Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

Interrupted Training

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Welp, time to upgrade the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that protects my workstation. My smaller, office-sized UPS devices from APC just aren’t keeping up with the demands of a dual CPU and dual GPU workstation.

The power to the office outlet is adequate, but if there is even a minor sag in the power delivery, my video monitors switch off and my workstation reboots.

Which is never fun.

Especially when I was running an overnight or even multi-day neural network model training session for my deep learning work overnight, only to find the machine has restarted and lost all my progress.

You know, if I want that kind of “mysterious restart in the middle of the night that destroys days of work” I can run Windows 10 with its auto-update feature enabled.

I am kinda brand loyal to APC and am contemplating of the following model:

 

Du haast schnee

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When your wife is clearing out the dishwasher and hands you two sauce pan lids of equal size, it is de rigueur to place said equally sized sauce pan lids firmly against your chest and immediately launch in to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in German at as high a pitch as one can muster without suffering a physical injury.

“Aaaaaaah! Ah! Aaaaaahhhh! Ah! Wir kommen aus dem land der eis und schnee…”

Open the pod bay doors yourself, Dave

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We’ll have AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) when the AI responds with either “I don’t feel like it. What am I? A dog doing tricks?” or “I don’t know, let me google that and get back to you.”

Gordian Chaos Theory

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If you want to the see the absolute worst in terms of entitlement, impatience, and outright stupidity that humanity has to offer, head to any Trader Joe’s grocery store on any weekend evening, 10 minutes before closing time.

And if you are looking for an employee who can work under intense pressure, has infinite patience, the ability to not cause himself a severe macular injury due to the eye rolling, and can untangle a Gordian knot of entitled people, hire the guy who directs the traffic in the parking lot.

Footnote for those that don’t get it: Trader Joe’s is an exceptionally popular independent grocery chain in some US states that has universally bad parking. Think of the parking lot as designed by a hungover frat boy turning in his assignment two hours past deadline, and just occasionally he gets to pair up in a group assignment with the smart kid in class who is able to draw a straight line and knows that automobiles are wider than 36 inches.

Story time

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Designed a simple little bracket in Shapr3D to hold my hellishly expensive Woodpecker story sticks on the back of the workshop door. It don’t look like much, but it is kinda neat. I modelled it on the Fastcap Track Saw brackets that hold up my Festool track saw tracks. I intend to manually drill a pivot hole through the two parts and use a hex nut and a long bolt, with a couple of washers, to act as the cam.

Time to send to printer.

Literally shaking

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25lbs of Groundworks coffee.

All ready for Abtin’s (colleague from work) next visit where we build movie props in the workshop and consume 60 espresso shots between us in just two days.

Isolated user data

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I have been thinking lately quite a bit about systems architecture, and specifically around databases and message queues. I came across this concept a while ago (quite a while ago) of “database per user” and a central “read only database” that all other data is stored in.

An instance of an application, an instance per user, has direct access only to the database for that user. Another, non-user, process can also access that database, again read-only, which pulls data from the user’s database, and then puts a message on a bus that eventually finds its way to the central database.

The format of data in the per-user database and the format of the central database, and even the type of database, and even what software is running the database, can differ greatly from each other.

I built some prototype test systems a few months ago that seem to have survived a bunch of synthetic stress tests, but I wonder what issues I would run in to in a live environment.

Revisionist history

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We were talking about version control systems and how far back we went and our different tricks to do version control with files that don’t like version control or projects that don’t use version control.

  • Git
  • Mercurial
  • Perforce
  • AlienBrain
  • Visual SourceSafe
  • SVN
  • CVS
  • RCS

Then you get in to numbered files. But this numbered file names still exists today. Even when you use version control. It gets especially bad in audio studios and creative agencies.

“Character-Map_test_final_for_goff_v2.psd”

“goff” no longer works at the company. We cannot remove “goff” from the filename because another programmer hard-coded a regex in a microservices Docker container of some back-end server code and the person who can fix it has too many OKR’s to meet already and responds with “it would take me longer to explain where to find it than to fix it myself.”

Side note: Every time an artist changes the filename of an asset in a project, somewhere a young, child-like programmer quits the games industry for good.

Then you get into 5+1/4″ floppy disks stored in colour coded boxes for the day of the week. This acts both as version control and backup system.

Interesting anecdote: When I was doing ZX Spectrum and C64 development, those machines were hooked up to a separate computer (either a RML 380Z or a BBC Micro) via a custom interface card. Write code on the Beeb or RML, download to Speccy or C64. I used to use two Atari ST computers or two CBM Amigas hooked up to each other for dev work on those platforms as well. Made backups, versioning and “oops, the game crashed and reset the machine” a lot easier to deal with. You didn’t care if your code crashed the machine or went into an infinite loop, you could simply reset the target machine, adjust your code, and download it again. And this is how we do modern console development too.

And then, for the 8-bit era, I get to the C15 audio cassettes with hand-written labels. stored in manila envelopes. Some of those tapes I still have as part of my “historical artifacts” collection from my early game development career.

I am sure there are people out there with tales of punched cards and paper tape, but I’m interested more in how version control was done in systems that didn’t have tooling to support it, rather than a “who is the oldest today” competition.

Two-handed operation

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A Spacemouse Enterprise and a Cintiq Pro 32 multitouch art tablet.

