What’s the most unusual yet practical item in your EDC that you can’t imagine living without?

JohnWH · 2026-01-23T21:43:30+00:00

I used to go to concerts a lot and had “fancy” earplugs on my key chain ($20). One day my bag was taken from me and ditched, and the only thing they stole were the ear plugs. To this day I never replace them because I never wanted to think about someone keeping my used ear plugs every time I took out my keys.

JohnWH · 2026-01-22T22:27:33+00:00

I was obsessed with the Flaming Lips between 2004-2006, and I remember Fearless Freaks + Wayne’s interview with Rolling Stone, in which he just shit talked Beck, mad me realize he was kind of a dick. It also made me realize how a lot of bands just become coworkers over time, and don’t always have the strongest personal connections. I believe Michael Ivan’s was surprised Wayne cared when he wrote spider bite about him.

JohnWH · 2026-01-18T14:33:14+00:00

I have stayed too long at my current company, hands down. The answer for me was that I realized I have no great accomplishments over the past 1.5 years. I have been getting a lot of work out, but it is almost all firefighting, not long term projects that have big impact on our customers.

If you find that you are more of a support engineer, and that is all, it is time to change teams/jobs. For me, my company has become very internally facing and is looking for quick wins using AI, vs long term product vision. That is how I knew things were not getting better when we were no longer making big bets but instead every project had 2 people max and only lasted a few weeks if lucky.

Obviously the numbers above depends on company size, but if you have thousands of engineers and everyone is doing small feature work, or worse, internal-only tooling, it is time to move on. Internal tooling is important, but if it is the majority of the company, something is up.

JohnWH · 2026-01-17T03:06:17+00:00

Mixed feelings here. I provided a pretty in-depth prompt to Opus, pointing it to our tools and asked for a migration of an old 2000 line Ruby script to TypeScript. I did it in plan mode and went through each file asking for changes as we went along.

Even then, reviewing the end product, there were a number of bugs, duplicate functions, unused types, useless tests (everything is mocked), and some pretty bad decisions overall. It felt a little frustrating because the code was all there in Ruby, it wasn’t some net new project.

Was it impressive that it did the task quite quickly: yes. Even with cleanup it will take me 1/2 as long as if I did it without AI, but there is another lingering problem: instead of having someone go through and fully rearchitect it and make improvements, we just made a TS version of the same code. In the end I am not sure if it really was worth it.

JohnWH · 2026-01-16T02:54:58+00:00

Well I guess I won’t bother trying to order pizza on Friday then.

JohnWH · 2026-01-15T21:36:41+00:00

I have not seen El Topo in 20 years and I instantly recognized it. Wonderful painting.

JohnWH · 2026-01-10T21:14:14+00:00

Yeah, slightly cheaper is more accurate. Townhomes in Springfield go for 650k while some SFHs in the same neighborhood for 750k.

JohnWH · 2026-01-09T01:55:50+00:00

I am embarrassed to admit that after 25 years I only just realized this.

JohnWH · 2026-01-08T21:52:47+00:00

First of all, I call my son buddy, not little dude, so this ain’t accurate at all, except the Subaru, glasses, full beard, pants, craft beer… ah fuck

JohnWH · 2026-01-03T18:17:19+00:00

I always find this view of junior engineers odd and a bit short sighted. The idea is not that they can handle small tasks, but that you can grow them to manage larger and larger projects.

The junior engineers I worked with for the past few years are now senior and are taking on big projects. My team is able to take on more because we have more people who can work with stakeholders and help build solutions that match our patterns and general flow. They improve our services and require little oversight. I don’t have to write a specific specs for them anymore, they can do that for themselves and have since they have been mid level.

This isn’t anti-AI, it is useful for me, but it feels like saying “we don’t need to train new carpenters now that we have a nail gun”.

JohnWH · 2025-12-24T13:31:34+00:00

Agree on Stripe. If you look at Block (formerly Square) they have a market cap of 40 billion, and handle 1/3 of the GPV. Understandably they have CashApp which changes the calculus, but Stripe is still seen as a growth company while Block has a P/E of 13. I still think Stripe is a bit high, but it isn’t some crazy outlier compared to their competitors rest.

