Do your dad a favor and buy him a tablet. I'd recommend an iPad for longevity and security reasons.

The previous team I was on was internal corp IT. Everyone was begging to ditch GotoMeeting and move to Skype.

But Skype was awful as well.

So we tested Zoom/Bluejeans/Hangouts and others (went with Zoom, fwiw).

We quit bothering with desktop/browser apps for video, and generally stuck to phone for audio only.

The Android and iOS experience with all of them was much less flakey.

Curious if you have some concrete examples of "loosely coupled" software projects. On GH perhaps?

It's a concept I try to keep in mind, but am never sure I am "doing it right".

Mainly C++ dev here, I do think for example LLVM is very well done, and Boost as well. But both are immense codebases and especially Boost is complicated to the point it's insane. It's a shame but I don't have good examples of relatively small projects to check out. Maybe that's worth an 'Ask HN' thread: I've definitely seen threads like 'Ask HN: what are good open source projects to check' but without the extra requirement they're small(ish). The concept of decoupling is usually not just in the details, but in the more higher level layers of the software, so to really grasp it you'd have to really spend some time on the whole project, not just read some files here and there. Which would obviously be easier with a small project.

I would point to both CLang and KDE as projects with very good modularity. I remember reading through the sources oc CLang a few years back and being impressed with it.