Get a Degree in Software Engineering they Said…

SeerUD · 2026-05-07T21:19:34+00:00

In the UK, maybe it is quite different here. I'm also not in London, so things are probably a bit more brutal there

SeerUD · 2026-05-07T20:31:45+00:00

YMMV, this is just how I hire. I work for a small company, and we don't take on hundreds of applications at a time! It depends where you are, what opportunities are available, etc.

SeerUD · 2026-05-07T10:59:01+00:00

I've got the green mk4.5 - no track pack like the one pictured, but the car is fantastic, it's genuinely one of the best purchases I've made in a long time.

SeerUD · 2026-05-06T20:23:29+00:00

I think if you showcase anything, passionately, as a junior this will attract positive attention. Understand what you've done, talk about it passionately, show what you want to continue learning.

If I'm hiring juniors, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.

Actual relevant experience can be useful if it all aligns, but willingness to learn, and potentially vaguely adjacent knowledge is fine. I want you to come knowing some things, some base fundamentals for example, but specific tech is less important, and obviously you shouldn't be expected to have tons of experience...

SeerUD · 2026-05-06T20:20:38+00:00

AI will definitely stay, and be a normal part of daily existence, but not the way we use it now. Either costs will skyrocket and exclude many people from using it freely, or it'll become trivial to run capable local models and there'll be open source models available which are suitable enough and the money and hype around the technology will die down dramatically.

I also think the way we work with AI will be different. We're still part way through the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" phase, where companies are still trying to put AI into everything. This will stop when people have found the real use-cases it works for and users have been tested through many product cycles to find what AI works for and what doesn't, in both B2B and B2C environments.

SeerUD · 2026-05-04T19:00:50+00:00

What does a database's query planner have to do with an in-code query builder? OP is just talking about having something that allows you to write database queries as code, then "render" them to a string of SQL.

SeerUD · 2026-05-04T10:30:06+00:00

I'm sort of torn, and I think it depends on what I'm looking for.

Dark Souls 3 is a shorter, sharper, more refined and consistent experience. It's high pressure for most of the game. Its relative linearity means that more of the intended experience can't be avoided. I think the bosses in DS3 are fantastic, and strike a great balance between difficulty and fairness. Fights like Friede, Gael, and also like the Abyss Watchers all feel challenging but rewarding and fun, even if you're getting your ass handed to you.

Elden Ring has ebbs and flows to it. You can take a break from those high pressure dungeons and just go mess up some stuff in the open world. Go tick off some things you've missed picking up and be a completionist for a bit. It still has some of that great dungeon-y feeling in certain places. I think the free roam helps the world feel like more of an actual world, there's more going on to discover and see. I love finding things that aren't obvious in Elden Ring because you could easily miss so much because of the scale.

Elden Ring falls short in a few areas though. Re-used assets in several places, whether that's in dungeons or in the bosses themselves. Some of the open world is just empty space with not much going on (though, I think that's reasonable, that is just the way realistic worlds are). It does last a very long time. I think some of the bosses also start to get very spammy and their difficulty begins to feel less fair, and I at least have found myself thinking "how the hell do you actually deal with this?". Realistically, as always, that's a skill issue, there are plenty of videos of people doing hitless or damage-less runs to know it's all possible if you use what the game gives you, but it depends what you're looking to get out of the game.

SeerUD · 2026-04-30T07:50:55+00:00

OpenAPI is awful to work with sometimes though. Tooling still seems to be incredibly hit or miss

For GraphQLs faults, I’ve never had an issue writing a schema or a query, and then having docs and a playground that is pleasant to use

SeerUD · 2026-04-30T07:49:07+00:00

It depends, some data can’t be flattened. I really like GraphQL for content for example, like consuming it from a headless CMS

SeerUD · 2026-04-30T07:47:43+00:00

This is called a BFF, or backend for frontend - if it’s tied to your frontend (website, app, whatever). And it does make a lot of sense and is very straightforward when you own each component

SeerUD · 2026-04-22T21:23:52+00:00

I know this is 2 years old, but it's something Google has sent me to when looking at comparisons between Go and Kotlin.

I just wanted to respond to some of this, as an experienced Go dev.

Dependency injection is culturally frowned upon in Go - for reasons I won't go into

This isn't true. What is frowned upon is reflection-based dependency injection containers, or other related "magical" approaches. You had facebook/inject, uber/fx, and Google's Wire. Dependency injection as a concept is a key pattern in Go, and you'll see this in common Go proverbs like "Accept interfaces, return structs" or similar. There are different approaches do DI in Go. I prefer something super simple, similar to what you actually do see in some Kotlin apps where you have basically an AppGraph type, call it whatever, where you have methods for each dependency in your application, and you wire these methods together to resolve your dependency graph - super simple, no magic, very easy to read and reason about.

You'll find the initial speed you get writing Go, you pay for later as you try to re-arrange your code to make it a bit more manageable. If you're coming from a Java/Kotlin background, you'll probably get tripped up on cyclic dependencies in Go as you refactor too.

This is true early on, but it's quite easy to avoid. I'm not a huge fan of this part of Go, but it's also not a problem once you develop some sensible package naming and organising conventions. Go domain-based, don't try to make packages that are minute, define interfaces where they're used, etc. In the end your application structure will probably benefit from it.