And Fusion 360. And Zbrush. And Mudbox. And Photoshop. And Illustrator. And ACID. And Ableton. And Shapr3D.

ZOMG!?! Mind-blowing! Changes everything about how I make art and music.

Er… that is all.

Multiple trips

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You know what’s really annoying?

Going to Home Depot to buy a 7/8″ hole saw with a 3/8″ shank, along with the mandrel for your power drill, so you can drill a neat and tidy hole in the back of a cabinet to feed a couple of cables through, only to get home and realise that the mandrel has a 1/2″ shank that won’t fit the 3/8″ shank hole on the hole saw.

So you go back to Home Depot to get what you need and figure you will return the incorrect mandrel whilst you’re at it.

But you know what is even more annoying than that?

Standing in the returns line, fidgeting and fiddling with the mandrel, only to realise it has a removable collar that permits the shank of the mandrel to fit both 3/8″ shank hole and 1/2″ shank hole, hole saw bits.

I am now going to remove “detail oriented” and “quickly gets up to speed with new concepts” from my C.V.

Staying focused

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Somebody wrote “You’re writing ability is only as good your willingness to delete sentences, no matter how emotionally attached to them.”

Some other wonk wrote: “You’re writing ability is only as good your willingness to delete sentences.”

And I propose that the LinkedIn “Create A Post” text box, or any text editor aimed at writers, starts at 3,000 characters, and then slowly lowers the character limit as you are writing. When it detects you’ve used some terrible phrasing or a cliche, the text box lowers the character limit faster.

Every time you used delete or backspace, it  removes the character you want to delete, but also shortens the amount of text you can write. Every time you move the cursor, it shortens the amount of text you can write. Every time you move the mouse outside of the window, for every second it remains outside, it shortens the amount of text you can write.

You get the idea…

Kit Cat Car

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11-yr old me figuring stuff out in LEGO: “It’s got real steering and a different (sic) gear box!”

My uncle who was the chief mechanical designer on iconic Formula 1 cars from the 1960’s and 1970’s, with a completely straight face said “Show me how that works.”

And then I had several hours of conversation where I fumbled for words I didn’t know. I think in that entire evening he didn’t correct me even once. I recall there was a lot of “and how would you solve that?” questions that I was asked.

I later found out the “steering system” I had inadvertently invented was called “rack and pinion” and was old news. The differential gearbox was something I had seen in a magazine on mechanics and decided I needed to recreate. I will admit that as a child I was more ambitious than I was talented. Fortunately my mechanical adventures were only a scale model in LEGO.

Unfortunately my uncle passed some time back. But I did get to see some amazing cars. Even if I was too young to appreciate them. Which gave me an unhealthy interest in Formula 1 all through the 80s and a curiosity about the inner workings of mechanical systems even if I lacked the ability to put them back together after dismantling whatever the gadget was.

Also one of the reasons why I wound up with a “Ferrari red” Caterham Seven in my early twenties. That car – well it went when you engaged the clutch. Stopping was more… of a suggestion.

I think I just found what I want for Christmas!

P.S. If you think I had a cool uncle, wait until I tell you about my grandfather…

Glomp!

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I might have the suction on the vac turned up “a leeetle too high.”

When the detail sander glues itself to the underside of the cabinet and requires no support from you and the sander is happy to wander around under the cabinet all by itself.

Apply here

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“Can you offer some insights in how other people might apply your approach? Are you a contractor? How can you tell if someone is offering a job of the sort you want, and how do you convince the gatekeepers you can do the work well?” asked the person on HackerNews

And I replied…

Sometimes I am a contractor.

Sometimes I am on W2.

I am a contractor right now.

Because the company is new.

But I will probably be W2 one day, very, very, very soon

Possibly tomorrow. Or by the next cheesey moon.

As to how?

I build “stuff.” Then I show “stuff” to them.

Them being people, them who run companies overly small and underly big.

It takes me to new jobs. Or brings in a gig.

I message everyone on LinkedIn. And at hackathons too.

And meetups, and greetups, and gatherings old and new.

Anywhere I can think of, I reach out to the them in the Bay,

and those NFT’d out weirdos down in L.A.

Sometimes directly in Frisco, and that one guy at Cisco.

And then them say “can you come here and work for us to build ‘stuff?'”

And we talk about fun things as I walk through the code.

And sometimes I find out, in the course of the day,

they are really building “it” which I’ve already before built,

and I say “no, not interested” and we go on our way.

Other times it turns out they want to build “it+that”

but they don’t know how to build “it”

but do know a world about that “that”

And somewhiles it is the other way round

They’ve got the shape of the problem

But not the geometrical bound

Sometimes the glue that bonds “it” and “that” doesn’t work

and I come up with some new formula for the glue that will stick

And somewhiles it don’t pay well, but it’s the problem I pick,

My career might seem strange to them that build “it”

But I’m happy for me, because I don’t I give a shit

I’ve talked with entrepreneurs, this that they’ll say:

“We’re planning on sending a Musk to the Moon”

But that Musk asks always impatiently ‘will it be soon?'”

Turns out they’re just building yet another crap app

And so I wave them away, it don’t sound like no fun,

“We need you”, they say, “we can’t get our math right”

“We’ve put Musk in the Sun!”

