HN user
Anecdotal:
A long time ago, in my 20's, I found out it's easy for me to think in two streams as long as they operated in different languages. I could talk to my colleagues in Hebrew and answer emails in English at the same time.
Surprisingly, writing and speaking in the same language is not as easy for me. Possible, but requires some mental effort to keep the buffers separated.
This is perfectly encapsulated in xkcd's "Standards" strip [https://xkcd.com/927/].
Similar when you climb up the technical path as well, beyond staff engineer. It gets lonely, not many peers, not part of a team, you have to be careful about what you say and to whom as your words carry a lot of significance.
GCP has it's own share of issues.
...
I was writing a long vent about GCP but the mix of issues we had, just in the last few weeks, was too identifying and I don't want to sour an already tremulous relationship, as much as I'd like to spill it all here.
Let's just sum it up with resource crunch and degraded services because, apparently, when one customer signs a $200B deal [1] all the "just a few $10M" get thrown to the wayside.
AWS is also affected. Time to go to Azure? I never thought I'd say those words.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2165585/anthropic-reportedly-agrees...
It’s a slop alright. But it also missed the next mainstream iteration which is Java virtual threads / Goroutines. Those do away with coloring by attacking the root of the problem: that OS threads are expensive.
Sure, it comes with its own issues like large stacks (10k copy of nearly the same stack?) and I predict a memory coloring in the future (stack variables or even whole frames that can opt out from being copied across virtual threads).
Yet... deploy on two clouds and you'll get tax payers scream at you for "wasting money" preparing for a black swan event. Can't have both, either reliability or lower cost.
It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.
I bet "I'm a lot of people". That's the point of the post. We exist, we contribute, some of us are critical. We just don't chase fame, don't care about (much) about recognition (beyond peer I guess) and have interests and ways to occupy our time other than software. :shrug:.
I accepted that I won't be a "name". Yet I have made suggestions that were adopted into Spring, I have commented on JCPs, I have talked with antirez (though not much contributed there, I'm still in awe of Redis' internal design). I just... don't care much about other people knowing me beyond what I need to pay the bills and make my immediate peers, manager chain and customers happy.
Heh. That's me. The "no presence" part. About the 10x part, ask my colleagues. I want to believe I'm doing some good work but who knows.
But the no presence... I've got a kid, a house, a mortgage. I've been in software since I was a teenager. Am I still fascinated by it? Sure. Will I still spend hours and hours of free time? Nop. It long since stopped being a hobby. Right now I like reading and listening to audio books, when I have a break from house chores and child rearing. I like to cook and experiment in the kitchen. The endorphin feedback cycle is so much faster (hours) than large scale software (weeks to years). I like to watch interesting shows on TV. Write. Coding-wise, I'm invisible outside the company I work at.
Not strictly a 9-5, but with a kid I do try to have quality family time, so I condense as much as possible to my working day, leaving time to be with my loved ones. If there's something important I'll participate. If there's a pagerduty alarm I'll jump. But otherwise, I'll deal with it tomorrow. I've long since learned to identify real emergencies from artificial urgency "because there's a milestone deadline!". Sure there is. Like the old saying goes "I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make when they go by". Is it a customer commitment? No? Then I'll work on it Monday morning, right now I'm out.
I value people like that. Being a hero is a young-people game. You can't be a hero for years and years and not burn out. I've seen that happen. Working every weekend? Then something is wrong with the estimation. Or the design. Or whoever is in charge of priorities.
God helps me when I look for a job again. I guess I'll have to rely on references and hope to hell I'll pass the filtering software to actually get someone to look at my application. So far I've been lucky. Last time I actually sent CVs was at the beginning of my career, as a new grad, 20 years ago. Ever since then I was picked out, carried over, invited in by people who knew me. Really, really hoping that'll keep being the case.
To me that's a complete circle back to lessons learned from neural networks - I long suspected we'd be heading that way again with transformers being a computational step rather than the whole thing.
That! It took me a while to start. My education of graph theory wasn't much better than your average college grad. But I found that fascinating and started reading. I was also very lucky to have had two great mentors - my TL and the product's architect, the former helped me to expend my understanding of the field.
I oversimplified. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390701
The product was a CMDB, with great tech and terrible marketing.
I oversimplified. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390701
That was about 20 years ago. Not much translates to today's world. I was in the algorithms team working on a CMDB product. Great tech, terrible marketing.
These days it's very different, mostly large-ish distributed systems.
kindaaaa....
I oversimplified the problem :). Really it was about generating an isomporhic-ish view, based on some user defined rules, of an existing graph, itself generated by a subgraph isomorphism by a query language.
