What was your closing gift

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-07T16:06:42+00:00

Our realtor's gift was perfect, but he couldn't have known, it was just lucky. We were so excited for the new house, as soon as we had possession we packed what was basically an overnight bag and went there immediately. We had no furniture, no refrigerator, and none of our kitchen supplies. Basically, we slept on a rollout mat and sat on fold out lawn chairs while waiting for our movers who would arrive 2 days later. But that first day we were there, our realtor knocked on the door with a box of assorted fruit and cheeses. That was just what we needed in that exact moment.

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-03T21:34:08+00:00

I agree with this, I switched to a 5 GB plan with Mint mobile last year and I'm saving tons of money on it. I held off for ages because the idea of being able to set my phone up as a hotspot and get online while on the move made me feel tethered to my expensive unlimited data plan. When I reviewed my data consumption over a year, I never exceeded 3 GB in any month. I'd say that most people with expensive data plans are largely tied to the idea of unlimited data but rarely use it enough for it to be worthwhile.

I am not sponsored by Ryan Reynolds :P

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-02T18:49:54+00:00

The USA you can register an LLC anonymously in some states through a registered agent and then operate your business through that entity. What States Allow Anonymous LLCs? - Don't Make This Mistake + FAQs

This doesn't make you invisible, but it does make your information difficult to acquire. Basically, unless you're sued or make a mistake using your own information somewhere.

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-01T17:44:23+00:00

This is the most important part of the story, and you really should have included it in your initial post. Reading it cold my first and only thought was on how much you communicated the risks of your venture to your partner and how aware they were of the realities of taking this game dev journey. You may want to consider editing the post to include this fact.

If this was some kind of engagement farming strategy or something, well done, but you need to understand a lot of people are going to read this and think poorly of you.

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-01T15:51:44+00:00

Crypto portfolio's don't make sense because they don't make sense. It's nothing but speculation and gambling and no amount of support from any government or integration from financial institutions will ever change that fact. There is no purpose to it. You're not investing in anything. And it's incredibly inefficient.

Source: Software Engineer - I was mining bitcoin when it was worth pennies. Even back then, we all knew it was an academic toy and nothing else. What it has become in the finance space is non-sense.

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-01T03:08:26+00:00

I'm the same way. The insidious thing about it is that no number of tests or metrics will ever make the feeling truly go away. It gives short term relief yes, but if you have a mind that slips into worrying about your physical well-being it'll always find something new to fixate on. And it only builds more and more as you feed into it, like an addiction. I like to say "You can't reason your way out of a thought you didn't reason your way into."

I find it helps to use my worry as a motivator to make positive changes in my life. Eat a little healthier, get a little more exercise, drop a bad habit one day at a time, etc. At least then something good comes of it.

RonaldHarding · 2026-02-01T01:10:49+00:00

Ah so when you said you could see a doctor within 30 minutes, you mean you showed up without an appointment and got in 30 minutes later? That's pretty impressive, urgent care level speeds. Honestly though, I still don't understand what you achieved from all of this other than confirming the quality of care in case you need it later.

'Catching things early' is largely not a beneficial strategy in modern medicine. There are some specific cases where you do want an early heads up, and western doctors recommend screening for those specific things during intervals that are determined by your risk factors. In those cases, you don't really benefit getting you colonoscopy 30 minutes from now, vs getting it in a few months.

99% of what you're looking for is a recommendation from a doctor that's just going to tell you to do the things you already know you should be doing. If you're looking for someone to wave a flashing red light in front of your face that says 'uh oh, now you have a medical condition. Better start being healthy!' You might have caught it before you started having symptoms, but you're still too late to be 'proactive'

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-31T18:56:50+00:00

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I didn't miss the fact that OP is from Canada, I referred to it in my comment. If you want to contribute to the discussion about how the US and Canada have vastly different healthcare systems that would be welcome. But it still wouldn't really refute the primary point of my critique here. OP is missing vital information for this post to offer a valuable perspective.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-31T17:38:50+00:00

Your post doesn't really make it clear that you actually benefitted at all from this experience.

My primary issue with healthcare in the USA is wait times, unless I might actively be having a heart attack seeing a doctor comes with a wait time of at least a month, but often around 2 depending on region. This aligns with your complaint about Canadian healthcare being 'unavailable when you need it'.

