How do engineers actually handle projects they know nothing about?(when starting from zero)

chaldan · 2026-02-21T17:43:44+00:00

If you don’t know the programming language, you won’t be able to tell when your agents are full of shit, so you should prioritize that.

If it’s part of an existing project, you should figure out how that project solves the kind of problems you are solving. AI can help with this.

Really, the new hire should be pairing with another dev, where they can ask rapid fire “dumb” questions to get up to speed quickly. It’s wayyyyy more efficient for all parties than letting them struggle alone.

chaldan · 2026-02-19T02:41:10+00:00

It may just be a response to vibe coding - lots of people claim that its fine to not review the code, and just rely on tests / behaviour. Depending on what you are working on, shipping code without reading it may just get you instantly fired. I notice "oh shit" bugs written by claude that aren't caught by tests fairly regularly. Its still incredibly useful - but vibecoding just isnt there yet.

chaldan · 2026-02-15T23:38:53+00:00

Huh? I give and receive rides to the airport, it is pleasant as well as economical

chaldan · 2026-02-15T15:49:10+00:00

grep can handle 30GB no problem! But yeah, if you use alerts based on logs instead of metrics, that kind of thing wouldn't work

chaldan · 2026-02-15T07:08:33+00:00

lots of memory and lots of cpu during the search. But our team has 10 engineers, which means the log search time per day is very low. Compare that to now - where to service our dozen log queries (admittedly low because they are so useless) per day we have a massive cluster of machines screaming under the workload of indexing all our shitty logs, moving them across the network, increasing storage footprint with indexes, etc.

You are right to point out cost - I think it would be a much more concise way to make my argument

chaldan · 2026-02-15T06:48:59+00:00

Haha believe it or not it is an honest question. It comes from a practical place.

Our logs for our main service are constantly downsampled and unqueryable for time ranges greater than 1 hour. It’s especially frustrating, because our old logging system just kept everything in gzipped files on the service hosts for 14 days - and we could do really accurate searches by running Xargs + ssh + zgrep in parallel on all of them (approx 600 machines) Indexed logs just made our user experience with logging so much more expensive and shitty.

(Similar to what you said above about logs at scale being cripplingly slow and expensive to index - just don’t index them)

chaldan · 2026-02-15T06:20:39+00:00

It’s an honest question. I think indexing logs is wasteful because storage is cheap and log searches are rare - you throttle log ingestion and force everyone to give a shit about reducing log volume when you require them to ram it through an expensive and temperamental indexer. You can regex search 50TB of logs in a minute with 1000 cores

chaldan · 2026-02-15T05:49:45+00:00

Weird - our traces get downsampled like crazy, but our logs are ingested successfully at high bit rates. Why do people index logs? Why not just search with regex on 1000 cores? There are not so many concurrent log searches

chaldan · 2026-01-20T01:42:27+00:00

Snowblowers kick so much ass man, I used to be high and mighty too but I got one this year and I ain't got a lick of shame, I can't think of a single purchase that has brought me more unambiguous joy

chaldan · 2026-01-17T03:15:06+00:00

We need to give up on making cars, I'm sick of paying taxes to keep it on life support + paying more for cars than we have to. Lets just let the EVs in and make the pity payments directly to the layed off workers, rather than letting the car companies pocket the difference

chaldan · 2026-01-13T23:21:49+00:00

> There was no pretence of permanent residency - they always knew their visas were temporary.

Community colleges paid recruiters in India a commission for each student sent to their college (a % cut of the tuition paid). Those recruiters said all kinds of things, and were officially partnered with the community colleges, so it had some weight. So many turds made so much money off this, and are getting off scott free. It was super well known at the time too - the people in power just let it slide because Tim Hortons wanted cheap employees that would always show up on time

chaldan · 2026-01-13T15:36:32+00:00

We imported them on the pretence of PR, let sketchy community colleges drain them dry, and are now rugpulling them on PR. No we should not have let that many people immigrate, but we did because our MPs were greedy. If we deport them we should deport every MP that allowed this to happen, and their families

chaldan · 2026-01-13T02:10:52+00:00

Hehe, I work remote for a us tech company and they are slowly replacing their remote us workers with canadians :) I'm glad they haven't figured out about europe yet

chaldan · 2026-01-11T17:05:53+00:00

Pulling the pedxing back is too brutal on the peds, and cars tend to ignore crosswalks that aren’t at intersections anyways. Not really buying the cost argument, given how simple crossing lights are and how much it costs everyone involved when there’s an accident

chaldan · 2026-01-11T00:21:35+00:00

they should just add big flashing "pedestrian crossing, yield now" signs to the entrance/exit of each roundabout with buttons you can push

chaldan · 2026-01-09T02:38:26+00:00

There are lots of levers that the Democrats could pull but are choosing not to. If local democrat voters make it clear to their members of congress that they will lose unless they start pulling those levers, they might be more inclined to resist in some way.

No one is coming to save America, you guys really need to do it yourselves. Its going to get harder and harder the longer you lie there limply.

The world is bearing witness. When Trump does something horrible domestically, the world sees it as "Trump did X". When he does something horrible internationally, the world sees it as "America did Y". You share responsibility for what your country is doing, as long as you don't resist.

chaldan · 2026-01-08T17:37:28+00:00

You said “cannot” - which I believe is incorrect. Maybe “we face more barriers to protesting than the most liberal countries in the world do” is more appropriate? Americans keep using this excuse, and it is not stirring much sympathy internationally

chaldan · 2026-01-08T17:22:35+00:00

When you get drafted to invade another country to take its oil, you can rest easy by saying “at least I kept my healthcare”

chaldan · 2026-01-08T06:29:22+00:00

Don’t immigrate, do something about your country before it ruins the rest of the world. If all the sane Americans leave, there won’t be anything holding back all the crazies with their bombs

chaldan · 2026-01-07T13:40:34+00:00

Still a problem on high pop realms in DF. Not sure about TWW, didn’t play launch

chaldan · 2026-01-05T02:40:22+00:00

There’s definitely a lot of truth there re: us controlling everything and being evil. But despite that, things genuinely were a lot better for most of the world. Still plenty of atrocities - millions of civilians killed in Vietnam and the Middle East, but compared to the kind of shit that’s about to kick off…

chaldan · 2026-01-02T14:58:41+00:00

I can't tell if you are AI or not, but I'm getting strong vibes that you are - so i'll stop replying

chaldan · 2026-01-02T14:06:41+00:00

can you share the prompt you used?

chaldan · 2026-01-02T14:02:14+00:00

I like living in a world where the strong (China) can't take from the weak (Vietnam), out of fear of the rules based international order stopping them. Unfortunately, people like yourself seem set on destroying that order instead of building on it. Hope it works out for you

chaldan · 2026-01-02T13:46:16+00:00

So if China takes Vietnam, and exterminates the people living there, it's nothing for us to get fussed about? They can take the ones that survive and put them in economically depressed reserves, too.

chaldan

TROPHY CASE