ingvul

In my company the greatest benefit is that: it is not mandatory. So I'm never on-call. My free time is too valuable for just a bit more of money.

I just bought a mbp M1. Would the M1 ultra be available on mbps in the (near) future?

Don't think it's plausible, otherwise it would already have happened. I mean, if country X really wants to pull that card they could have already done so without having to tell the entire world of their invasion intentions.

It's easier (and usually more rewarding) to start something from scratch than to fork.

And this is why the tech interview process is (still) broken.

You can as well build the site locally (e.g., on your computer) first and commit the .html files in your page repo. GitHub pages will then serve your .html files directly without having to build your site using Jekyll. This is what I used to do when hosting my site on github pages:

- locally install jekyll

- write my .md files

- run jekyll locally to see how my site looks like

- commit .md and .html files

- let github pages know what you are pushing the static files yourself

Doing sports and running with a 6 inch smartphone attached to your arm or in your pocket is just uncomfortable.

Can you upload your own mp3s to the Apple Watch? Do I need special software for that?

It's a shame you cannot put your own mp3s on the Mighty Vibe.

DevOps usually need to be on-call (paid) rotations. That sucks.

Why do you have sound alerts on Slack? I thought turning them off was the norm (at least in my experience). I have all the alerts turned off except the notification banner/popup.

- one alias for personal/professional correspondence. Own domain

- one alias for everything that is less important than the previous point (e.g., github, netlify, aws). Own domain

- one dummy protonmail inbox for everything else (e.g., reddit, HN, pizza online, etc.)

I wish I could migrate to Linode... but they don't support VPCs in Europe though.

Which platform is exempt from this? I have heard similar stories from GCP, AWS, Linode, etc. I would even say: the bigger the platform, the worse the customer support (i.e., Google)

Everything matters. Given two more or less skilled candidates, I guess if one looks like Brad Pitt, well, that's something no? Or if someone has a really nice voice, that has to count for something. Perhaps the company is thinking in terms "oh, candidate 2 has a magnificent voice! If we ever present tech conferences, he will do great!"

This is not a world where "only your brain" matters. If you have brain and a decent surface (i.e., face, body, voice, manners) then you'll beat the ones who "only" have brain.

Probably the 4th generation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#4th_generation)

Everybody knows that the amount of time one should spend "splitting a string in C# by a delimiter" is 2 minutes 16 seconds. More than that and it's a "red flag".

I'm tired of all this BS really.

Agree. At least in Europe we have, I believe, what I like to call "European English" accent: it's a mix of American English (because Hollywood + Netflix) plus British English (because that's was is taught in schools) plus your local accent (German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). We all understand each other very well (even when we make mistakes, because we usually make the same mistakes). It's funny because whenever a native English speaker joins the conversation, some of us may have trouble understanding him.

I want to throw a bunch of micro-robots on the top of my head and let them cut my hair exactly the way I want. I don't want to brush my teeth at night: I just put a bunch of micro-robots, let them to their job and spit them out at the end. Cutting my nails? Micro-robots can do that. Showering? A thing of the past; micro-robots will keep me clean 24/7. Like, can you imagine the humans of the year 2200 doing all these little things by themselves?

It just seems to be so unreal that we are so excited about AR/VR, but we can't even make technology that gets us a decent haircut.

I just don’t understand how this is a net time/energy savings?

At the end of the day is all about trust. Do you trust code you find in SO/Copilot to be good enough for your use case?

In my case I do not trust SO code. Whenever I use SO, if I find some snippet that seems to be the code solution I'm looking for, I copy-paste the snippet on my IDE, read through it carefully, rename variable names as needed, handle edge cases, remove unused code, etc., etc. Any code solution I find in SO gives me the "starting" kick, which is about 10% of the total effort of writing code from scratch. The remaining 90% (to understand the code that is being committed) cannot simply go away. I do not expect Copilot will make much of a difference.

Like it or not, when interviewing for a job, you're doing a sales presentation

Maybe in the 90s. Nowadays it's becoming very balanced in the way that companies are the ones who are doing a sales presentation as well.