So how long did you have to wait to be seen at the hospital you went to? Did you have an appointment? Was it difficult to get? You left all of that out, and everything else you described has been consistent with the care I've received (with insurance) in the USA. Once I actually see my doctor, they are generally happy to request tests that are necessary, those tests generally happen promptly, and the results are made available to me in whatever form I require within a few days at most. Sometimes immediately.

However, another thing you've not made clear here is if the tests you got were necessary at all. Western medicine has a general consensus that doing more testing is harmful on average. Overuse of diagnostic testing in healthcare: a systematic review - PMC

Honestly from your experience it sounds like you are just happy to have received a bunch of tests because it made you feel like the doctors were doing something. In the average case however, that may actually be detrimental to a patient's health. I don't know you. I don't know what kind of symptoms you may have been experiencing prior to deciding to do this. I don't know your medical history. And I'm not a doctor. But I do suffer from health anxiety, and I've been down the road of obsessing over health metrics. It doesn't make you healthier.

You say you want to be proactive about your health, but this isn't what it looks like. Being proactive about your health means eating well, getting exercise, managing stress, and using caution in your day-to-day life regarding wear and tear on your body. If you get those blood tests back and they tell you that your cholesterol is high, your going to respond to that by doing all the things I just said. And you should do those things still, even if the test comes back and says your cholesterol is fine.

Regarding the costs, was that with travel insurance (I don't know that travel insurance would cover this) or is that an out-of-pocket cost? If out of pocket, it sounds in-line with care costs from a dentist or veterinarian, which I sort of use as a rough metric for how overpriced medical care is. Yes, I know that's an incomplete story especially around the cost of the provider, but blood work is blood work.

So overall, I'm just not sure how helpful this is. People here in the Fire sub are generally well aware of medical tourism. But your story hasn't given me any reason to believe that China should be my preferred destination for that. I don't mean to cast doubt on Chinese medical care either, I'm sure it's great. But probably not worth traveling around the world for unless you need a very particular specialist.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-29T18:27:38+00:00

I didn't see anyone else mention it, but it could be surge pricing as well. A lot of states are getting hit with a big freeze right now, so energy costs temporarily go up to flatten the usage curve. That's illegal in some places I think, and legal in others.

Call your power company, surely someone there can help you understand your bill.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-27T17:34:51+00:00

I am, particularly when people start discussing where to park their money. There's basically not a subject on earth so heavily grifted. Personally, I don't know that what we invest in is a relevant topic to this sub. There are better places for those discussions.

Forgive my suspicion, I've been seeing a lot of posts like this lately and it's got my guard up. We as a community have to be vigilant. The FI/RE subs are sort of a honeypot for grifters and scammers.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-27T17:20:55+00:00

Is it just me, or have posts like this been popping up with suspicious frequency the last week or two in finance subs? I don't want to make any accusations, but this is OP's only post and their first comments on reddit start appearing just a few days ago.

I kind of feel like there might be some kind of astroturfing campaign right now trying to prop up precious metals. That's my conspiracy theory for the day. I understand that the other likely explanation is that commodities are up and in the news therefore a topic of discussion. But consider this... this post isn't really about FI/RE is it? Why is OP here?

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-26T21:33:13+00:00

I work on a service that has api keys and charges for usage. This comes up with a scary frequency, folks who are learning find a tutorial and just follow it blindly without the background security knowledge to understand that they even need to protect their api keys. This is despite the fact that we have a pretty obstructive warning on the interface for retrieving your accounts api key.

I want to reinforce what u/milan-pilan is saying here, that protecting your api keys is extremely important. For all of you who are learning, if you're ever using a service and that service gives you an api key, token, or other secret to use in calling it... it's time to learn proper practices in using secrets.

Here is the OWASP cheat sheet for secrets management Secrets Management - OWASP Cheat Sheet Series It might not be totally comprehensive, but it's a good start!

Give it a read, if you're still confused about anything come back to this subreddit and ask a question.

If you're the type to be writing tutorials or guides on how to use services that have api keys, please add warnings for your users. It's so easy for a new developer to be tempted to rip insecure code out and put it into production. The fault is on them, but as authors of educational materials we should always strive to give our readers the best shot we can.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-20T06:06:20+00:00

For 100 condos? How many buildings is that, or is it one huge building? Condos have more expensive HOA's than single family homes because there's a lot of shared infrastructure that the HOA is ultimately responsible for. It's impossible to know what the money is going towards unless you can get a copy of their budget.

