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A new chapter in the NI saga? Found in a recent SEC disclosure (I was trying to figure out whether the slow increase in NI stock value since last November was due to something else than the recent announcement that they were firing 10% of their employees to increase the shareholder happiness): "On January 3, 2021, Carla Pineyro Sublett, the Company’s Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, and General Manager of the Portfolio Business, and a named executive officer, notified the Company of her intent to resign from the Company, effective February 1, 2021, to pursue other opportunities." Who is Carla? Well, she is Mrs Super Green in the flesh: Carla Piñeyro Sublett - NI, first ever Chief Marketing Officer for NI. Intrigued, I looked around and found a couple of (moderately) interesting podcasts: Carla Piñeyro Sublett - Top podcast episodes (listennotes.com) in which she sounds like a very capable lady, and confess that she "discovered" that the company was in need of not just a rebranding (which she carried out brilliantly, we will all agree) but a complete reform. Her decision seems to indicate that that opinion might not have sounded too great to her top brass colleagues... I want to believe she was sincere when she says (said) that her customers are amazing people (a little bit emphatic, are we not?), and that they should be empowered (hence the picture of someone I assume is a customer "engineering ambitiously" on the landing page). I am not sure whether that meant "listened to", but if that was it, she definitely was onto something. NI: if your customers don't think you have what it takes to provide them with the tools they need to stay on the top, what do you think will happen? And if you don't want this to happen, what do you think you need to do?

I have a theory for what a good UI for GIT would look like, and it is a bit different from the existing ones. I think there should be a picture of the current state of the world. You draw a picture of the state you want. Then the tool generates the command line commands that get you from A to B. This serves two purposes: rather than taking an action and then seeing if that did what you want, it puts the UI in charge of figuring out how to get you textually what you're specifying graphically. Second, it shows the user what the commands are that it is executing so that you figure out "oh, that's how that is done" so that when the UI inevitably hits its limits (for whatever reason, GIT seems to exceed the complexity of all UIs used to render it), then the user is already are familiar with the commandline interface. I don't think I'll ever be motivated to write this UI, but I figured I'd toss out that bit of brainstorming in case anyone decides to chase that albatross.