There’s so many friggin nerds sailing that it’s ridiculous. Who else makes so much so as to indulge in such a wildly expensive hobby?

Never mind the ultra rich nerdy boat names (Bayseienne, Steve Job’s weird thing, the sensible and utilitarian Google barge with all the toys, and Oracle guy’s toys, and on and on), there’s soooooo many more minor nerd boats with names like “Dream SQL” and etc.

Happy. But skeptical. I like the people I work with, I have a ton of flexibility, and I’m so well paid that it’s a little weird. I like this stuff, and would do most of it for free. But the MegaCorp I work at has been tightening their screws with worker hostile stuff: removing benefits, changing pay structures, trying to force me to go to the office, and etc. All that changes how I look at what I’m doing. They are, of course, psychopaths. I always knew that but thought I found a comfortable little groove in the system to do things I like with people I like. Now… Less. There’s an undercurrent of coercion that makes me feel a little icky, and now I’m more ready to roll the dice on change and seeing what’s next.

This is a brand lift study. It’s almost worthless: Hulu is paid nearly zero for it. I can’t believe they’ve stooped this low to scrape so little incremental revenue with such a customer hostile tack. Their product and analytics people must truly suck and completely lack awareness of counter metrics.

What don’t you like about your Framework? I haven’t noticed anything wrong with mine, but haven’t had it long.

??

The film data is way over ambitious. I don’t think blowing a 35mm negative up to 16x20 is “superb.”

I have both. The way Bose handles bluetooth with multiple devices is so awful that I gave up on them and bought the Sony’s. They would probably be fine if you only intend to ever pair them to one device. However, for me, I just never figured out what they were trying to do. I’d turn them on and they’d wake up a sleeping iPad in another room, or closed laptop, and then refuse to connect to my phone (using the phone’s built in Bluetooth menu) until I opened the Bose App to reconfigure them. The last straw was on video calls for work-- they’d randomly re-connect with a random device.

The Sony’s just don’t do that. They don’t wake up random sleeping or idle devices, and if they do connect to the wrong device I can use the OS Bluetooth menus to manually connect them to a given device – rather than opening the app in my phone.

So cool, thanks. As a kid I spent so much time in DEBUG, stepping through DOS’s executables, and especially the Interrupt handlers. It’s so neat to see the actual source code-- way easier to read and follow. I didn’t know it was all written in assembly, from within Debug it sometimes seemed so messy and convoluted that I just assumed more was written in C.

14 life sentences isn’t “life in jail” in the UK, where murdering 270 people isn’t too much for “compassionate release.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelbaset_al-Megrahi

Hey, don’t be discouraged.

You are a treasure and rare. There are places for folks like you. I hope you can find one where the culture fits you and knows your value.

Until then. You can try to change the culture. But if that’s possible depends on more than I know for your context.

With small teams it’s easier. Demonstrate competence, gain trust of everyone around you, then sell a better tomorrow where … Stuff just works. Faster velocity, more features, fewer bugs, etc.

This is a very valued message in some places, and totally not in others.

I have a feeling that infrastructure/platform/core teams – those making tools for other engs – are probably more naturally aligned to quality and lower defect rates. That may be a direction for you if you aren’t sure where to start aiming towards.

Is this for interviewing or promotion?

At my org the formal definition is “[demonstrated] ability to lead projects at x scope.” This is how people leaders frame it.

But to individual contributors (engineering track) folks, I think we are looking for:

• Thinks. Applies themselves to the hard work of figuring things out. Reads documentation for libraries and languages to get how to use them. Doesn’t vomit up random groupthink (from the wider org or web) without understanding it.
• Curious: doesn’t take “this is how we’ve always done it” as a thought stopper – wonders if there’s a better way. Flexible, open to learning.
• Teamwork skills: communicates own level of certainty, listens to others and tries to understand – not stubborn: honestly tries to figure out the best solution rather than trying to look smart in front of others. Has a feel for how to help everyone be heard and add their thoughts to the group decision.
• Communicates clearly-- excellent written documentation for spikes/designs/decisions is a clear stand out here. (easy win with high visibility)
• Can start to participate in meta/scope and product type conversations around “hey this is stupidly hard why don’t we just do this slightly different thing that’s way easier” (extra credit at this level)

How to show this when interviewing vs getting promoted is different.

I feel their business side is run by morons. I tried to setup a small business with them, and gave up when I couldn’t wrestle a price out of their sales folks after two weeks of back and forth emails.

I’m dealing with a new service written by someone who extensively cut and pasted from ChatGPT, got it to “almost done – just needs all the operational excellence type stuff to put it into production”, and left the project.

Honestly we should have just scrapped it and rewritten it. It’s barely coherent and filled with basic bugs that have wasted so much time.

I feel maybe this style of sloppy coding workflow is better suited to front end coding or a simple CRUD API for saving state, where you can immediately see if something works as intended, than backend services that have to handle common sense business logic like “don’t explode if there is no inventory” and etc.

For this dev, I think he was new to the language and got in a tight feedback loop of hacking together stuff with ChatGPT without trying to really understand each line of code. I think he didn’t learn as much as if he would have applied himself to reading library and language documentation, and so is still a weak dev. Even though we gave him an opportunity to grow with a small green field service and several months to write it.

Sorry, I can’t find the specific paper-- NASA wrote so much about this (it was a big problem, plus astronauts had to save their poop-- which was then analyzed and copiously written about) that I just got lost looking. Search for “NASA low residue diet” and things like “preflight”, “fecal collection assembly”, “waste management system”, and etc – from Gemeni through Apollo.

There’s pictures online of the bags. They were taped to the butts to help make a seal.

Now I want to read the preflight diet study again, so please write if you find it.

NASA has a paper on how to not poop for days. It’s on the Internet. Before space toilets there was only a space bag with finger scissor/scoop holes. It didn’t work, poop got everywhere. The paper goes into detail about fecal matter being everywhere after early multi-day missions.

So they figured it out. Their system works – I’ve also had my own reasons.