Companies want elite engineers, and so the technical interviews are Google level. Turns out 95% of the companies out there do not need elite engineers.

I do think I'm experiencing burn out, but I don't see myself quitting. It's weird.

I feel fine when I have to:

- refactor code

- create some new application code from scratch

- fix some business logic bug

I feel anxiety (and I experience burn out symptoms) when I have to:

- deal with any k8s issue

- incorporate any third-party library like oauth2-proxy

- run some migration in a big table

I don't like "infrastructure" topics, but as a "senior" software engineer I don't have a choice. I love dealing only with application code (e.g., classes, interfaces, modules, business logic, tests, etc.)

Final thought: money matters come up a lot in your post. You don't have to measure yourself in that dimension if you don't want to anymore. You can add a great deal of value to the world without $$$ being the base unit, and/or have a lot of fun!

Reminds me: "But sir, I don't want money; I just want a big home with a big garden!". Not sure where I heard it.

Could you elaborate? I rely heavily on systemd (I don't always run applications on containers), so my usually server on the cloud looks like: a go binary running under systemd. I can't easily reproduce that with Docker. Sure, for other kind of applications it works quite well, and as I said before I do make use of Docker as well, although I don't think it can satisfy my needs as "infra" engineer.

Why would you ask if it's dead?

Mainly because developers around me use Docker instead, and infrastructure engineers do not reproduce cloud infrastructure locally anymore (they have dev environments on the cloud as well). In my experience, at least, Vagrant was heavily used like 4 years ago, but nowadays not so much.

To make this clear: I am a nobody and my code sucks. Now, for a moment, imagine the same question is stated but by developers who are actually great contributors to the open source community but can't (or don't want to) openly ask these kind of questions regarding Copilot (this is actually why I'm posting this, one of these great contributors is a close friend of mine).

I can only imagine one of the big reasons to release Copilot to the public for free is to make it better by sending back to GitHub the "reviewed code". Example:

- Copilot suggests me a snippet of code

- It's almost what I wanted. I fix the code

- Copilot sends back the fixed code to GitHub

- Copilot gets better at guessing my (and others) wishes

Unless Copilot is running locally, I won't use it.

I use time. The usual flow is like this:

- Day 1: exciting idea comes to my mind. I start to think a bit about why it would make sense to implement it, who would pay for it, etc. I do some investigations (e.g., how many competitors are out there? Would I ever come with something "better"?) and if things don't look good, I discard the idea... otherwise I let it stay in mind for a few days. Most of my ideas don't pass this stage.

- Day 21: if I haven't yet discarded the idea, I do more investigations. I evaluate potential competitors (if there are none, I check why). In general is now when I spend more time digging around. If I feel confident about the idea I tell it to people I know which I consider would be potential customers.

- Day 41: if I haven't yet discarded the idea, I start working on it. This could be a simple online website (just a landing page) where I track visits and the like. I do some marketing in places that I know people would be interested in my idea, etc.

- Day 61: if I haven't yet discarded the idea, I take it more seriously. It's now when my idea becomes a "serious side project".

Usually, 1 idea or so every 2 years reach the "Day 61" stage. Almost all my ideas get discarded because I realize at some point that "they don't actually make sense. Let's not waste time on them".

Note: I don't think one can "quickly" validate ideas. If you decide something in a matter of a few days... you are probably missing a lot of details (unless you have a whole team working for you): and most probably the outcome will be "wasted time". For learning, sure, it does make sense to "waste time" but I'm assuming here that the goal is not "learning" but to actually decide on what idea one should spend time on.

Links:

- Western Digital 1TB WD Blue Mobile Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 128 MB Cache, 3.5": https://www.amazon.com/WD-Blue-1TB-Hard-Drive/dp/B013HNYVLA/...

- Hard Drive Enclosure, RSHTECH USB 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Docking Station for 3.5 inch SATA I/II/III HDD: https://www.amazon.com/RSHTECH-Enclosure-External-Docking-St...