> They told me I would to use both Ubuntu and Juju, and I couldn't use other tools if those two worked

Dogfooding is a valid strategy to improve their product, but you’d be heavily invested in Juju’s success.

I don’t remember it as particularly surreal. They did a remote programming interview over Zoom (in 2014 or so) and it was a really interesting problem - to make a PRNG for a specific range of integers using two other PRNGs. Their solution had a branch and mine was branchless and decently random. It was, at least then, a very personalistic company, centred around Shuttleworth, but his influence didn’t usually extend more than two org levels, and different parts of it behaved as different companies.

I have a happy story about Casio and college. I started college with a very limited TI-55 calculator: 51 steps and no conditional branching. The rich kids got HP-41 calculators, the average ones got programmable Casios. I got a Casio PB-700, programmable in BASIC.

Best gift ever. I could finish all numeric methods tests in a fraction of the time it took for others to use or program the ordinary calculators. It was a huge qualitative leap.