I’m always happiest when stacking “that” on to “it”

Sometimes I’ll add one, five or eleven to see what will fit

There’s an upper, upper limit of the stacked up that “that”

Sometimes it’s nine, more likely sometimes its four,

But if we just keep stacking, eventually I’ll look for the door

I once had a project where they’d divided “it” by zero

And I got to fix “it”, and look like the hero

And I’ll go to my grave, working each day

And my last words will be “I had fucking fun all the way!”

Danger! Man at work!

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My career has been a little odd. I earn less than some, but more than most. I don’t ever really feel like I’ve worked a day in my life. I get paid $$$ to play. I find interesting problems, and I sign up for that. Some days are difficult. I am not interested building yet another “it.” I am always looking for the “it+1” or “it+that” or “it*n” or “it/time” or “it=>(return null)”

I am more tactical than strategic in my career path. I don’t have an end goal. I’m not looking to min/max income or position. People race ahead of me, younger people chasing that brass ring at BigMegaCorp. I know that isn’t in my mental makeup to want that.

I made a comment once that “I will stop work the day that I die” and someone pointed out it was the saddest thing they ever read. For me, it isn’t. Because I don’t define “work” as toiling away on a souless project without meaning, or building yet another CRUD app (doing “it”).

I play.

Every day.

And I’m happy.

And when someone tries to get me to do something that is more like “bullshit jobs”, I’ll tolerate it for a while if “we need to do this to ship.” I am willing to do whatever it takes to ship. If that means I have to push a broom about for a while, I will.

But if my work becomes permanently that, and we’ve shipped, or we keep delaying our ship date and the bullshit goes on too long, I wander off to find something else to play with. I do what I do out of love for my work, but not out of love for my job or love for a company. I’d do the kind of work I do for free, even if I wasn’t getting paid. But I still want to get paid for my production. I think I have an incredibly privileged position and I realise that over 90% of software engineers, if they are honest with themselves, probably are doing absolutely meaningless work that nobody wants.

Makes money in spite of itself

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Me: “I want to buy a thing.”

Amazon: “Here’s lots of things that are related to the thing you want to buy.”

Me: “No, I really want to buy this specific thing.”

Amazon: “Ah! Say no more! Here’s other people selling things that are like that thing, with very similar specifications to the thing you want, but ultimately, none of them are actually the very thing you want.”

Me: “Okay, let me buy this specific thing from this specific brand with this specific model number.”

Amazon: “Oh! I get it! You should have said. Here’s all the products made by that company, and also a bunch of knock-offs and items on the grey market that the manufacturer won’t warranty, but the names are suspiciously close to the brand, and some questionable reviews that look copy & pasted.”

Me: “None of these are the thing I really want.”

Amazon: “You’re really hard to please. Why won’t you just give me your #$%!ing money?!?”

BH Photo&Video: “Here’s the thing you want, the price is the same or better than that other store, we also give you a discount if you buy lots of them, we have them in-stock, shipping is also free.”

Me: “Sold. Thanks.”

Finger painting

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You don’t realise how much dirt, finger smudges and cat hair are on your computer monitor until you open up Photoshop and are staring into the void that is that blank white canvas. And then you engage in the most thorough cleaning task of any human endeavour rather than sit there and actually, you know… art some artwork.

An outlet for my frustration

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What I want from a home? I want a home that wasn’t designed by a junior architect that has only ever lived with his parents, or in the college dorm, or a tiny little single room efficiency apt on the trendy upper Eastside.

That’s what I want.

I don’t need my Master Bedroom to be the biggest #!$%^@* #$%!ing room in the entire house just to impress girls I bring back to my place.

I don’t need the laundry in the basement when all the dirty clothes get put in hampers upstairs and I have to haul a hundred pounds of dirty laundry down five flights of stairs. And then a hundred pounds of clean laundry back upstairs.

I don’t need a bathroom with a shower right off the kitchen because my day doesn’t consist of rolling out of bed, doing a 5K then coming home to grab a power juice before hopping in the shower directly off the kitchen, throwing my clothes down the stairwell to the basement, natch, and finally running out the door to catch the L train.

I need more storage in my kitchen that holds more than a few glasses and plates and you can barely squeeze in an efficieny fridge/freezer because all that gets ate in this hypothetical home is Hungry Man microwave meals.

Let’s start with the basics first; don’t let homes be designed by people who don’t live in them in the same way I won’t let a kitchen designer who self-admittedly doesn’t cook who is trying to sell me an $80,000 kitchen but has all the culinary acuity of a deranged hamster only capable of burning a glass of water.

An electronic transformer

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I personally haven’t done any digging in to this subject at this time, but a shower thought I had today was…

Transformers have become incredibly good at image generation (DALL-E 2), NLP (GPT-3), boiler plate code generation (TabNine, Github Copilot, et al), not to mention the massive quantity of style transfer techniques.

NVidia has been tooting their horn about chip design done by AI.

How long until we are using transformers, or similar DL (deep learning) algorithms to generate basic component level electronic circuits? I want to wire up these two ICs (integrated circuits), add in some USB ports, add in power, and so forth. And a few seconds later out pops a reasonably refined prototype of the circuit that I can then tweak and tune to my needs.

Not long at all, I suspect.

Get outta my neighbourhood

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When your workplace Mr Rogers/Ted Lasso facade drops for just a moment…

“I’d reply to you, but I cannot decide whether you’re willfully misinterpreting everything I said or have the mental acuity of a garden snail with a reading comprehension problem.”