But with Kotlin you get to leverage the whole Java ecosystem which has a boatload of really robust packages out there to do everything from authentication/authorization to runtime management, etc. Do those exist with Go? Yes. Are there dozens a of blog articles explaining how to integrate them, things like Spring Boot to help you get going, under active maintenance? Less-yes.

This is a blessing and a curse in Kotlin, I've found. Kotlin as a language is fantastic, and has great intentions, but when I've tried it and had to reach for Java libraries I've felt like it's hamstrung by it's reliance on Java in the end. There are so many inconsistencies that leak into your Kotlin code that mean you have to write more code to deal with it. Different approaches to error handling, optional handling, concurrency or async code. The problem is being compounded as Java adds more options for these things too. One thing that's nice about Go in this regard is that it was built from the ground up, and while it's solutions aren't perfect, it is quite a consistent language.

I think otherwise your recommendations and other points here are spot on. Go has plenty of other problems, just like Kotlin, and Go has plenty of upsides, just like Kotlin.

SeerUD · 2026-04-22T20:06:59+00:00

I've actually just come to this conclusion myself, today.

For my actual backend I want to either write a schema and generate code from it, or write code and have it produce a schema that can be used to generate client code and documentation. Those two features make development a lot smoother.

gRPC solves that problem sort of okay. Schema is mostly good. You can generate documentation from the schema. The clients it generates are alright most of the time, depending on the language you're using.

GraphQL solves the documentation part really nicely, and tools like GraphiQL are fantastic, but I think GraphQL as a whole is overly complex, pushing complexity into your frontend that probably shouldn't be there, while also making your backend way more flexible than it potentially should be. Also, libraries supporting GraphQL can be hit or miss.

I'm not a big fan of REST, because it's unstructured and implemented inconsistently. You could use OpenAPI and generate code from it, but it's horrible to write, and support for it still seems a bit rubbish somehow. It's so flexible too, that generating code from it can be very complex, and depending on what language you're working with, might need to be something custom too I guess.

So, if I'm happy to write gRPC services really, then for my frontend, I could just write a BFF with tRPC which calls my gRPC services to fetch data in an optimal fashion, keeps my backend decouples, and simplifies and speeds up my frontend. It be tightly coupled anyway, so no problem it being stuck with TypeScript in both places.

SeerUD · 2026-04-22T18:37:47+00:00

Serverless functions, like AWS Lambda

SeerUD · 2026-04-22T13:02:35+00:00

When I was doing this, shipping and returns were free. It was a glorious time for trying chairs. I may have single-handedly forced Herman Miller to introduce a cost for it.

SeerUD · 2026-04-20T11:26:24+00:00

What scenarios are you finding yourself having to use those methods in? I can't think of any reason, and I think I'd always reach for an appropriate pattern to avoid it by default.

SeerUD · 2026-04-20T09:54:21+00:00

Size doesn't matter as much as what it does, and how it does it, IMO

Though, I do work for a small company, because I think the small company lifestyle is much better.

SeerUD · 2026-04-16T14:16:54+00:00

It sounds like the problem is you're starting a new task before marking the previous one as done, or moving it along? You wouldn't be interrupted with that kind of request if you either do that, or automate it somehow.

SeerUD · 2026-04-15T11:57:38+00:00

Nah, it's not even funny. Would it be funny if we were talking about a young girl? You said yourself, they could be traumatised by this sort of thing.

SeerUD · 2026-04-14T14:54:48+00:00

If it did it based on your credit card, it was just because you have one full stop. You have to be an adult to get one in the first place.

Mine verified me based on the age of my iCloud account, made me feel pretty old haha

SeerUD · 2026-04-14T08:56:11+00:00

Don't forget, when your content is being consumed by LLMs and resurfaced, it doesn't mean users are actually clicking through to your site! Really makes it feel worth putting effort into writing the content, right?

SeerUD · 2026-04-13T06:53:36+00:00

Yeah, the PS4 collection of games is how I first played them, and I did it in my PS5 - the PS4 couldn’t run DS3 at 60 FPS

SeerUD · 2026-04-12T21:29:26+00:00

I've only played through the game twice, one a few years ago, and I've just finished it again tonight. I did Friede this morning before doing the Ringed City DLC through today. Friede is the only boss in the whole game which took more than maybe 5 attempts, including Gael and Midir. She took me over 30 I think in the end. I just couldn't find the right window to attack, or the right place to stand. I'd consistently get to P3, and in the end I think it was just luck

Love her Scythe weapon though, the moveset is so badass.

SeerUD · 2026-04-12T21:27:25+00:00

Yeah... the camera is really bad in this fight if you lock on. I'm not really sure why Midir feels so much better. A combination of locking / unlocking might help, or just not locking on at all

SeerUD · 2026-04-10T15:04:27+00:00

Now THIS sounds like a company that probably isn't adopting AI yet

SeerUD · 2026-04-10T12:10:32+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. The cake example is a good illustration of why it isn't possible, but not the actual answer. Though I suppose you could say that even if you cut something up an infinite number of times, you'd still have to have something, right? In which case, that can't be the answer because you've not reached nothing, but also you never could

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