A garage sale for your mind

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work

A collection of 56 posts

The Money is not Worth It

I've had amazing jobs and terrible ones. One manager kept reminding me I was paid too much; that wasn't even his worst blunder. The takeaway after a lot of jobs: if you find the right one, stick with it. If you're in the wrong one, work like hell to leave. The money is not worth it.

Kids and Office Work

I talked with an xAI engineer about a role: hit the ground running, don't watch the clock, in the office every day, in Palo Alto. That work style is completely incompatible with having a family, which is curious given who owns xAI. Incongruity in words versus actions.

Building vs Marketing

I can turn interesting ideas into high-quality, functional apps all day long, and no one will ever know. Decades of engineering experience and zero idea how to get traction. You want the secret? Yeah, I do too. Let me know if you figure it out.

Starlink Mini for the Park

A Starlink Mini and battery are headed for my desk. The parks we can reach have little or no cell service, and a normal work schedule means most of the year it's dark by EOD. With internet at the picnic table, I can stay at the park as long as the kids want.

Ditching Squarespace for Ghost

A three or four page site facing a nearly $300 Squarespace renewal. So I spun up a Ghost instance, copy-pasted the content, repointed the nginx proxy, confirmed it worked, and clicked Cancel. Cha-ching. I wasn't getting my money's worth. Good riddance.

Ditching Squarespace for Ghost

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.

Technical Interviews

Interviewing for a Senior Staff role that requires cryptography and network programming, and the first technical interview focuses entirely on MVVM with SwiftUI. Why? I could learn that in a couple hours. Thankfully the last two rounds were more on point.

Xcode Blues

Does Xcode's AI integration actually do anything useful? I keep trying the feature and consistently fail to find any value in it. Is it just me?

The State of AI Programming

I've been programming since the early 1990s on a hand-me-down Mac Plus. The AI tooling improves at breakneck speed, but the actual programming ability has leveled off, and it will lead you down the wrong path with supreme confidence. A field report from building a streaming app.

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