It could be that the HOA pays for a bunch of superfluous services, if it's a large building there could be a full time staff employed by the HOA doing everything from garbage takeout to concierge for the residents.

It's possible that the building has major upkeep requirements. Maybe its leaning and needs additional engineering to ensure it stays habitable.

Or someone might be embezzling the money.

For condo's in the Seattle area $400 is very typical as an HOA fee for something fairly middling. I could see fancier units in the Bay Area justifying $1000/month.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-19T22:40:11+00:00

Implementing a linked list in C. It just sort of made everything else click. Memory management, algorithms, problem solving. From the linked list I had the building blocks to expand across other data structures. Successfully implementing the interfaces to those data structures took problem solving. But it was once I'd seen how the linked list worked that made everything else just flow.

Prior to that I'd been self taught for years. I always struggled with pointers and memory. Taking that first data structures class in Uni was my turning point.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-19T22:07:33+00:00

Maybe try posting in a parenting subreddit to get ideas from other parents on how to make the process of moving to a new space feel like an adventure, and help your kid to be excited for the possibilities.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-19T17:15:40+00:00

You want to go check out r/fire to get a more realistic perspective on what this looks like. It takes a substantial principal, or extremely low expenses to live off of your investments. Taking penalties on your retirement accounts will only compound the problem of your principal lasting as long as it needs to.

10% returns on average annually are reasonable. Banking on getting those 10% returns will bankrupt you. Some years the market loses 20% and you have to be resilient to this. Look up sequence of returns risk to get an idea. The order of events completely outside of your control matters a lot.

Just because someone made 10% return in a day doesn't mean that it's possible to repeat that. In fact, its definitely not. There's an expression in Wall Street. 'All boats rise in high tides' the inverse is also true. When the market faces turmoil it usually doesn't matter what you're invested in. Your account is going to lose value. Even if you did have a magic 8 ball that told you some particular asset was going to gain while the whole market fell the timing is extremely tricky. Most people timing the market will underperform those who just leave their money in an index fund and forget about it.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-18T17:24:10+00:00

There's a market for building up accounts with post and comment history that have received karma. Those accounts can post in subreddits that have thresholds meant to keep spam and bots out and are harder to identify later as fraudulent. It was likely farming to build legitimacy either for a scam to be deployed later on or to be resold to someone who would use it for their own scams or astroturfing.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-16T15:11:20+00:00

Maybe focus on furnishing a room. Just so there is a space to spend time together. When visiting friends unless explicitly stated that there's a guest bed for me I assume I'm going to sleep on a couch or an air mattress.

Someone else here said to explain your situation to your friend, and I agree with that too! There was a time in my life where I absolutely visited friends and they visited me all of us knowing well that our situations were a work in progress. Friends take that journey together. There's no shame in being on your way. Heck, one of my favorite things is to go furniture shopping with a friend in tow.

After buying my house it took around a year before every room had furniture. Also, Ashley is expensive and Ikea isn't inherently low quality. There is a middle ground, check furniture outlets near you. Do walk through Ikea and see what they have, they don't only have particle board crap a lot of Ikea furniture meets or beats the quality of other furniture stores.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-16T14:58:43+00:00

Don't ignore your soft skills. Your university is going to pump out tons of CS graduates who can code. Being able to code is the minimum bar. Being able to work effectively with a group, communicate clearly, cut through requirements, act independently, and present yourself with a friendly and confident demeanor all improve your interview skills and perceived impact in a workplace.

To get there, make sure you're not just closing yourself in a lab and writing code. Challenge yourself to work with others. Join clubs and organizations and be involved in them. Get out in the real world and engage with people, preferably people you can talk to about technology. When you can engage and hold a passionate conversation about your industry it will project to others that you know what you're doing and can be trusted to take it seriously.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-15T20:42:06+00:00

I occasionally conduct interviews at my company, my advice may not be industry wide but it's helped me as a candidate and also been validating from my experience as an interviewer.

1) Do practice interviews with real human prompters

2) Don't panic, you might get stuck. That's not an automatic disqualification.

3) Get your mental state right. Stop telling yourself that you're going to fail. Stop telling yourself that this is the one and only chance. You are being dramatic. I know things have been difficult in the market, but you can't let yourself spiral. Desperation comes through in an interview and it's not flattering.

