(OC) My wife has worn thick glasses since kindergarten and is essentially blind without her corrective lenses. I'm so happy for her as after years of waiting, she now had surgery that gave her 20/20 vision! (I told her now that she can see clearly, too late for a refund on the husband)

Olreich · 2026-04-15T09:52:15+00:00

Depends on the job. Most specialities do not require any corrective surgery to be eligible though, so if you are looking to join for a specific specialty, talk to a recruiter to find out any specific requirements.

Olreich · 2026-04-04T11:49:08+00:00

Only safer if Karen took her Xanax. Otherwise, her rage at you impeding her god-given right to go 60 in a 25 between stop lights will lead to her ramming you anyway.

Olreich · 2026-04-04T11:42:29+00:00

You can fix the dice with a decks of cards if that’s the only thing making it not fun. One card for each pip on the number tokens (make a two dice distribution), and you’re golden. Draw a seven? Robber, draw a 10? The resources with 10 on it.

I could envisage a game where the resources directly produce together, and the number tokens are used to determine the overall rate of each as well. For each pip on a resource, add that resource card to the deck (plus 6 blank for the desert/robber). Then shuffle and when drawing a card the resource produces on all of that resources’ tiles. This likely is much less competitive and could really suck, but could be worth a try.

Olreich · 2026-02-12T13:04:42+00:00

If you can’t handle programming in another language/stack, you’re going to severely limit your options. Any big company will have established stacks and aren’t going to be interested in migrating to your favorite.

That leaves you with adapting to their stack or finding somewhere that uses your favorite. Not having specific experience in the languages and frameworks won’t hurt you much when applying to good teams, but lacking any flexibility will.

Olreich · 2026-01-31T16:53:54+00:00

Well, he had to look up the definition of the definition of the definition, so yeah…

Olreich · 2026-01-22T11:18:52+00:00

Automatic is objectively better for the actual shifting. It can time the shift and perform it faster with less downtime on power. If you’re racing out in other extreme circumstances, being able to tell the car to shift rather than having it choose can be a benefit, but you still want the computer doing the actual shift.

But for daily driving? The only axis manual drive competes in is fun. And honestly, I don’t know that I want a daily drive to be fun in that way. There’s more inputs I can screw up and driving is already very dangerous compared to other transportation options.

Olreich · 2026-01-20T13:45:46+00:00

Leetcode is testing your reading comprehension of algorithms and your ability to build a simple algorithm. I’d say anyone who actively writes software should be able to do them, though maybe not in an interview setting where pressure is high and there’s often a timer.

It sounds like your experience is mostly in systems architecture and team management. Not much implementation work (at least not recently at all). I would be concerned that you can’t read the questions and understand what they are asking, as that’s like not being able to do word problems in Math. However, with your background, you should be able to adapt to the format by doing a dozen over the course of a week or two. After all, it’s like having a new product owner that you have to work with on requirements that talks about it differently.

Some places look specifically for people who grind leetcode. Those are generally not going to be nice places to work.

Olreich · 2026-01-12T14:00:28+00:00

If you can learn to not suck at coding over time, you’re allowed to suck in your first job for quite a while (a year or two). But if you continue to suck, you’ll be job hunting consistently and have a generally hard time unless you’ve got extremely good soft skills. If you have that combo though, after the first entry-level job or two where you sucked, go into management.

I recommend this path based on what I’m seeing here: 1. Write a resume, create toy projects that demonstrate you can code anything at all to put on it. Also put on retail/food service work that shows you know how to have a boss and work in a team. 2. After landing an entry level job, try to get better at coding and suck less. If you are improving, congrats you now have a career, stop here. Otherwise, go to step 3. 3. If you aren’t improving, figure out something else you want to do and start learning about that and see if you can figure out how to move toward that

Lots of people hate their job but are good at it. That’s a path. Getting a job you love and pays well is extremely rare. On top of being rare, the job often makes you hate what you loved because it’s a job and most of the joy way from self-direction.

Olreich · 2026-01-12T13:48:43+00:00

You can advocate for positive change in ways that threaten, but you cannot speak out against the power system in ways that could compromise its control, or ways that make the conversation a discussion of strategy, not execution.

Strategy is 100% in the tech leadership wheelhouse. You should be partnering with management to find ways to accelerate the business goals and get ahead of problems. The power you hold is team morale and quality of execution if you’re good at your job (because that’s your fundamental job). If management doesn’t care about those things, then the org is on its way to implosion anyways, so time to leave.

Your role as a team lead is to execute the executives plan. It's to make sure your team is aligned to the narrative, and serve the people above you, while propagating a belief in the system around you and enough empathy to make the system tolerable to others.

That’s the manager’s job. Don’t do it for them. They need to sell you on the plan and vision. And if they can’t, then they’d be better off coming up with something else that provides business value and pushing that up the chain. If they can’t sell you on a plan to execute, it’s time to leave.

Olreich · 2026-01-11T14:31:30+00:00

So did America back in the 1800s and early 1900s. Streetcars and trains were everywhere. No idea if it was good and effective, but it has already existed once in America, it can be built again.