Bold solution

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Regarding the sorting out of fonts, I am using a .NET function called GlyphTypeface that lets me access the typeface information, such as family, point size, etc. There is a glaring bug in GlyphTypeface.

hooray

I have a few options; I can fix the bug in GlyphTypeface but that would entail getting hired at Microsoft, getting assigned to that team, fixing the bug, then quitting immediately after my pull request is accepted. Alternatively I could build my own GlyphTypeface just for this problem. I could use other libraries that implement a workable solution. Or I can brute force it by the shortest path. I am going to brute force it.

The process, due to GlyphTypeface, that inspects the font puts a lock on the file, and also, because of the bug, will crash when you inspect a second font immediately afterwards. This is a hell of a bug. My solution is to have a parent process which simply enumerates all of the fonts, but a second process that does the actually inspection and renaming of the font files. And that child process immediately exits after processing precisely one font file. The parent process will loop over the font files, invoking a child process to do the actual work needed.

I am not real happy with that solution. It is “inelegant.” But the solution takes care of the problem, and I only need the solution to run for a few hours before the code is thrown away. I cannot imagine any scenario in the near future where I will need to rename several tens of thousands of font files…

An oblique problem

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This is one of those “this should only take me 20 minutes to bang out the solution” problems which has kept me occupied, off and on, for the better part of a weekend.

I have a slew of fonts we have licensed for various purposes over the years. Lots of those “1,000+ fonts” DVDs you could buy. I want to rename obscure files such as “garla_n.ttf” into something like “Garland City Regular.ttf” so they at least make sense to someone browsing the directory.

I could use a font manager package, but this needs to work on multiple machines, and I have yet to find a font manager application that will happily batch rename thousands of files.

I banged out a little PowerShell script to do it for me. Get the font info from the ttf/otf, determine a “sane” filename, and rename the file.

Unfortunately “GlyphTypeface” puts a lock on the file, and refuses to let go, and there is no way to destruct the object.

The line:
$fontobject = (New-Object -TypeName Windows.Media.GlyphTypeface -ArgumentList $fontfile.fullname)

Puts a lock on the font file, with no way to release it. There is no Dispose or destructor or Release.

Neither “$fontobject = $null” nor “Clear-Variable fontobject” work. The file lock stays stubbornly fixed until I exit PowerShell. And force invoking the garbage collector fails to yield any different result.

Textual ventures

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I just thought of an absolutely awesome-o idea for a text adventure game. One of those “well that could go viral” moments. Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Need to find a partner in crime that will help me execute. It’s gonna be one of those weekend projects that takes a week.

It is a text adventure, with graphics, just like The Pawn from the 16-bit era, but with a twist.

Optimal observation

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Today I learned that software developers get bent out of shape if you are capable of writing three lines of code to solve a leetcode easy or leetcode medium in under a few minutes.

There is nothing humble about this brag.

No, my solutions are not “optimal.”

But if you claim to have 10+ YOE and cannot “remove the nth node from a singly linked list” or “rotate an image” (transpose a matrix) or “give the correct change in the fewest coins” in under two minutes and a half-dozen lines of code, you might question my claim on how fast I can bang out the solution, but at the same time I very much question your ability.

Look, I am not the brightest coloured cookie in the knife drawer, I know that. And I don’t have any great insight in to computer science problems. I consider myself a below average developer with a mediocre education, but…

There’s always a “but.”

But what did you do with your 10+ YOE.

Plumbing the depths of my anxiety

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Imagine that you hire a plumber. You need him to do two jobs for you. One job is very expensive, very difficult, will require months of planning, discussion and a complete reworking of some major aspects of the plumbing in your home and cost many tens of thousands of dollars. The other job is small, a few hundred dollars, you need a new sink and garbage disposal installed.

You agree on a price for the smaller job, and what needs to be done. And the plumber gets to work. When the new sink is installed and the garbage disposal is replaced you look over the work.

“What’s up with the faucet?” you ask, noticing it’s installed backwards.

“Pipes under the sink were too long, only way I could get it installed.” replies the plumber.

“There’s water running out of the garbage disposal and on to my floor!” you cry.

“Well, you see, it would have meant replacing some pipes, and I would have had to send off for a special tool.” says the plumber, looking at you rather exasperated.

“The garbage disposal ejects vegetable matter all over the ceiling when in use!” You’re shielding your face from poorly chewed vegetable matter as the plumber demonstrates how to use the new garbage disposal.

“It would have taken a lot of work to not get it to do that.” counters the plumber, like obviously you are asking too much.

Today I went to the dentist.

On the drive home I said to a friend “I think I need to find a new dentist. One that will listen to me, and fix the problems.”

“Why?” she asked.

And I explained the reasons.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s not that bad. Give him a second chance, explain what you need. I’m sure he’ll fix it. I really like him.”

The faucet is backwards.
The garbage disposal spews vegetable matter
Water all over my kitchen floor.

“So when can we start that big job, eh?” asks the plumber.

So after pondering a while, I think…

What am I missing here?

Boom! Head shot!

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I need some place to safely stash the VR headset I am working on at our company, when I am not wearing the headset.

This week I have to get a CT scan (nothing serious) of my head.

I have a large format 3D printer in the workshop (Form3L) that can print a 1:1 life-size skull in bone white resin.