Think a computer network as a graph, with various other configuration items like processes, attached drives, etc (something also known as a CMDB). Query that graph to generate a subgraph out of it. Then use rules to make that subgraph appear as a tree of layers (tree but in each layer you may have additional edges between the vertices) because trees are efficient, non-complex representation on 2d space (i.e. monitors).
However, a child node in that tree isn't necessarily connected directly to the parent node. E.g. one of the rules may be "display the sub network and the attached drives in a single layer", so now the parent node, the gateway, has both network nodes (directly connected to it) and attached drives (indirectly connected to it) as direct descendants.
Extend this to be able to connect through any descendant, direct or indirect (gateway -> network node -> disk -> config file -> config value - but put the config value on the level of the network node and build a link between them to represent the compound relationship).
Walk through the original subgraph while evaluating the rules and build a "trace back" stack to let you understand how to build each layer even in the presence of compound links while performing a single walkthrough instead of nm (original vertices rules for generation).
As I said, that was a lot of fun. I miss those days.
I despise leetcode interviews. These days, with coding LLMs, I see them as even less relevant than they were before.
Yet, you ask someone "how do you build an efficient LFU" and get blank stares (I just LOVE the memcache solution of regions and probabilistic promotion/demotion).
One of my best commits was removing about 60K lines of code, a whole "server" (it was early 2000's) with that had to hold all of its state in memory and replacing them with about 5k of logic that was lightweight enough to piggyback into another service and had no in-memory state at all. That was pure a algorithmic win - figuring out that a specific guided subgraph isomorphism where the target was a tree (directed, non cyclic graph with a single root) was possible by a single walk through the origin (general) directed bi-graph while emitting vertices and edges to the output graph (tree) and maintaining only a small in-process peek-able stack of steps taken from the root that can affect the current generation step (not necessarily just parent path).
I still remember the behemoth of a commit that was "-60,000 (or similar) lines of code". Best commit I ever pushed.
Those were fun times. Hadn't done anything algorithmically impressive since.
This (and all the rest) are true. But why isn’t every repeated alarm on (phone, calendar) equipped with “skip N nexts”?
Piggybacking on this, I just want an alarm that I could tell “not tomorrow please, I’m off work. But keep the schedule otherwise, ok?”
Apparently that’s touch to ask in 2025.
A cursory glance at "setAccessible" usage reveals popular libraries such as serializers like gson and jaxb, class manipulation and generation like cglib, aspectj and even jdk.internal.reflect, testing frameworks and libraries including junit, mockito and other mocking libraries, lombok, groovy, spring, and the list goes on and on.
My bet is that this will be yet another "checked exception" or "module system", where many applications now need to add "--add-opens". If you'll use ANY of many of the more popular frameworks or libraries you'll end up giving this assurance away, which will make library developers not able to rely on it and we're back to square one.
I'm so happy (well... I'm something. happy is somewhat hard to come by these days) that I helped a fellow widower. We're in this alone, but together.
My personal view is to hide nothing, NOTHING, from my daughter. The tears, the grief, the pictures, the videos. Talking about death using "death" and not "passed away". Talking about the memories and feelings. About a person no longer being here (not spiritual so no "heaven" for us, no waiting to be reunited). And, so far at least (just closing on 2 years, daughter grew from 4.5 to 6.5), it seems to be working very well. She's happy, active, well adjusted, charismatic and not prone to tantrums or worrisome behavior more than any other 6 years old. And her being happy makes me happy. I KNOW my late wife would've been proud of us both.
"How is this our life?"
I asked that question so many times (for reference, see my comment on Jake's thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41163619 ). I asked it of my late wife. I asked it of my therapist. I asked it of my daughter, when she was sleeping.
"Is this my life now?"
The first few months were terrible. Then things started to get better. Before anyone jumps and says "a few months?! That's nothing!", there's a thing called "anticipatory grief". Look it up. (Besides, each grief journey is individual. Besides, who are you to criticize me?).
Then things stopped getting worse. For a while life was flat. Colorless. Dark. I moved through the motions. Dropped my daughter at preschool, worked from home, picked her up, went to the playground, went home, dinner, bedtime story, lie in bed doing nothing. Rinse and repeat. Go to sleep early to avoid feeling.
Then it started getting better. And better. And even better than that. Therapy, meds, pushing (omg so much pushing), friends, a new love. Things got continuously better. I'll never forget that year, but I also now know that I can survive what I think is the 2nd worst thing that can happen to a person. I know it cannot break me.
And I think Bess found that out too. Parts of us died with them, but new parts are growing. Parenthood parts. Discovery parts.