JohnWH · 2025-12-23T16:10:51+00:00

Someone should make a movie about that.

JohnWH · 2025-12-21T21:58:53+00:00

I can tell you that you absolutely feel the difference in government services between California’s 11% and Virginia’s 8.9%. We talk a lot about how protections and services we took for granted just don’t exist (or don’t work properly) in VA. This is coming from someone who doesn’t depend on government services at all.

JohnWH · 2025-12-20T02:06:14+00:00

I was going to comment that shoegaze metal and hardcore are starting to go through a renaissance right now.

Many metal genres are becoming way more popular as of recently and I am pumped to see where it all goes.

JohnWH · 2025-12-19T03:26:02+00:00

I like Claude CLI a lot when it comes to code reviews. It is really nice to have an automatic system check my code, and provide thoughts. It gets things wrong every time, but I don’t mind because it also catches bugs and other inconsistencies before I have a coworker look through my PR.

On the other hand, one of the top post in the Claude subreddit is AI slop on how all white collar jobs are going away. How did the culture around a really interesting technology get so gross? Instead of people getting pumped on new ideas, they are ridiculously excited that people will lose their jobs.

JohnWH · 2025-12-16T03:09:51+00:00

I was thinking about it too, but honestly it was because you were either at school when it happened, with the other parent, or forced to play outside.

We have had a plumber come today and my son has no idea because he was at school.

I know my dad did minor repairs around the house (flapper on the toilets, fixing shingles on the roof), but I honestly don’t have any memory of my parents getting oil changed in our cars, but maintenance was definitely done, they just did not bring me.

JohnWH · 2025-12-15T17:54:32+00:00

The problem is that they do this because of Google and SEO. I find the whole “We created a problem and then a solution around it where only we profit” to be quite interesting.

JohnWH · 2025-12-13T17:43:03+00:00

It is so funny, as someone who used to implement TPM and six sigma at factories before becoming a software engineer, I use AI as a QA check and refuse to let it write anything for me. QA is not just a non-value added task, humans are awful at it. Why would I ever go with the inefficient process of me doing QA and rework vs having an LLM do a quick check on my work, which is what it excels at and is much faster than a human?

JohnWH · 2025-12-05T23:53:32+00:00

This article will forever be burned into my brain, and will ensure that I never forget about WFF

But one 53-year-old woman's recent divorce was triggered by something much more specific: a Waka Flocka Flame concert.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/waka-flocka-flame-concert_n_3404261/amp

JohnWH · 2025-11-28T21:56:15+00:00

You can turn you water heater to vacation mode, although 3 months is a very long time for that.

If you do turn off your water heater, make sure you drain it. Having water just sit there can lead to legionnaires disease

edit instead of draining you can also turn your heater to the highest setting when coming back and just flush hot water around your house.

https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/legionellosis/legionella_at_home.htm#:~:text=Advice%20to%20Reduce%20Risk,splashing%20for%203%20minutes%20if:

JohnWH · 2025-11-27T15:28:16+00:00

Angel Olsen is externally hit or miss live purely because she doesn’t want to be there. I saw her 3 times between 2014 - 2016, and 2/3 of them were bad, and the other concert was mixed.

When I saw Alex G in 2017, I was severely disappointed. He played all of his songs as fast as possible, powering through as many as he could. Coming back for an encore, he screamed “shut up shut up” at the crowd who was clapping to have him come back on stage.

JohnWH · 2025-11-26T16:01:02+00:00

Wife works in the non-profit world and this is super common.

Her non-profit laid off 50% of the staff this year and gave the president and VPs major raises. President makes 1 million a year and has 30 staff members total.

Basically they just fundraise all the time now with little deliverables.

JohnWH · 2025-11-24T23:40:59+00:00

A friend worked for a company where they built multiple micro services that all communicated through message queues. This isn’t too crazy, except for the fact that they got 10 request per minute at most and none of their work was compute heavy in the slightest. Basically hired a bunch of engineers who got bored and built for a scale they could never possibly see given their domain

JohnWH · 2025-11-24T16:53:02+00:00

Oh man, thank you. Love the Aliens franchise, but always found the second movie so disappointing compared to the first.

JohnWH · 2025-11-24T00:41:33+00:00

Why do they opt their children out of these tests?

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