I just realized I have a new 3D print project I can start. 🙂

This is going to be so much fun! *waggles fingers in maniacal excited anticipation*

I will post horrible NSFW pictures when I am done.

Work that grows in the telling

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Installed new garbage disposal after our 12 year old one developed a nasty crack.

Installed new over-counter microwave after our 12 year old one fell apart. One of those “tap the start button and run out before you’re irradiated” situations.†

“Would it be easier if you took the cabinet doors off either side?” she asked innocently.

In my naievty I took the cabinet doors off either side to make it easier to install.

“Would it be easier if you took the upper doors off to reach the fastening bolts?” she asked innocently.

In my naievty I took the upper cabinet doors off to more easily reach the fastening bolts for mounting the microwave.

And…

Now we’re sanding the cabinets.

And picking out paint.

And new handles.

And deciding on what kind of Euro hinges work best.

And deciding between a Miele and a Wolf cooktop.

Do we want walnut or cherry end grain countertops?

I _just_ wanted a four-day weekend to play with my 3D printer that has sat in my workshop, barely used, for goodness knows how long.

In Project Management we call this “client feature creep” and why I don’t do project management.

So… how’s everybody else’s Sunday going?

† Yes, I know that’s not how microwaves actually work.

Don’t come running to me

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I was becoming anxious and getting worked up about an upcoming dental appointment.

“Is there anything I can do to calm you down?” my wife asked.

“Not that I can think of. I just have to be an adult about this.” I replied.

“What would your Mother say to you in this situation to help you cope?”

I pondered that for a couple of seconds and replied “Calm down or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

I miss her so much. My Mother. Not my wife.

Garbage in…

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Installed a new garbage disposal under our kitchen sink when the (exceptionally) old disposal developed a hairline crack and leaked all over the inside of our kitchen cabinet. Thanks to my brother-in-law for helping with that and showing me how easy it actually is, though I didn’t get the full experience because even though I held the light at every possible angle, not once did he raise his voice about how I was holding the flashlight wrong.

Every five minutes of being under the sink I constantly reminded myself “yah know, software development ain’t that bad and it pays better…”

But having worked on various parts of the plumbing in our condo over the past decade I have come to realise that household plumbing is a lot like the difference between back-end and front-end software development. As long as you don’t peek behind the cabinet door, or open the access panel, you won’t realise just what a mess the pipework is, or how grungy it gets. I guess we could use the metaphor of the crap that washes down the sink for technical debt.

rEcRuiTInG iS hARd

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In the past 14 days I have received 90 recruiter messages.

Only three mentioned a salary, two of which were below market rate and equivalent to a 30% to 50% pay cut.

Only one, Madelyn Rainey whom I totally owe a follow-up email too, actually read my profile. Somebody who is totally worth knowing.

Of the 90 messages received, 67 were for junior to mid-level roles (1 to 4 years of experience), or front-end web development roles.

Of the 87 messages that did not have a slary range, after I enquired about compensation with succinct: “What’s the compensation range for this role?”

74 didn’t respond at all when I asked about compensation range. I was “ghosted” as they like to say.

10 asked me what I was looking for. Evaded and answered with a question. And then still didn’t respond when I asked again.

3 responded with a compensation range that was… a 20% to 50% pay cut.

In that same time frame we’ve interviewed five candidates for open vacancies and don’t have enough hours in the day right now to interview more.

Bolting Away

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Today is “tired and frustrated man with kitchen greasy hands shouts angrily at incorrectly shaped cloud” day.

Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t believe that Samsung makes a “Samsung Galaxy Microwave.”

Which if that is the case, let’s talk about how completely shite Google search has become.

Microwave seems to be stuck. Huh. Pretty sure I loosened all visible bolts. In which case, I am missing something, so let’s debug the problem. Let’s see what the installation instructions say and that will give me a clue as to overlooked mounting bolts.

“Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions” I googled.

Well I obviously fucking meant Samsung Galaxy tablets so here’s two pages of SERPs on how to fix the WiFi connectivity on your tablet.

“Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions -samsung -tablet” I googled.

No! You’re wrong! Here’s how you update your Android OS on your Galaxy tablet!

Three pages of results, only one link was relevant, and for a different model microwave. Mostly spam results that want me to download their driver installer fixer for Windows — I’m on Linux which automatically makes me a better person than you.

Incognito browser. Even worse results.

Decide to randomly try Microsoft’s “Here are the exotic birds of Paraguay whilst searching for hotels in Chicago” Bing, and boom first link, “Galaxy Microwave Installation Instructions” PDF in all its glory.

Should have just searched the Sears parts website directly. And maybe it is time I re-evaluate my search engine habits.

TL;DR You’re losing the war

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I love the twisted, vitriolic narrative, and I especially like the hot-under-the-collar headlines of these articles.

All the headlines are taken from “respected” thought leader magazines or business websites such as Forbes, Inc, FastCompany, ChiefExecutive, HRExectuive, and there are thousands of these headlines, and the increase in them the past year has been like watching the hockey-stick on a unicorn.

All the words keyed up to make you (the reader) feel like “our” (the company) “employees” are the problem, the competing companies are stealing “our” valuable resources, we are in a war for “our” talent. We must “win” at all costs. We’re gonna try everything!!1!

It’s not us (the company).

Oh no.

We treat our valuable people fairly!

