A garage sale for your mind

Sign in Subscribe

Curtis Jones

God-fearing, mountain-climbing, software engineer.

📍 Atlanta, GA https://curtisjones.com

To Sleep or not to Sleep

Our evening routine is predictable, but if I make it past that 9pm siren song of my pillow, I can work until 3am with ease. The weird part: then I lie down and my brain just keeps GOING. Maybe I'm throwing off some sleep rhythm.

Slapping my Past Self

Asked what I'd tell my younger self, my answer is embarrassingly practical: finish what you started. I have a graveyard of projects abandoned right at the boring polish phase, each a little regret. The joy isn't only in the breakthrough; it's in the boring victory of shipping.

Interviewing

Last week I started the job search: a dozen applications a day on LinkedIn and Indeed, effort waning by the double digits. There's a "feel" element to fit, but I've found almost zero correlation between which replies I expect and which ones I get. It feels random.

More on AI Programming

If AI optimizes my work, do we need fewer programmers? I offer the alternative: the scope of software just keeps growing. Before compilers the largest programs were tiny; now AAA games take hundreds of engineers years. The bar keeps rising.

The Coffee Getter

I'm the guy who stays for the full credits, and one title has stuck with me for years: 2nd 2nd assistant director. I always pictured an assistant's assistant fetching coffee. Turns out it's a real, essential role wrangling crowds on massive shoots.

Bank Fail

Going paperless at my new bank (which I severely dislike) sounded simple. Instead it meant clicking every tab like defusing a bomb, then sending a plea into a "Contact Us" void and waiting two full days for a human to flip the switch. For "security", obviously.

My Super Power

I once wrote an app that had to scan ITF barcodes, a format iOS didn't support. After learning that the white space encodes the data and the last digit is a checksum, I got my superpower: for a few months I could read and parse ITF barcodes in my head.

A New Hate (GA ZLY-564)

I never had an opinion on the sport bike community until a gaggle of them blocked both highway lanes for ten miles so their friends could speed up and slow down through the gap. So, yeah, I have a new hate now. Best wishes to Georgia plate ZLY-564.

Instagram is Dead

I weened myself off Instagram not because it was bad but because it was too good. Years later I came back, and now every picture has music I can't mute and the feed is littered with people I don't follow. Talk about losing the plot.

Primal Urges

Every time I light a fire and smell the smoke, something in my core wakes up and wants land in the mountains with a cabin and a fire pit. We already live in the mountains, but an HOA where you can't fell a tree without approval doesn't quite scratch the itch. One day.

Web Analytics