nik9000

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It's been good. I'd recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I'm a software engineer because I'm bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can't write. Didn't want to follow in my mom's footsteps but I just can't so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It's honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I'm proud of it. It's no google, but it's honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don't deserve it. It's been good. But I got lucky.

Mine looks a little like that. It's my job though. Everything's on GitHub.

I think all those are a little true. But I'm mostly guessing. I'm happy to change my mind if anyone knows better.

Either way, these folks are my hero.

I really thought the idea was, "You like mecha? You like kids piloting mecha? This is how it'd go down." I loved it so much. Shinji's a broken, abused shell child. He lives with a broken human who drowns her sorrows in drink. His father is just evil. He'd have to be to let his kid pilot the mecha.

The only real father figure we ever see for shinji is a spy. Who gets killed. He's in love with a girl that hates him. Because he's broken. But he has no one else. Except those friends at school who I think they take away. Don't remember. And that angel who he has to kill or something. Damn, it's been like 25 years. I have no idea what happened. But in my memory it's terrible. Wonderful stuff.

I hate the smell of some ground coffee. Others smell good.

Do folks still use logstash here? Filebeat and ES gets you pretty far. I've never been deep in ops land though.

Amazing

We squash. I'm not really interesting in your local journey to land the change. It's sometimes useful during review, but after that it's mostly the state of the main branch I care about. It's what I need to bisect anyway.

I don't like commits that are just references to issues. Copy the issue into the commit message so git blame tells you something useful. Unless it's just closing a simple big. Then the title and issue reference are plenty.

Depends on the project I imagine.

I wonder what my last commit at each job was. I'll bet it was boring. About 10% of my commit messages are genuinely interesting.

I think the last new instruction the JVM added was invokedynamic like 10 years ago. I believe they did it so lambdas could be called efficiently. Polymorphic incline cache and stuff.

But the JVM has grown more complex in other ways. The way to force simd instructions is pretty wild, for example.

I don't know enough to call it a mess or not. It works though.

I had this silly thing kicking around in me head forever. I'v always had a generally positive view of Gore and now is the time to square that circle. Thanks for your comment. It made me read more. The guy was on Futurama. He deserves that.

Apparently he pushed for money for bringing more mass adoption of the Internet. It looks like as a senator he recognized the value of the Internet before stuff like gopher existed. Presumably because of papers from the NSF. So he was important.

In some question on the news he flubbed words and said something like, "I took the initiative in developing the Internet." That's not a lie so far as I can tell, but boy does it sound like bullshit. It's super close to "I invented the Internet".

I got all this from one source so maybe it's bullshit, but hey: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/799/708

Saw it twenty five years ago. Never again.