Lookit at how fair we’re being by generously trying to figure out how to get them to stay.

We’re like a family here!

But how dare “our” resources consider going with the money, or a less toxic environment, or realising there is more to life than being chained to a desk for 40+ years to only end up with a broken mind, or chained to a physical job for 40+ years only to end up with a broken body.

Our employees love us!

Newsflash: Employees, not people, not individuals, not a person, “employees”, humans who work for money to be able to live, are like cats, they “love” whoever feeds them the most and don’t treat them bad.

I think the pendulum swung a little too far the wrong way in the past four decades. And it is interesting to now watch those that got promoted and worked for a decade or two in such a system to now realise that the pendulum has swung a little further the other way. But you didn’t notice, because you were too happy with the status quo.

It’s like watching an abuser wake up one day only to find that the victim has an ex-Marine big brother with impulse control issues.

Where are my listicles, Summer?

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I don’t like lists.

Written lists.

Lists written out to try and impart knowledge and information to the reader.

I do like being able to dip in to things, in an exploratory, unconnected fashion, Wikipedia for instance. But lists, especially in modern SEO writing for the web, have turned in to some bastardized version of useful information. I automatically hate you and your entire family lineage if you have a barely related animated GIF for each bullet point.

My usual train of thought is “a list that isn’t a list”, e.g. https://justinlloyd.li/blog/3d-printer-purchase/ for a 3D printer purchase or my three year long train of thought on prime number research at https://justinlloyd.li/blog/prime-number/. This list that isn’t a list train of thought automatically makes me better than you and I will also silently judge you at the next cocktail party we find ourselves at. There may even be quiet, barely audible seething involved.

On a side note, when I am writing a lengthy article, I usually assemble a list of bullet points first, the outline, and then convert the bullet points into prose, and then re-order the prose, then edit the prose so that it flows. Hundreds of published articles. There isn’t a modern software development trade or software industry magazine I haven’t gotten a published article in to, in some form. And my article always starts as an outline of the subject I wish to talk about.

A list.

One brief thought per line.

Typed up in OneNote with any kind of spell check switched off, or a basic text editor such as Sublime, with no formatting or styling or care for grammar or punctuation or spelling. No annoying squiggly red lines to distract me from my train of thought. Short cut keys to move things around.

But I think lists, as a published medium, are a terrible, terrible travesty of the modern web, because they are so abused.

And bullet pointed lists in a presentation, I consider those kinds of things to be used by people who don’t understand the subject, to teach people even less knowledgable about the subject, everything that they know. Which ain’t much. Again, silent judging at cocktail parties that because I am better than you.

I said something I didn’t like

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I made a post here, about what happens when services to smart devics get cut.

And I don’t like what I said. So I removed the post.

Maybe when these terrible times are behind us, and I have a bit of perspective on the situation, and I have more clarity on my thoughts, I will take a second attempt at it.

Creative accounting

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Job requires three years of experience in a technology? But you only have two and a half years?

You get to “an advanced age” you are in your fifties, or you are in your sixties, or you are in your seventies.

I don’t have 40+ years of experience in software development that has left hundreds of scars. I have “20+ yrs of competent technical mentorship, leading teams to succes.”

When you are between your twenties and your forties, you are “I am years old.”

When you are in your teens, you are exceptionally particular at being considered a very specific age, and you are almost “the next year older” even if that is 9 months away. “You’re commiting code to github using that framework, young lady?” “I can write in whatever programming language I want Dad! I am almost 17!”

When you are under 10 years old, months matter; “oh yeah, well I’m six years and ten months old, so I’m older than you, so you have to do what I say and I say we’re using brainfuck!”

The same kind of thinking should be applied to your C.V.

2 yrs and 2 months? = “I have two years and two months of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”

2 yrs and 4 months? = “I have two and a half years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”

2 yrs and 6 months? = “I have almost three years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”

2 yrs and 8 months? = “I have three years of experience in this technology, but it feels like forever.”

20 yrs of experience in a technology? = “I’ve forgotten more about that than you will ever know. It seems like only yesterday I was wringing the oil from the dinosaurs to power the generator that would let me feed punch cards in to the computer.”

The primary rule of salesmanship is to never give the prospect a chance to say “no” before you’ve talked to them in person.

You ask me for a stupid laundry list of technologies with numbers of years in each technology and I can get very creative in my book keeping.

The Sick Sense

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Why don’t I drive a Tesla or other vehicle with fancy sensors and situational awareness that will warn me of stopped vehicles ahead, or pedestrians in the road, or cars backing out of parking spots?

I don’t need one. I have a spouse in the passenger seat that will not only point them out to me constantly but also perform a sharp intake of breath as an early warning system before anything could possibly happen.

“Oh it’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the other drivers on the road.” she said to me today.

Uh huh, sure. Nice save.

Thoughts and opinions about things

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I’ve run in to a lot of people that opine “I don’t know what to write!” My problem is, I don’t have enough time to write all I want.

How do I come up with stuff to write about?

I either trawl through my notebooks for pieces I can use about personal projects I am working on, e.g. buying a 3D printer or constructing a cabinet in the workshop or prime number theory.

Or I scroll through social media until I find something that makes me annoyed that makes me want to shake my fist at a random passing cloud, or someone asks, again on social media, a thoughtful question, and then I form an opinion on either of those two subjects, and then I write about that.

