inertia and the intransigence of Silicon Valley-type companies.








  • For consumer software, yes, most is still being built with a baseline target instruction set from the early/mid-2000s. In 2019 there were reports of Apex Legends requiring SSE4.1, an instruction set from circa 2007. It will be be probably close to a couple decades before consumer software would start commonly requiring these instructions.

    However, for more specialized environments, such as scientific and high-performance computing applications, it’s much more common that you will be using custom software designed for a specific task, and that it’s normal to recompile the software when you get a new set of hardware. In those applications, these instructions can make a huge impact, as you know exactly which capabilities are supported by the hardware and can use everything available.

    I believe there are also some (possibly limited) situations where a program can check what instructions a processor supports and use either the newer (higher-performance) version or the slower, more widely-supported version depending on that check. There may be limits on how often that can be done however.




  • jQuery is a JavaScript* library that played a really important role in adding interactivity to websites and doing so in a way that works across browsers. Its capabilities were fantastic for its day, but newer iterations of JavaScript and subsequent frameworks and libraries (such as Angular, Vue, Svelte, and React) generally provide the same capabilities in a form that is easier to work with. Most new sites use those newer tools, but jQuery was one of the key technologies behind the kind of interactive websites from the mid-2000s until the mid-2010s (essentially the heyday of Web 2.0 (RIP)), and is still used in websites from that era that haven’t needed huge overhauls since then.

    • JavaScript is the main programming language used to add interactivity to websites (plus a bunch more that’s beyond the scope of this).