For the past decade, I‘ve been at basically the same employer, even if in different institutes. Maybe it’s time for a switch, also to grow more experience in the fields I‘ve worked in, lastly mainly HPC performance analysis tools and working with parallel paradigms in such field.
The past few years, I‘ve gotten close to development on compilers and parallel runtimes, such as OpenMP, but never looked into working on them directly. However, I‘m really interested in it. So one of the things I really want to spend time on is understanding more of the compilers and their code base, and start contributing.
Learning another programming language is also high on my priority list. C/C++/Python are languages where I‘m quite versed in, but looking into Rust, Go or Zig would be quite interesting for me as well.
What you’re describing is basically using MPI in some way, shape or form. This works, but also can introduce a lot of complexity. If your program doesn’t need to communicate, then it’s easy. But that’s not the case for all programs. Especially once we’re talking about simulations and other applications running on HPC systems.
Sometimes it’s also easier to split work using multiple threads. Other programming languages let you do that and actually use multiple threads efficiently. In Python, the benefit was just too limited due to the GIL.
I had the most issues with sites like YouTube, where I‘m not surprised that Chrome based browsers run better. However, I recently also had issues with Sony, where the login page would error out every single time with Safari and Firefox. Chromium worked just fine.
I honestly do not understand why there’s this little testing being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers should not be used or don’t exist. It‘s actively harming users. In our software development projects (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks…
I agree that salary is not necessarily the highest in the EU. When looking at job offerings outside my current job, it sometimes feels like I would actually get less salary than I currently do.
However, my current job has almost no chance of promotion. In addition, no permanent contract which will force me to switch jobs in a couple of years as they cannot provide fixed-term contracts due to law anymore.
The past few years, I‘ve gotten close to development on compilers and parallel runtimes, such as OpenMP, but never looked into working on them directly. However, I‘m really interested in it. So one of the things I really want to spend time on is understanding more of the compilers and their code base, and start contributing.
Learning another programming language is also high on my priority list. C/C++/Python are languages where I‘m quite versed in, but looking into Rust, Go or Zig would be quite interesting for me as well.