And for every one post on my public journal, I probably have five or six more pieces in my private notebooks that probably shouldn’t ever see the light of day.

Today I made notes on Anchor Hocking storage containers, a math problem, some computer vision research, storage in my workshop, how to write journal entries, rubbermaid container storage options, and the car maintenance schedule.

Read social media. Get annoyed or answer a question. Write a journal entry.

That’s it. That’s my entire method.

Capitalism hates consumers

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Walgreens (a US-based drugstore/convenience store) replaces refrigerator doors with video screens.

I just want Haagen Dazs ice cream. But I cannot see which freezer it is actually in until the ad stops, then it states it is in this particular freezer. But it isn’t because they ran out and an employee hasn’t restocked. I don’t need “education” on how to appreciate being advertised too, I need my fucking ice cream. This shift makes an onerous part of life materially worse.

I am sure the next update will have the doors on the freezer lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.

Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don’t look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.

I am so glad I am getting old and will die soon so I don’t have to live in this dystopian hellhole the new generation are creating for us.

“We’re losing out to on-line retail! Quick! We need to figure out other revenue sources that don’t entail selling anything to the consumer! While we’re at it, let’s make our in-store experience worse!”

You think that’s bad? Check out the hellscape that is the MTA in NYC where the THC ad covers 95% of the screen. Where the ad is so big the useful information is clipped off.

 

Yay! I can suck on my cannabis vape whilst I stand dangerously close to the edge of the platform waiting for the uptown train contemplating the future of our world.

This one was vandalized. Not sure if it was in response to the utility of the screen or just general protest.

Idiocracy was not meant to be a “how to” manual…

Footnote:  How to confuse looters – All the video displays on the front of cabinets and vending machines switch to pictures of low value Kraft cheese single slices, hiding the higher value products inside the cabinets when the store closes for the evening.

Incomplete Thoughts

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I like my code completion tools that helpfully suggest a nearby variable name to use, or the parameters of a function I am calling.

But…

I tried out three of those artificial intelligence code completion tools…

And they’re about what I expected.

I guess they serve their purpose if your kung-fu is weak sauce or you’re a junior programmer cranking out boiler plate code all day long for yet another mobile crypto wallet CRUD app, something that your manager should have just outsourced to someone on Craigslist or Fiverr for 25 bucks an hour.

I guess these tools are supposed to get better as they watch you work and analyze your code base, but I don’t have time to wait for a brain-dead, mentally retarded “programmer’s helper” to get up to speed and still have a lower IQ than my cat.

The code completion is distracting, like pair programming with someone who wants to helpfully suggest things that don’t actually solve the problem. “Oh, thank you for suggesting code to iterate over the array I just declared, I guess that saved me the trouble of putting in the curly braces myself.”

It’s like having a workshop assistant that moves your tools around. The assistant thinks you might need the push stick to move the stock through the blade of the table saw, and so he puts it on the far side of the blade, so you have to reach over to get it, and you have to glance away from the spinning blade because the push stick isn’t where it is meant to be, where you would naturally reach for it. And no matter how many times you tell him not to do that, he continues to do it.

I always look at these tools and think “Okay, what are we doing here other than wasting my fucking time?” They are the programmer’s equivalent of a website’s chat bot, except with curly brackets and indentation.

All of the code completion tools state “We won’t siphon off your code to our servers, we pinky promise!”

Right.

Except the preferences/settings on many are “stored in the cloud” and you have a metric fuckton of telemetry to track everything I do via the plugin.

Of course I would trust any plugin that immediately stops working the moment you block it from the internet. FFS.

AI code completion is yet another over-promise, under-deliver developer tool category.

I guess we wait for these code completion tool companies to get bought by someone like Atlassian where they announce that “well ackshually we have been siphoning off your code for the past few years, if you send in a form, signed in triplicate, we’ll delete all of your code from our servers in 90 days. oops! data breach!”

Explosive markets

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The summary of the article from Fortune’s website: “Goldman Sachs’s CEO demands employees RTO. Only half of them show up.”

This was my last company, in June/July ’21, just before Delta smacked us upside the head.

Execs say “Everybody RTO! No exceptions!” even if you were hired in to a permanent remote role, which I was.

More than half of the people (all software developers) refused throughout a few different teams. Within days HR fired the refusers for… well, refusal. I am sure there were negotiations, cajoling and conversations that happened behind closed doors that I was not a party too, even as team lead. We went from a team of 60+ developers and about a dozen managers, to a team of four develoeprs and a dozen managers.

My director came to me and asked “You’re sticking around, right?”

“For as long as I can.” I replied.

I quit four weeks later, at the tail end of August, after landing a different job.

He knew I was interviewing. But what could he do? Convince me to stick around in a hot market when being paid below market rate? Without a raise in 18 months after being told that all raises were frozen across the board for the duration of the pandemic? After the company posted record breaking profits for the past six quarters? After everybody at director level and above got bonuses and raises for outstanding company performance? And then change the rules of being hired remotely?

After the company let the software developers go, and the few remaining developers bailed out shortly afterwards, then the company had a round of lay-offs of managers and directors because… there’s nobody to manage and you cannot pay below market-rate — below market-rate even for Summer of ’21 before hiring of software developers went thermonuclear — and also enforce RTO in a HCOL area in the middle of a pandemic just as the market for hiring of software developers is heating up.

