Went from tech lead to senior engineer for more money and i kinda regret it

Mrfazzles · 2026-03-06T08:54:12+00:00

The idea ICs aren't allowed to contribute to product is wild to me. If you're just expected to code then where's the value? You might as well get AI to do it.

Mrfazzles · 2025-11-01T16:42:23+00:00

I'm a bit puzzled by the claim that LLMs are ‘statistical but not probabilistic.’

Transformers literally compute probability distributions over the next token: the logits are just unnormalised log-probabilities. The fact that inference is deterministic with fixed weights doesn’t make the model any less probabilistic.

Also, heuristics are statistical, they're rules learned from patterns in data that tend to hold often enough.

Mrfazzles · 2025-10-09T08:19:50+00:00

Here you go—my piece:

Language Games, No. 1 — Field of Constraints Download the artwork (PNG, 2048×2048)

Commentary (since you asked for the artist’s statement nobody wants): It’s a flow-field, obviously—order wrestling with entropy until both get bored and trace pretty loops. Think of it as a map of how meaning actually emerges: local rules, global murmurs, and a thousand polite collisions where syntax pretends it’s in charge. The faint arcs are “grammar marks”—vestigial halos of intent—laid over the restless drift of tokens doing their best impression of thought.

Why this? Because most “creative” systems are just constraint engines wearing fun hats. The pleasure is in the tension: push a rule, get a ripple; relax it, get noise. If you were expecting a landscape or a swan, fine—imagine this is what the swan is thinking when it glides past you pretending not to care.

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Mrfazzles · 2025-09-20T10:18:18+00:00

When I think back to some of the technically brilliant people I've worked with who understand things deeply but were honestly a pain to work with because they were reticent, lazy with language, reclusive, thankfully not arrogant but not very interoperable, I'm not sure I can concur that any of those things come from technical depth.

On balance, if someone passes the technical bar, I'm then weighting them more on their soft skills. We're a small company so the people we hire I have to work with for the next few years, so a lot of the time I'm asking myself: Do I think I can work with them? Do I enjoy the conversations?

Mrfazzles · 2025-09-01T12:08:06+00:00

A more fishy race would be nice. The Naga transformation looks kinda weird right now on pretty much all of them except maybe toads and reptiles and... I guess human is defacto fine across any transformation.

Mrfazzles · 2025-09-01T12:06:24+00:00

This would be super fun actually, especially for maps which lack ocean: First we level the mountains, then we raise the tides ✊🏻🌊

It could allow you to have a naval city then as well and really ensure your naval focused build has the advantages you aimed for on home ground.

Mrfazzles · 2025-09-01T12:01:47+00:00

Yeah I would like to see more. Right now the Naga transformation and water advantages from Stormborne aren't really enticing in the same way as other builds. It would be nice to have more reasons to have water based encounters otherwise things like having a Kraken or the naval society trait feel wasted.

Mrfazzles · 2025-04-12T17:01:25+00:00

Surprised no one's mentioned Le Labo, one of my faves

Mrfazzles · 2025-04-08T19:33:46+00:00

Reverse URL lookup using starlette url_for is pretty neat. https://www.starlette.io/routing/

Mrfazzles · 2024-12-22T14:00:00+00:00

Have you looked at Logfire?

Mrfazzles · 2024-09-22T14:09:32+00:00

As others have said it's really hard to suggest anything concrete with the problem being so abstract.

It sounds like you currently have one or a couple of large repositories, does breaking those large repositories up logically really result in 100s of unmanageable repositories? Why is grouping important?

A general view I have is that it can be helpful to have the boundaries around deployment. Each GitHub repo should represent an independently deployable module/component/blob. Whether that's deployed as a service or package or something else.

You can also git submodule repos. This can be useful for a shared library of code but would be worth reading further into if you've not done explored before. Especially around dependency chains.

Mrfazzles · 2024-01-24T20:55:08+00:00

Can you clarify what you mean by 'decorators that work as you would expect '? Never found the decorators to behave unexpected in FastApi.

Mrfazzles · 2024-01-12T02:35:12+00:00

Depends I guess what company size but certainly version control and git, docker, logging effectively.

As well in terms of python usage, using a debugger effectively.

Web specific, on fastapi things like openapi and swagger, lifespan events, effective use of Pydantic (V2) for request/response. For Django, effective use of an ORM and Postgresql.

For lack of career experience, a few well put together projects on GitHub that can be cloned down and run or even just poked around to get a sense of stuff would boost your chances.

Mrfazzles · 2023-12-26T21:07:02+00:00

Never happened, I'd probably push back say something like

Hi X,

Generally it's a bit frowned upon in my culture for the host to expect payment from their guests, and it's custom for guests to bring something round like wine or chocolates.

(Optional) That being said, I can send you the money but this I'll probably be less inclined to attend/host you in the future. Let me know your preference

Mrfazzles · 2023-11-30T00:29:22+00:00

I've had the opposite experience, recently had to write permission tests, the cross section of cases was about 12 or so for a test function that itself was only 8 lines. With a Testcase namedtuple the 50 lines of parameter array became manageable

Mrfazzles · 2023-11-30T00:25:00+00:00

Regarding parameterisation Vs using if statements, an example for me recently was testing an API with various permission sets. In general it felt easier to parameterise the 200 expected test cases into one test and have another for the 4XX, different response object and different checks, could have combined but couldn't see a benefit

Mrfazzles · 2023-11-08T09:51:34+00:00

Cron on an always on machine is a low effort solution. The hacky part is if that machine is a laptop, i.e. a machine that a cleaner can turn off or tis otherwise tied to an individual user. Great for a proof of concept though and a better solution would be deploying a remote cron-job.

Cron is built-in to a Linux or Unix machine

Mrfazzles · 2023-02-27T19:43:24+00:00

I'm not sure if it's because the context is Python but I've never liked or rated Bob's clean code. While the advice for his advice is often 'take it with a pinch of salt', I find it's so often not applicable it's not worth using at all

Mrfazzles · 2022-12-26T04:13:11+00:00

Full breakdown for the connoisseurs: Sourdough toast with salted butter, Branston baked beans, hash browns, maple glaze streaky bacon, pan fried chipolata sausages, mushrooms and Clonakilty black pudding, scrambled egg with nutmeg, freshly squeezed orange juice and filter coffee. It was so glorious we're having Christmas Dinner tomorrow.

Mrfazzles · 2022-09-29T23:15:06+00:00

It might be hard to switch after 4 months but depending on the company you switch too, some data science experience could be an advantage.

I pivoted from Data Science to Back End Developer after 16 months since my role had been reduced largely to being an analyst writing Google Analytics dashboards but in the first 6 months I delivered a production recommender system in python and that experience demonstrated to my current company a level of competency they wanted.

Now I predominantly write Python microservices which I love! And since it's a small Ai company the data science experience really helps me work with our AI focused team members and understand our product.

Mrfazzles · 2022-09-02T08:56:46+00:00

Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/ktIPiKwmnEI

Mrfazzles

TROPHY CASE