What are you doing this week?
9 points by caius
9 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
If you don’t mind me asking, how was your experience with burnout and how long did it take for you to heal?
we felt that the communication of your thought process wasn't as clear as it could be and some of the architectural choices you made didn't build upon the answers you provided (switching from an async system back to a sync system).
Not getting a job, so applying to 200 more jobs and hopefully getting at least one interview. That was about the ratio of the first batch of 200 applications.
Vent, please ignore: Fuck system design interviews (usually nice people though). Stop asking me to design a system when you don't have any data for me to model this completely arbitrary backend on. If one synchronous request saves 10 invalid items being dumped into a queue and processed asynchronously by the rest of the system before failing, you're gonna have to convince me an asynchronous request is the better option. Like I get it, but it's arbitrary until it's not.
I can't ignore this, do you mean sequential vs concurrent instead of async vs synchronous? was there some sort of confusion on their end about whether you were making a fully thread blocking call vs relying on an event loop of some kind? I've never failed a system design interview because they're just simply fun to me, it's like high speed game design.
Fun time with the kids!
What is your goal with the paper replication/reimplementation? Are you specifically interested in whether the paper’s results are robust or do you want to use the methodology on new data?
Learning some Elixir, Olympic hockey, taxes
Thinking hard about the future and what my place in it might be.
I thought I was going to be a programmer / software developer till retirement (and then continue to code on my own things just for fun until I croak), but at this rate I doubt there will be software developers in a couple of years.
In the last three years, I've had badly declining health - both mentally and physically (largely as a response to medications). I've gained a lot of weight, my blood pressure is through the roof, I've developed migraines - aside from a chronic headache. I'm not sleeping properly, and despite medications and therapy my depression and anxiety are getting worse rather than better.
Perhaps I should try to get out - although I have no idea what to reskill to that isn't also going to be eaten up by AI before I've finished training for it. I've desperately attempted to come up with other things to do just for myself, but nothing seems to be able to replace programming for me.
I will continue to work for as long as anyone needs me to, and in my free time I'm trying to learn to settle into a life without any form of creative expression, now that human creativity is obsolete. So: Playing some video games and trying to force myself to not think about ideas about games I would want to make - even though I've done the latter since I was five years old.
The new world fucking sucks.
I completely understand what you are going through, there are some hard and uncertain times for everyone (not just us programmers) ahead. Having experienced some of the things you are describing, I know how hard it can be to handle these feelings. Just know that you are not alone and that, despite how the world may shift, our greatest strength remains in us being ourselves. You are incredibly valuable because of who you are and that goes beyond any narrative/ way of life/ career possibilities which might be forced upon us.
Problem is: "Being myself" mostly means being a meticulous obsessive nerd who cares a lot about technical and creative detail, which is exactly the kind of person there is no longer any place or use for.
There are other scientific and technical fields that welcome these kinds of people. Academia is a traditional refuge, though it has its own problems. Electrical/computer engineering is a relatively easy sideways move for software people. Anything else with "engineering" in the title will put you in the company of at least a reasonable fraction of other meticulous obsessive nerds. And most of them have higher standards for "it actually works" than software does, so I don't see AI invading them anytime soon.
That is, at the absolute shortest, a three-year university degree away. (The one I have in CS does not let me work on electrical engineering). And, really, I strongly doubt AI won't have made serious inroads in eating up other engineering disciplines in three years.
(Three years ago, we were amazed that ChatGPT could sometimes get Fizzbuzz right.)
I sincerely hope you get out of this hole.
Your creativity and craftsmanship are internal first. You will figure this out because that’s what we programmers/engineers/nerds do.
We will be fine.
but at this rate I doubt there will be software developers in a couple of years.
The question you should ask yourself is, “Is this new direction the field is going something I’m aligned with?”. I doubt software will go away
To me, programming has been a lifeline since 9 years old, especially coming out of poverty with it as a tool, but I know that world doesn’t exist anymore
Of course there'll be software. I just don't know if there'll be humans who make it anymore.
I spent most of my young-adulthood under the relative poverty line (which is something very different from absolute poverty when you live in a rich country, of course), and programming was also how I clawed myself out of that. I learned programming at the same that I learned to read and write (my mother taught me), and it was what I had that got me through being a bullied little boy, a lonely teenager, an undiagnosed-autistic-and-struggling-to-get-by young adult, and eventually a middle-aged man spending one and a half years in near-total isolation when the pandemic hit. It's always been what I had.
I've tried replacing it with other activities, but there's nothing that keeps as much of my brain active that there isn't something horrible deep in the hindbrain that spins off into a terrible loop. And, more critically: Every other creative activity is also being made pointless by AI. I used to draw, I used to play several musical instruments, I used to make pixel art, I used to write short fiction - and, well, AI has ruined all of that too.