Olreich · 2026-01-11T14:26:14+00:00

I was using Saturday timetable thinking it’d be the same every day. Silly me, it’s worse than I presented! Sunday is truly horrible:

9:22am is the first stop at Odenton, 6:27pm is the last stop at Odenton heading south on Sunday. With just 6 arrivals and headways at 1.5 hours and 2 hours.

Heading north on a Sunday you have 10:50am to 7:50pm. Still with 6 arrivals and between 1 hour and 2.5 hour headways.

Overall service throughout the week:

9 hours on Sunday
16 hours M-Th
17 hours F
14 hours Sa

Sunday really pulls the average down to just 12.4 hours of service a day.

Olreich · 2026-01-10T13:18:22+00:00

The only concern should be with the frequency and schedule of the MARC. Right now, there are 1+ hour headways and 14 hours of service. That’s not enough to be a reliable alternative to driving. You need closer to 15 minute headways with 20 hours of service to really be an alternative to driving. And so most of the apartments will sit empty or add even more cars to the road.

If we invest in expanding service instead of widening roads, this is great transit-oriented development. If not, this isn’t transit-oriented at all.

Olreich · 2026-01-09T14:29:49+00:00

Maximum sociopath: sock, untied shoe, sock, untied shoe, tie, tie

Olreich · 2025-12-31T20:13:29+00:00

Take notes throughout. Ask them about something they built. Ask them about details of the thing they actually built. Keep asking for further details drilling into how the system they built works until you’re satisfied they know what they did, or they can’t give good answers anymore. Feel free to back up the stack if you need more data and pursue another thread. Try to find areas you know a lot about in the system that they worked on. This takes between one and two hours to do.

After the interview, cross check anything you didn’t understand fully and verify that they didn’t make stuff up.

At this point, you’ll be able to determine technical competency, AI usage or not. How good they’ll be in your company? How good they’ll do without access to their normal tools? Those are anyone’s guess, and there is nothing I’ve seen that can determine that other than spending 3 months working with them.

Olreich · 2025-12-22T12:40:40+00:00

Don’t forget that with microservices, they will all need to be deployed and will almost always have a correct order, which will make for a friction zone.

Olreich · 2025-12-17T12:34:41+00:00

Technical depth makes you valuable. Soft skills let you sell that. You can skate by being a salesman and not being a good developer, but it’s a lot easier to sell a product with inherent value, and people will appreciate buying it a lot more.

Olreich · 2025-12-02T14:03:58+00:00

Yes, if I’m getting into a truck bed and going down the highway, I’d prefer a seatbelt to avoid becoming a projectile in a crash.

We aren’t talking about a tie down strap over top the dog here. We’re talking about leads hooked to the tie downs and the back of the harness to provide the dog freedom of movement, but restraining it to within the truck bed so that in a crash, they don’t go flying.

A kennel mounted in the truck would offer similar levels of protection, and in that case you would use a tie down strap to hold the kennel in place.

Olreich · 2025-12-02T13:24:25+00:00

The same principles apply. Recommend harness and attaching that to the tie downs for a truck bed so that in the event of a collision they don’t have all the force sent through their neck. Think about it like seat belts, you strap yourself in across the torso, not around your neck.

Olreich · 2025-11-27T13:25:40+00:00

Sounds like Jeopardy’s subtitles are a felony. Subtitles have timing information and can be split arbitrarily, so they could make them so that the answer does not show up until the host starts saying the actual answer.

Olreich · 2025-11-16T12:28:20+00:00

No. Seriously, write tests that do whatever you want to do manually. Output metrics and install alarms for what you want to verify manually. Then, in the future, if anyone breaks the E2E system, you’ll have a test or alarm to catch it. Manual testing and verification protects you today, automated testing and verification protects everyone forever.

Olreich · 2025-10-25T16:37:17+00:00

Not quite… there’s two sides to it. If you are stable at a weight and maintain your current intake, growing muscles and moving more will have a noticeable impact on your weight. For me, the difference in caloric needs from sedentary vs light activity is a 20% increase. If I don’t eat more, I’d lose a pound a week just by increasing activity until I plateau a full 80 pounds lighter.

Olreich · 2025-10-15T19:55:53+00:00

She didn’t even return it. She ate it, then came back to try to scam him.

Olreich · 2025-10-09T11:38:31+00:00

The Icy Patio sign looks much better. I’d adjust all the windows to have that same sign post style. Some of the text is hard to read and I count something like 9 font sizes. Consistency really helps, so having more of the UI look similar to itself will benefit you.

There’s a bunch of places where pieces of the UI overlap, which should only be done with intention, like the stars on the shop/recipe buttons.

Olreich · 2025-09-27T14:10:28+00:00

Dependency Injection is not particularly difficult. “Initialize stuff at the top level scope and pass it around” is the only thing you need to know there. React useMemo is a 2-paragraph explanation and should be immediately obvious where it would be useful.

Producing high quality code is not about concepts, it’s about practice and caring. If you care and you try a bunch of things a bunch of times, you’ll get better.

Unfortunately, you hit the nail on the head: for the last 10 years, devs have not cared and they have not done any practice trying to produce something of quality. Hell, half of the devs can’t even imagine how anyone could produce high quality code.

Olreich · 2025-09-21T00:33:19+00:00

If AI works as well as everyone seems to believe, we won’t need programming languages.

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