I am rather surprised nobody has mentioned BlueGriffon[^] If it was more actively worked on, it could be epic. In its current state its pretty damn good, but certainly has its quirks. I've found with persistence I can work around most of them.

This is great, I thought I was alone. I watched someone using one of my tools once. He would start it and due to the size of the project it would take about 20-30 minutes to complete. He was literally just playing with his phone for 3/4's of his day instead of doing other things. I got so angry I literally rewrote the whole thing an entirely different way while consuming an entire bottle of scotch. I woke up with no recollection of what I had done, but it worked and that same task only took 30 seconds! Years later I did unravel what I did and still don't understand how I made something relatively nice while hammered drunk. Clearly my first implementation was not a good one, but in my defense it wasn't meant to be run on excessively large data sets at the time.

I am definitively a C# guy, but I generally love programming so I've also learned/used JavaScript, VB.Net, LISP, Python, misc other obscure scripting languages and I am currently taking a C++ class so I can effectively play with some specific SDK's. Learning these languages have each taught me different lessons. There is no correct language, some are just plain easier to deploy in different places. The Microsoft (open source!) .NET 5 gives me some hope that I'll get to use C# more frequently in my future. I certainly don't understand the Anti-Microsoft groups. In very recent years, MS has been a beacon of what I've always fundamentally believed needed to happen; IE, the dismantling of proprietary platforms and file types so that all things have the potential to interoperate. That is the only path to "thriving" in the next era and the companies (regardless of their size) that continue to live in a "black box" state will someday die if they don't focus on being the "open world" stars instead of the "closed world" wardens.

Best advice I was ever given was to stop chasing fine pieces of ass and find someone I truly respect. I married a girl a bit older than me, an intellectual equal if not smarter than me, makes more money than I do and morally grounded without being a prude. We did date for 6 years, so I do still advocate for an extended debugging phase to make sure the final product is production ready :)

I am a long time hobbyist programmer from a construction based industry. Being a hobbyist, I am no authority on the matter, but I think my intimate relationship with both of those words in and out of the programming world might provide some decent perspective. I find it remarkable just how often I can take programming philosophy articles, do a search/replace of programming terms for construction terms and usually wind up with a document that 95% represents my very divergent industry. To me design is the aesthetic parts of a software that users will see and appreciate. That isn't necessarily just the appeal of the UI, but also related to the combination of tools (features) that were made available for them to productively accomplish their own goals. In construction terms, design is most fundamentally how appreciated the end results will be to the occupants, after the incorporation of all the tiny details. I would consider architecture the elegance of the whole systems back end that supports the design. Was it a series of after thoughts and band aids that ultimately produced a seamless user experience or was it well planned, easy to maintain, easy to enhance and easy to troubleshoot. I would also say, in terms of construction, the architecture would include the very big picture pre-engineering concepts and that truly good architecture should always be clear and obvious to maintenance personnel of reasonable competency. Both are very important and extremely interconnected. Which is why this question will never have a consensus.

There are a million things I'd love to dig into if I wasn't already spending 75 hours a week as a 3D modeler for construction company + 30 more doing industry specific hobbyist programming. Based on your comment though, I guess I am proposing they reinvent the wheel, but encapsulated around the users. Not quite the level of isolation I want, but it does seem like even a Chrome plugin could mostly do this for me as long as it existed for iOS, Android and Windows. Still, would be nice for OS level integration on mobiles so all the various standalone apps could recieve the altered input. Maybe I am just too ignorant on this topic to understand and I can accept that... Online or in the real world if someone wants to steal something they are going to steal it, all we can do is make it more trouble than its worth. With that said, wouldn't doubling down even on our current protection methods (as proposed) cause some kind of useful distruption?

Let me prefix this with having no background in the world of security whatsoever, but I did have an idea that I believe could have some merit and I thought I’d see what others thought. It occurred to me that an OS with a "private key" of my choosing, several algorithmic options to use in conjunction with that key and some specification (length/charset) of the desired output, could have a mode designed to "alter" my input based on those data points. No actual password would be stored, but my password of "password1" could be turned into 180 characters for me by the OS while in what I call "password mode". Unless someone is using my private key, my selected algorithm, and my character set criteria, then nobody could reproduce the same output as me by typing password1. In my mind, this private key works similar to a cypher (yes I am that far out of my depth) and could be my dogs name or an entire paragraph from my favorite book. The algorithms would need to do all of this in such a way where each subsequent character is an entirely new (but repeatable) character footprint. So, even if you type 11111 for your password, each new instance of 1 has an entirely different burst of (20'ish) characters representing the next instance of the 1 key. This probably wouldn't change how we would log into an OS, but I do believe everyone using garbled 120+ character passwords overnight would go a long ways towards securing ourselves on individual websites. I also believe it would be extremely helpful to keep my password and change my private key when I find out a wesbite I use has been compromised.