It increasingly feels to me like there's no point in being human in this new world.
It increasingly feels to me like there's no point in being human in this new world.
We can care about and for those we love. While not necessarily a career for everyone, I do believe this is what makes us human, for the longest of times. On a personal level, I have found it a great deterrent for darker thoughts.
A hand-drawn, hand written card you send a loved one means a lot more than something generated by a machine. I go to concerts to enjoy the atmosphere, the composition, and also to appreciate the skill involved in playing the instruments.
I'm unfortunately the stereotypical autistic computer nerd with shitty social skills. I don't really have any loved ones, except for close family (and one friend who lives in another country). I'm long-term single and never had kids.
The pre-AI world, at least, had a place for someone like me. The new one doesn't.
I did not mean to imply that our loved ones are only romantic partners or progeny. I would consider family, friends, coworker, anyone we know that we care about to be a "loved one".
I get that. There are just very few people in my life overall.
(I often think about, now, how my life might have been different if I'd forced myself to spend more time in my youth practicing my social skills rather than programming. But, well - programming just seemed to click in my brain like nothing before or after.)
I thought about suggesting this about two weeks ago when I read your comment about picking up leatherworking but that nothing besides programming really seems to stimulate your brain right .. then I thought maybe the suggestion is silly. But .. have you tried to get into electronics design? Like, small hardware projects with Arduinos or ESP32s? Designing your own boards in KiCAD etc.?
For me, this is a hobby that I picked up in 2020 back when the pandemic hit (though not specifically due to it). This whole process of finding the microcontrollers, sensors, parts .. you want to work with, reading through hundreds of pages of datasheets to understand how they work and check if they fit together, wiring up all the components in a KiCAD schematic, placing all the parts down on a PCB and then routing all the traces, so that not only everything is connected electrically but the result also looks nice aesthetically .. it's all a very big puzzle game, which I think is perfect for nerding about small details. After all of that, you can order your circuit board online to get an actual physical thing of the idea that you sketched up; either pre-assembled or you buy parts separately and you solder everything on; no need to start with tiny SMD parts. Finally, you'd still have to program the firmware; only now you're not writing software for some abstract and generic computer but you're working on that device right there in front of you on your desk.
And sure, I bet AI can write Arduino code and maybe it can even generate a valid KiCAD file somehow. But the failure rate will be higher because now each design is unique and has its own quirks. And from what you write, I'm afraid that the following stance might not work for you but: so what? I'm not doing this to compete with anyone. I'm doing this hobby because I want to design and build something that's wholly mine in the end. :)
Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I've actually done a little electronics design already (though only some really simple things) - and soldered a lot; aside from the obvious DIY mechanical keyboard rite of passage, I built a Eurorack modular synth a few years back (the case was partly laser-cut and partly hand-made, most of the modules were soldered from kits). My day job is as an embedded developer, so there's quite a lot of the things you mention I currently do for work.
I don't really care about competing with anyone, really. Not about my code, my pictures, my music, or anything at all I do. There's 8 billion people on this planet; the chance that I would be best at anything at all is infinitesimal and it seems to me a fool's errand to even concern myself with that. But when anyone can simply push a button on a machine and get out what requires a lot of effort for me, it feels pointless. For me, there's no difference about whether that's programming, or electronics design, or a drawing, or a bass line.
(And, well, a couple of weeks ago I saw someone decide to screw with an EE student who was trying hard to cope with his programming skills being obsolete before he's even done studying - when he said "at least AI can't design electronics!", someone fired up KiCAD and had Claude Code design electronics. That was a particularly depressing little show for everyone involved.)
I used to draw, I used to play several musical instruments, I used to make pixel art, I used to write short fiction - and, well, AI has ruined all of that too.
I’m not so sure regarding music and other “performance arts”. Of course AI can generate music, but AI can’t replace humans playing live on a stage. I really can’t do this for a living but I think it is a funny hobby that helps to make sense out of this agentic world.
And, more critically: Every other creative activity is also being made pointless by AI. I used to draw, I used to play several musical instruments, I used to make pixel art, I used to write short fiction - and, well, AI has ruined all of that too.
I'm sorry it feels that way. I'm not sure about the "there will be no programmers" part, I think a lot of people are being fooled and fooling themselves. But it doesn't sound like your reasons for doing these creative activities needs have gone anywhere even if AI has gotten exceptionally good at them.
Maybe I'm asking you to talk me out of making little game experiments no one will play, like I always have.