I remember watching my wife to make sure she was breathing. Then at the hospital. Then she wasn't. And it was terrible. A loss I cannot even describe, a part of your own soul that is torn out of you. Yet, that part was painful. Not just that, also in pain. In some sense, I was relieved she was no longer in pain. Even more relived she didn't have to witness her mom passing away. The world turning darker and more despair filling in. She missed on milestones, but also on sadness. And, at the end, I miss her but that part, slowly, became more bearable.
To Bess - I can't promise it'll be ok. No one can. But it'll get easier to bare.
"Explains Git so often, probably dreams in commit messages"
"So passionate about system design, probably tries to optimize their grocery shopping with distributed algorithms"
Both are so true!
And on a more serious note, "Will develop an open-source journaling platform focused on grief support and mental health" sounds like an amazing project to dive into. Possibly, deepseek, possibly...
That happened to me too. Then I switched writing in "notes" and eventually switched to https://dayone.me/ which has a webapp as well as mobile app, so it's easy for me to write on any device. It was less disheartening not to see that "delivered, not read" on messages.
Forgot to add: Journaling helped me a lot. I favored writing this as "letters" / "texts" to my wife. As if she's here, just telling her about my day, feelings, emotions, what our kid did, what happened around us, family and friends. Venting, crying, blaming, being frustrated, being happy, being proud. All goes in there.
Lost my wife about 1.5 years ago. It was expected and unexpected at the same time. Long metastatic cancer treatment that ended all of the sudden, in a few weeks of unconsciousness ("coma") with an auto immune brain disease, likely caused by chemo.
As the partner left behind, I nothing but empathy to Bess. As an avid, ultra pragmatic, HN reader though, I've gathered resources so I'll list them here:
Forums / chats:
https://www.reddit.com/r/widowers/ - This one I used immediately after. Yelling into the void. Crying. Having other people cry with me. Make sure I'm heard.
https://discord.gg/CFQfCdby - /r/widowers discord. This one is "good" for the first few days / weeks / months, when the pain is great and the sense of lost is overcoming and you just need someone to talk with, someone who's been through this, right now. Everyone is friendly, rules to keep things sane and not triggering are in effect.
Facebook groups - I know, ugh. But it helps to see other people in the same boat. Somehow. A little. For me it was "Young and Widowed With Children" (well, me) and some of the black humor groups e.g. "Widow(er) Humor". Find your tribe. It really does help.
Books:
It's ok you're not ok - https://www.amazon.com/Its-That-Youre-Not-Understand/dp/1622... - This is "the book". Everyone recommends it and it's justified. If you can't bring yourself to read, get the audible version. I did, it was easier to lie in bed with eyes closed.
Irreverent Grief Guide - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L5RRJ9D - this one is a "how to" guide. I mean a real "how to", emotionally. I, and possibly many on /r/widowers/ found it priceless.
Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzOvi0Aa2EA - Huberman labs - a really short video on how your brain needs to reorient itself after loss.
Kids:
"The widow's survival guide" - https://www.amazon.com/Widows-Survival-Guide-Living-Children... - "you're not alone in the mess" kind of book. Again, audible version available.
Kids' books (mine was 3.5 so YMMV):
Reread over and over:
- The invisible string - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031648623X
- Fix-it man - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1925335348
- Missing mummy - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0230749518
- The sad dragon - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1948040999
- Something very sad happened - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1433822660
- Love is forever - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615884059
- I'll See You In The Moon - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1989123309
- My heart will stay - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0578794578
- The heart and the bottle - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399254528
- Always remember - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399168095
- The garden of lost balls - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BLQW27XX
- Gone but never forgotten - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09SNY9VF3
Actually, therapy and meds before, if not already. Anticipatory grief is a thing and processing it can make later days a bit easier. Anti anxiety meds (NDRI) can create "inoculation" effect to some extent. SSRIs probably as well. Understand depression, the symptoms, the issues. Educate family and friends. Establish rapport with a therapist.
Friends and community:
Expect loss of friends. It's terrible but it happens a lot. Extremely common that friends will silently disappear after a few days or weeks. Not even just joint friends. People are awkward around grief. Community, however, does seem to work well. Rely on them. Don't say no to food offers, it helps. Doordash! Don't be shy about it, it's fine to eat junk food. Don't drink though and don't get high, it deepens and prolongs the grief symptoms.
Calls:
Don't forget your family or close friends. I've had daily calls with my sister. It helped a ton. Scheduled daily calls.
Cannot be complete without a reference to Wat
This looks really great, but I wish there was a setting for "SAT level English". That could've really helped me improve my own vocabulary. Also "used in a sentence" so I could actually type something in a sentence.
And... maybe ignore typos, spaces, commas etc in the non main word? The main word is important for sure but the rest is less, just forces you to focus on what you're learning.