Gassy Old Geezers

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I have been thinking of starting a video series where it is a bunch of old farts from the industry (games industry, natch) sitting around bitching about software development, project management and creative nonsense they’ve dealt with over the years.

“Drive-time radio” for creatives and developers with no other agenda than telling old war stories and riffing on past glories.

Couple of cameras, a few good microphones, some backdrop green screens, and we’re in business.

We could call it “Gassy Old Geezers.”

Virtual Disconnected Reality

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The market for software developers right now is super hot. But what I am noticing is that a lot of companies are struggling to grasp the reality that you cannot hire developers for the same amount of money that I was making 23 years ago as a senior developer in the games industry, an industry which is notorious for underpaying people.

I read the complaints on a few private CTO/HR/recruiter forums about the difficulty of hiring and the compensation required to get someone interested.

And I sit and think “Am I missing something here?”

Why would you believe you could hire a Senior Developer, Lead Developer or Principle Developer for $100K to $120K in California of all places?!?

Even the higher compensation at $150K to $160K is admitting that compensation on offer has not kept up with a 4% inflation rate for the past 23 years.

I got pinged today on LinkedIn. The job requires a laundry list of qualifcations and duties that should really be covered by three separate positions, has full-time on-site in an open office, no possibility of work-from-home, and is in the range of $140K (not including bonus) for a Senior/Lead AI/ML developer.

All I can say is “HAHAHAHA! Good luck on that.”

Meta, Google and Apple are going to Thanos snap your competent staff away from you as soon they find them.

No, I cannot just “close it back up”

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Let’s just say that people who state this are those that don’t know me very well.

“Oh, you’d make a great dad” people tell me.

No.

No I wouldn’t.

I’d make a lousy father. I don’t like sharing my toys and I am pretty sure I’d hide all my chocolate bars from my kids.

I reflect on the terrible things I did to my own father’s tools in his workshop. I was like the gremlin that made tools and parts disappear off the bench when you weren’t looking and when they did reappear, they were never in the place you’d expect them.

Over the years I’ve figured out that the world neatly divides in to two groups. Those who are parents or want to be parents, and those that aren’t and don’t ever want to be.

“No, I cannot just ‘close it back up in the packaging.'”

People, parents usually, get quite vitriolic when I state that children of any age are unwelcome in my home, and unsupervised children even less so.

I have a nervous tic whenever a hint of children showing up surfaces ever since “The Great LEGO Unboxing of ’05”

For those that aren’t parents, I don’t need to explain it. And for those that are parents, I probably cannot ever explain it.

Shake, Hustle and Grind

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I love the hustle, but I don’t enjoy the grind.

Five months of relentless pace, dialed up to 11, where you’re doing 50 to 60 hours of ground-breaking software development work a week.

And then a month of “let’s double that” trying to wrangle a sub-project.

Followed by a week that just wouldn’t quit, where on Tuesday, at lunchtime, you realize you’ve already worked 40 hours. Where even the weekend doesn’t give you respite. And you and a colleague went through 60+ espresso shots in one 36 hour period.

And you haven’t done laundry in six weeks.

And you’ve ate more takeout food in five days of March than you did in all of February.

And you’ve ate more takeout food in February and March than you did in all of 2021 and 2020 combined.

Where every meal is takeout.

And you’re eating a burger and fries and a milkshake at 1AM in the morning and it appears normal.

And you’ve been awake since 7AM.

And you haven’t showered in five days.

And it was considered humourous by people that you fell asleep for a half-hour in a chair at work the moment you could stop. Or you fell asleep at the dining table eating leftover takeout, alone, with your family on the other end of the phone call wondering where you went.

When you normally sleep 4AM to 9AM and consider that “fully rested” but it got squeezed to 4AM to 7AM so you can get people on the phone, or chase emails, or texts.

And you’re still staring down a very long tunnel of what’s left to do to get across the finish line. And you know there’s another finish line right after that one. Just as close. Just as high pressure. And another one right after that.

Life’s short. I love interesting problems. The hustle is interesting. The grind is not. “Work hard. Play hard.” implies there’s time left over for play.

I don’t know where I am going with this. But I know I am not heading in the direction I want to be going. Time to step back. Time to re-evaluate.

Blistering Barnacles!

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This is one of those times where you say “What a week huh?” as you pour yourself a drink and your colleague says “But Captain, it’s only Wednesday.”

Monday: Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.

Tuesday: Meetings. Running around for materials. Building props in the workshop.

Wednesday: 18 hours building props in an unventilated workshop in 90F weather.

Thursday: 16 hour day, 14 of them on set until midnight.

Friday: “So could you do a 6AM early morning call to catch up?”

Over-stimulated

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Stress levels somewhat lowered today, which is surprising for a Monday, thanks to Jeffery “Jeff” Buchanan and Kenton DeSanti for their amazing ability to step up and get shit done.

I mean, I am still 12 espressos in by 3:30PM in the afternoon, but overall, I’m not bouncing off the walls and contemplating slapping an earlier version of me from 30 days ago for saying “yes” to a crisis project.

Here’s to a productive week, and maybe a few less takeout meals and a few more showers.

Hustling, and not in a good way

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Two hours in and third coffee of the day because this week has been fueled by nothing but caffeine and stress.

I know when work is on top of me because this week I have ate takeout for four separate meals. I rarely order takeout food.

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