What's the point? I can spend an afternoon pixelilng an image, and then an AI bro will come along and show me that he can have a machine extrude something similar in ten seconds flat (I had this exact interaction enough times that this, specifically, was what put me off pixel art). I've spent years getting pretty good at playing bass, now anybody can write a short prompt and get something better than what I can play. I can't draw a picture on paper anymore without just seeing a sad blob of low-grade copium.
I never had any need to be better than other people whatsoever, because none of this is a contest to me - but it is demotivating in the extreme that people aren't even needed for creative activity anymore. Why bother?
I have unfortunately only glib responses and I don't think they'll help. Hopefully this will all seem much less of a crisis once the AI bros have finished drowning themselves in output.
Which games are you playing? I have been playing Helldivers 2 and Dead by Daylight.
Right now I'm completely spent after a migraine attack that lasted for over 5 hours (worst I've had in my life), with little energy left for work or play.
But the last game I got into was Citizen Sleeper.
I spent a couple days last week to bring up Hare to 0.26.0 on Guix. While the maintainers review it and we work out the problems, I'm hoping to actually learn the language too this week. Drew DeVault seems like an eccentric fellow, but Hare seems interesting and even if I don't necessarily end up using it for anything, it's always fun to learn something new.
Switching from macOS to windows 11 as my main desktop machine. This sounds very uncool to some, but I’m liking it so far. The main reason is the need to use Unreal engine.
Built-in features like window management and clipboard history are nice. File explorer is a lot more useful than Finder. Network SMB shares actually stay connected and mounted, which I could never achieve on macOS. WSL2 is pretty cool, but it’s a bit annoying to have two separate file systems. I was able to get up and running with all of my side projects (typescript, rust, go).
Do you have a good guide for WSL? I've been switching over to Windows as well for my personal computer and Node runs super slowly. I think I need to set up WSL but I've been putting it off since I have higher priority things to work on and I've yet to find a nice simpler guide.
I don't have a good guide, I just did this:
I use VS Code (and wanna check out WebStorm, haven't used a full-fledged IDE since Netbeans 15+ years ago), so I just did code . from inside Linux and it set up the "remote" connection and ran VS Code in Windows. Works surprisingly smoothly.
Also consider increasing the RAM available to WSL.
Spent the weekend setting up my first Raspberry Pi, and I'm genuinely impressed.
Using it as a backup monitoring display for my home server rack and NAS - my main monitoring runs on a ThinkCentre with FreeBSD, but if that goes down, I need something independent to tell me about it. So the Pi runs the Glance dashboard + Uptime Kuma, pushing alerts through ntfy.sh.
Really love how efficient Pi OS Lite is - tiny footprint, pulls only ~3.5W, and does exactly what I need for this always-on watchdog role. And, well, the Debian-based system.
@Work I'm still slogging through a task to upgrade all of our dependencies, but I'm just about done. It's been a lot more trouble than I expected, but we'll have everything upgraded to the newest versions available in nuget, our non-nuget depenencies at the latest versions, and targetting the newest .Net Framework. At some point we'll start moving to .Net Core, but this upgrade was the first step.
Outside of work I'm going to circle back to some projects that I started but didn't finish and see if I can make some progress on them. Or at least refactor and clean things up a bit for later.
It's also been insanely warm here - nearly summer weather - so I want to get outside.
Right now I'm working on adding optional user accounts to my daily word game Tiled Words. (A lot of players have asked for this to sync their progress across devices.) Though I should probably go to bed soon. The baby will surely be waking me up in the middle of the night.
At work we're starting a new app because the business is pivoting pretty heavily. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic that the current team will be able to build a solid app and jettison a lot of the old tech debt that was keeping us down.
I'm focused on the front-end and am working to build out a solid foundation with a custom design system that will work well for our business needs.
Overhauling Mitogen's module override/deny/skip implementation. Surveying the state of anonymous/privacy preserving proof of age systems.
I spent the week-end setting up a k3s cluster on Vultr the hard way, and i’ll probably keep improving the overall setup until i’m satisfied. I’ll probably migrate my website tonight or tomorrow, and then I want trying to deploy a Miniflux instance as well (i didn’t like Feedly in the end).
And at some point, I’ll try to write an article about the resulting setup, similarly to what I did with the last one.
Home alone with the pets as the rest of the family have gone exploring down south as its school holidays. Enjoyable in some ways having the entire house to myself, worse in others.
Have a bunch of jobs to get on with, some involving cars, some involving house DIY. Managed to clear about half my office floor last weekend, so now need to decide what I want to do in terms of furniture in here, I'd like a lot more storage, but also more workspace area. Suspect putting a bunch of cupboards/drawers and a worktop along the back wall is the most sensible way to achieve that, and probably cut the whiteboard in half - not that I use it much anymore, tend to reach for markdown & mermaid first now.
Looking forward to the monthly ruby user group later in the week.