Tech

Trigger warning: this is a bit of a rant. Also, it contains opinions. Specifically mine. If you are allergic to other peoples opinions, or likely to experience anger or hatefulness when hearing others opinions, this post is probably not for you. Also, if you actually are an Engineer, have a cookie. Intro I spend a large amount of time on interviews. Or I did, up until mid 2020, but whatever. Sure, it’s not as much as large corporations fielding thousands of applicants, but I’d wager more than the average startup. I’ve conducted a couple hundred interviews myself, and I’ve been interviewed a couple ten times. ...

Intro I don’t know why this has been on my mind the last few weeks, but guess that means I need to write something down… I love Bruce Lee. I don’t generally think of myself of someone who has “heroes”, but if there is one person outside my father who has greatly inspired me and changed how I think about life, it would be Bruce Lee. At first, as a little kid with silly hopes and crazy dreams, it was just all the cool fighting scenes in his movies that made want to be like him. ...

TL;DR That’s pretty much it. Entire post summed up right there 👆 Introduction Early in 2023 I took on a challenge. I’d been going on about making my own game for ages, and my wife finally called me out on it; stop talking, start doing. A buddy of mine had been doing the same thing about an app idea he had, and so our wives decided to lock us in a room for a day and force us to work on these ideas. ...

LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...

Clarity for the purpose of this post 😏 code monkey, n. a computer programmer who is not involved in any aspect of conceptual or design work, but simply writes code to specifications given programmer, n. an organism that can turn caffeine into code. Introduction Once upon a time, (many, many moons ago) at the very start of my career, I was just a “code monkey”; an individual contributor to the grand scheme of the digital jungle being fed instructions from primates higher on the food chain and was expected to simply do what I’m told. ...

Right, so it’s been a minute since I last posted something. Like many other companies this last year, we weren’t spared layoffs. While I still have my job, my team has been greatly reduced, both from people leaving when they saw the signs and from people being let go. So while fighting survivors guilt and an increased workload, posting hasn’t been my first priority. But while doing my day to day and trying to keep my head down and deliver as much as possible as quickly as possible, I noticed something. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than we need to talk about it. ...

Introduction So very many years back when I was but a fledgling coder, armed with BASIC skills and deep into a Turbo Pascal with Objects book, I remember a conversation with my dad. Frustrated by the level of specificity needed to communicate with a machine, I asked, “Why has no-one made a programming language where I can just tell it ‘build this game for me’?” My dad, in his infinite wisdom, mused that cracking that puzzle – creating a natural language programming language – was a feat yet to be achieved. “Whoever manages to do that,” he predicted, “will make a fortune.” ...

Ah, another “trend” I’ve seen online in the last year. I wonder which AI recommendation tool suggested this one to the thousands of small YT channels and influencers who needed a topic… Okay, saltiness aside, I actually found this one quite interesting. And not because I agree with most of the approaches I’ve seen people recommend (it is shocking how many just want to punt their own products or their sponsors), but mainly it was interesting because I was thinking that… ...

Just a quick one here, but I used this a lot today and realised after chatting to some other devs that a lot of people don’t know about this trick. That trick is: History Expansion Let’s say you are SSH’d (or SSM’d on AWS if you want to be more secure) onto a Linux box and you want check the status of a service with systemctl status cassandra.service You see that the service is exited for some reason, and you want to restart it after determining that’s all that is needed. ...

Today again, I was triggered. So here is a hastily written post about my thoughts. sigh 😔 I feel like every week there is new thing which my inbox spams me with. If it’s not AI taking our jobs, it’s some [insert new and shiny framework] which will render [insert current “industry standard”] useless, or it’s about how everyone will get let go because of the market correction and recession, or whatever, so many stupid things. ...