Mar 28, 2024
Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
-- Fahrenheit 451
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Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
-- Fahrenheit 451
Saw a new form of content farming today: Someone made a video of a robotic voice reading out the chatgpt output for a programming question that was put in as the prompt (and was the title of the video).
The answer was wrong.
My classmate from uni asked to meet for coffee and I was not in the mood today but I went anyway. It ended up being a good chat and it was nice talk about our experience with software development so far. I left thinking: see you shouldn't isolate yourself so much and go out more.
Now I'm back home and trying not to second guess every single thing I said. 😞
6. Julia Evans once said "behind every best practice is a horror story." If you don't understand a Best Practice, look for the horror story that inspired it. It might make the best practice make sense. It might turn out to be something that's completely irrelevant to you, and then you can feel comfortable doing a different practice instead. 8. Take walks. 9. Almost every tool you use has some form of hidden depth, from your programming language to git to JIRA. Don't feel like you have to become an expert in every single one, but do consider spending 5-10 minutes learning a bit more about what it can do. 11. Ultimately none of us can predict the future, just as none of us could have predicted the present. Just try to do the best you can, live according to your values, and enjoy the ride.
From: Advice for software devs who've read all those other advice posts
On 6: It's so important to understand WHY we follow a certain pattern or convention. Mostly so you can better understand the context within which it is used. So many times, I have tried to be "smart" and made my code more complicated then it needed to be because I was using a tool/pattern that was not the right fit.
On 8: Look away from the screen, get up and stretch. Drink some water.
On 9: Try to do a quick google to see if you're tool can do the thing you need it to do. Learn to solve with your current tool before reinventing the wheel. Write down how you did it to reference later (because you will forget).
On 11: Anxiety about the future and if I'm keeping up with tech has low ROI. Focus on today and what you are already learning. Build skills on focus, adaptability, resilience, critical thinking. Those will guide you into the future.
If we live in the age of information, why is it so hard to figure out what skin care routine I should follow?
This last week was my first week at my new job. I've mostly been doing onboarding activities. I enjoyed the engineering focused sessions the most since they helped me understand how the company approaches software development. Some of the sessions were live, and others were pre-recorded videos. I enjoy the videos more since I can watch them at 2x speed. I wonder if this is a low attention issue as even for YouTube, I have to watch videos at 2x speed or else it feels too slow.
Aside from the sessions, I worked on refreshing my Java knowledge. I haven't used Java in years, so I need to relearn the basics and learn framework my company uses. I am also learning about the company product and my teams problem (complex) problem domain by reading through the team documentation. It is slow going as there is lots of unfamiliar terminolgy. I am going to set up a knowledge transfer session with my onboarding buddy to help clarify my confusion.
I've been taking notes in Obsidian as I go along. Obsidian requires a licsense for commercial work, but it's worth it for me. I can take notes that are saved locally instead of on an external server (ie don't expose company info). I could use Bear instead, but I already use Obsidian for personal knowledge management so it's seamless to use it at work too.
Some things on my mind for next week:
have my first 1-1 with my manager. I'm hoping to make a good impression and not come across and quiet or awkward.
as I ramp up on real work, I need to continue to make time in my schedule for curiosity fuelled self learning that lets me continue building a high level view of my work.
be mindful of stress/anxiety levels. Don't let perfectionism and fear of not being good enough make you overwork/feel anxious all the time.
Going to start this at my new job. I already keep a hype doc and this can be a good compliment.
I'm reading And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and trying to solve it before the big reveal. So far I figured out that it could be any of them.