cesarbs

> Burnout and dream of working in construction...

Is this a thing? Working in construction is usually my first day dream when I'm feeling fed up with work or a little burned out.

QBasic was my first exposure to programming, when I was 9 years old. Fond memories. Despite it having what today I consider terrible syntax, it made programming extremely approachable. After a quick "hello, world" intro from an IT guy at my mom's office, I spent countless hours reading the help pages and learning the commands. Sometimes I wish programming could be as simple again.

I suffer from severe hypochondria. If I did this test and found out I have a higher change of developing some kind of cancer, I don't think I would be able to sleep well again for the rest of my life.

On a related note, we go through great lengths in the Kestrel HTTP server [0] (which also uses libuv) to have fast HTTP parsing. As an example, we attempt to read the method and the HTTP version as longs and compare them to pre-computed longs in order to have fast comparisons and reuse strings containing standard methods and versions (reducing memory allocation is the main driver of our optimizations) [1], so we don't have to allocate those strings on every request. We do a similar thing for headers [2]. We also manage a lot of our own memory, despite using a garbage collected language [3].

[0] https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer

[1] https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/blob/3a424f6abac...

[2] https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/blob/dev/src/Mic...

[3] https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/blob/dev/src/Mic...

My first night in any hotel is almost always terrible. But on subsequent nights I sleep like a baby.

Does this mean I'm better off not having any money in a savings account (except perhaps 1 month's expenses or so) and putting that money in stocks and bonds? I've been thinking recently of moving (part of) my 5-month emergency fund to intermediate term muni bonds (VWITX specifically). But I'm not sure if that's a good move.

I love your dictionary-like sample sentence :)

I wasn't advocating writing extremely rigid, non-extensible code. I was alluding to unnecessarily abstract code bases where e.g. there's a class hierarchy with 7 classes when in fact 3 would properly describe the problem domain. Some people get really carried away coming up with abstractions and in the end they just write a lot of meaningless or purposeless code.

I'm kinda bummed to hear that. I have mentioned how it's done in the Netherlands on several occasions. I thought it had worked - sad it didn't.

Yeah, listening is very different from reading. Most audiobooks I play at 1.5x-2x because narrations are usually super slow.

It's the fifth bullet point in the list at the top of the page.

Yep.

Going a bit off topic here (since my kid is still in elementary), but I wish schools started later for more selfish reasons. Our kid naturally wakes up early but the Mrs. and I are night owls. We've been miserable since our kid started going to school. We've been trying to force ourselves to go to bed earlier than its natural to us, with varying degrees of success, but most weeks are spent half asleep most of the time because waking up at 7am just doesn't work for us. I can't wait for middle school when the kiddo will likely be old enough to wake up on her own, fix herself up and go catch the school bus.

Am I the only one confused by the title? I honestly thought it would be an April Fool's joke :) The title makes me think it's about coloring colored images.

> It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

Spot on. I find myself frequently and increasingly frustrated with how slow most software is nowadays. Every app in my phone takes 2-3 seconds to load. Lots of websites/webapps take several seconds to load before they are readable/usable (Google Sheets is particularly offensive here).

Years ago I had a lot less hardware than today, and the software I use had less features, but I remember response times being much faster. I hope we're able to reverse this situation soon.

That's pretty much my personal approach to writing code (with special devotion to the "how can we avoid building it" part). I wish everyone I worked with had the same attitude.

The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non-problems.

When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it actually required solving or if a more pragmatic solution was at hand and would lead to the same outcome.

Now that I have some years of experience in the industry, I realize that 80% of the "puzzles" I face at work are bullshit. They are usually complicated situations generated by organic and uncontrolled growth in codebase complexity that lead to horrible scenarios requiring a lot of brain power to solve. The thing is, if things had been more properly thought out, those situations would have not occurred in the first place, because the code would have a lot more sound architecture. But because it was allowed to grow without thought and refactoring, it now offers many "puzzles" that the younger people in the team don't even question at a more fundamental level.

Sorry for the cynicism but it's honestly the way I feel about most of the work I do these days. Too much in terms of stability, maintainability and soundness is sacrificed for performance and for pushing things out the door asap.

Do you buy hardware based on what it looks?

I've stopped buying 100% cotton t-shirts because they shrink so much. polyester/cotton or tri-blend last so much longer. Also, I find them more comfortable to use (cotton sticks to the skin when it gets humid).

Brazil is collapsing and there's no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

That "diversity" you put there is really snarky. You seem to be implying that non-diversity (which you're very likely thinking of as white males) hires all perform well and only diversity hires underperform.

> When someone who is a diversity hire

What are you trying to imply here?

> 5. They aren't Incompetent. They are just good at what they do, for long time, which new comers might dispute as being lazy, not passionate about technology.

I'm fairly sure I would fall in OP's "incompetent" bucket, but this point of yours nailed it. I'm not among the oldest people around and I haven't been that long at the company I work at, but I definitely don't have the passion and drive of the single, early 20s guys in my team.

Give me a task and I'll do it well. But don't expect me to be 100% of the time on social media promoting the product, and don't expect to see me voluntarily working nights and weekends just because the product is really cool (which it really is, but it's still work). I have 1) a family and 2) multiple other interests outside of work.

High protein or high in red meat? There's a huge difference there. If I eat a high protein diet with my protein coming from e.g. soy, am I still under the same risk?

> You can have a long, happy and prosperous career working with a single stack that someone has made work on your OS of choice, but if you don't enjoy feeding the machine, there is a ceiling on your flexibility and problem solving ability.

That's what gets to me the most. I'm fairly confident in my problem solving abilities and coding skills. But I frequently lose all motivation to do good work when 80% of what I do is "feed the machine". There are times when doing it makes sense for the problem at hand, and then I feel motivated, but most of the time feeding the machine is about dealing with shitty code, bad documentation and unnecessary overengineering.

Wikipedia says that the Sweden Democrats are anti-immigration [1]. Your comment seems to imply the opposite. Could you elaborate more?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Democrats

You have to click on the "1 month" and "12 month" buttons for their respective prices to show up. I was confused too.

> Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much.

Are you kidding? Almost every public school I know of has to run fundraisers because government funding is not enough to last through the school year.

I'm one of the authors of QuickSynergy: https://github.com/cesarbs/quicksynergy-gtk

I was quite happy to learn recently that it's pretty popular with my wife's team at Amazon. She had a pleasant surprise when she installed it on her machine and noticed my name in the About dialog :)

It's due for an update though...

Thanks, I guess I should have deduced that myself. In my case both my wife and I are software engineers making really good salaries, so we definitely don't need both of us to be working. We don't even do it on purpose but looking at our lifestyle it is definitely on a level that could be sustained with only one of our salaries :)