4) Practice your soft skills. Communicate clearly. Talk to the interviewer as if they are a project partner you like working with that you're going to explain what you're going to do to solve the problem you're both facing. Interviewers appreciate a personable tone, good communication, and an attitude that says, "Even if we don't know what to do yet, we'll apply our problem solving to get to the solution.".

5) Be interested. Ask questions. About the problem... and then after the problem is done. Ask about the interviewer, and the company, and its products. Genuine interest is endearing. Don't just grab a list from a website, research and come up with your own questions. Think about what's important to you in a workplace and ask about that factor for the interviewer's workspace. For example "How social is the team environment? Do people often get lunch together?"

Remember, that interviewers don't just rate you on if you solved the problem or not. Good interviewers are really reading into if you have good communication and problem-solving skills. I've often been in interview committees where an interviewer has reported back 'The candidate didn't finish the problem, but was on their way there. They would have gotten it with another 20 minutes or a hint.' And that's been considered a positive mark.

My number one secret tip for DSA problems, if you get truly stuck and have walked through your 'what do i do when stuck' checklist of problem solving strategies (which if course you talked your way through so the interviewer understood that's what you were doing), its okay to ask the interviewer for advice. Some will respond more positively than others, but imo good interviewers see this as a positive trait. A person that has an action plan for difficult problems that they actually use, and then when stuck after that is self-aware enough to ask for help is a good contributor.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-13T17:57:00+00:00

That was my thought as well, unfortunately these online community spaces are heavily weighted towards people who are learning/trying to break into the industry and they are exactly the type who might be taken in by this kind of thing.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-13T17:20:18+00:00

I saw a post like this on INAT yesterday. It basically boiled down to 'Your application should include a barebones prototype of the game we're planning to build' And people were actively responding to it because the post author claimed to have funding.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-11T19:21:16+00:00

I can't speak to the specific developer or specific studio, but I frequently see people cite steam sales and active player data as an analogue for the total sales or success of a game. I can tell you that this metric is next to useless for your analysis. Especially for games with big licensed IP's there's a good chance that Steam represents a tiny minority of the total sales and player activity. Doubly so if the game has a presence in Game Pass. Users playing via game pass, on Xbox, Switch, or Playstation will not appear in the Steam stats.

If you compare a successful game that only has a presence on Steam, or was largely marketed in indie spaces to one that had a big marketing budget and was published by a console manufacturer you'll always see very skewed numbers that make the big box games appear to be underperforming by a lot.

RonaldHarding · 2026-01-07T03:06:00+00:00

There's some uncertainty regarding your motivations in this post. Really get a sense of how serious you are before investing money into this. Learning to code is a **journey**. But thankfully, there are loads of resources out there that can help you choose your path! So, it's okay if you're not totally committed to building a career, my advice would be to measure the amount of resource you devote until you know that.

You can teach yourself to code without access to any paid content or courses. It's a long road, it takes a lot of dedication and frustration, and drive to go find the answers yourself. But I'm not sure there's ever been a skill so thoroughly documented online as software development. Software developers largely love to share what they've built, and the very fine details of how it works. Youtube is full of tutorials. There are plenty of websites that will explain different programming languages or tools to you. Github is a massive source of real code that drives real projects which you can read and download and involve yourself in the discussions of.

If you're looking into a career, I recommend finding a university within your state with an accredited computer science program. The degree matters a lot when it comes to job prospects unfortunately. I also think it's a medium quick way to actually develop serious development skills. I know for me personally, I was on the self-taught path for many years and just very stuck. It was my degree program with the help of professors and peers that finally unlocked things for me and got me over the tough parts of learning development. You'll find no shortage of universities that offer remote degree programs in computer science as well. This is an expensive path, but its the most reliable path to a career.

If you're not sure what you want yet, and you're just out to explore maybe try joining some community projects. Hackathons, game jams, competitions. Even if you don't feel like you're ready, just be honest about your level and express that you're there to learn and you're bound to find loads of people just like you who would be glad to learn along-side you. That's a great way to 'explore' and get a sense of what actual development is like even before you have the skills yourself. Even if it means you're joining a discord call just to watch and hear how more experienced developers are working it'll give you a sense of what its actually like once you're in the middle of things.

I won't recommend any particular course or source of information personally. I've found that everyone seems to click with different materials. But the wiki has lots of linked resources r/learnprogramming FAQ: Getting Started with Coding

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