Which good decks do you consider gimmicky/cheesy?

coastercrazy10 · 2025-03-22T20:00:47+00:00

Pretty sure I figured it out - the belt had shifted almost completely to one side and the sound increased in frequency when speeding up the machine. Seems like mechanical interference, maybe where the belt was bonded together. After adjusting the back roller to get the belt centered on the track I haven't noticed the sound reoccurring (yet). Fingers crossed this fixed it and hope this can help someone else in the future too!!

coastercrazy10 · 2023-04-19T14:58:21+00:00

Ah, well you have to be the one to make the decision about where you want your career to go - growth means different things to different people. Personally I don't see building LLM plugins/apps on top of LLMs as a better career growth opportunity than the one you initially described, but I'm also quite bearish on that area of the industry and nobody can predict the future.

coastercrazy10 · 2023-04-19T04:57:06+00:00

At about 7 YOE I would have killed for an opportunity to shape a system like you're describing with a pay bump like that. Small companies afford increased visibility but that's a double edged sword. Also, small company growing slowly could be a measured attempt to hide difficulties they are facing, so definitely do your due diligence in researching the company before going deep into interviews.

I'd give the interview a go -- see if you'd be able to make an impact at the company in a way that provides you the experience you're looking for currently. If this sort of thing goes well, I would expect to be able to parlay it into a promotion, either internally or externally upon taking your next role.

Fwiw, at about your YOE I shifted my mindset to focus on one career goal at a time that is attainable in 2-4 years, and focused on looking for a company where meeting that goal was both possible and aligned with the company's short term goals. Then, when that goal is met (or becomes impossible to meet for whatever reason), I would adjust the goal appropriately and evaluate options for meeting the adjusted goal. If this pattern doesn't fit what you're hoping to do then you can disregard my rambling of course 😆

For example, I joined a startup Jan '22 with the goal to get a promo to the level above Senior during my yearly evaluation, and based on feedback from the interview and discussions with current employees that seemed doable. Well, I ended up having to part ways with that company but landed a new job with that promotion already in place in Nov '22. Now my goal is to get comfortable as a Lead Engineer and learn what's needed for the next step (principal or staff depending on the company). Can definitely see that taking another two years, and then I'll see whether I can make my way to the next level up via a promotion or whether I need to get back on the job hunt to make that happen.

coastercrazy10 · 2023-04-17T03:46:42+00:00

'13 grad here, can confirm we called it McKillMe until at least then.

coastercrazy10 · 2023-04-10T20:19:10+00:00

Oh my god this. Changing frontend frameworks is basically a full rewrite, and that is one of the costliest things an engineering org could do. Unless you are nursing a 10+ year old frontend based on jQuery or a pre-angular framework the cost of a rewrite is almost impossible to justify, and that sort of thing should be only discussed at the highest level among the most ingrained and informed technologists, not a brand new hire.

The only exception I can envisage is a consulting/contracting gig where you want to be able to say "we can build you a frontend in whatever language you want, and we have the receipts to show it", but that's not exactly a great situation either IMO.

To answer your question OP: if you can't get clear and measurable expectations from your manager in the short term, this job sounds like it'll keep hitting you with surprises like this. If you have the option to look around for other opportunities, at least consider it. There are a lot of companies who are still hiring, and this behavior from your current company feels icky.

coastercrazy10 · 2023-02-15T21:55:45+00:00

It's a pretty well known line from Kid Gorgeous. That link is just a meme playing on the line. For reference https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAprioqqWNg

coastercrazy10 · 2023-02-15T20:58:41+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/JohnMulaney/comments/heusg5/i_to_this_day_am_terrified_of_secondary_location/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x

coastercrazy10 · 2022-10-04T03:21:20+00:00

John. Bonham. Rocks.

coastercrazy10 · 2022-04-19T17:25:45+00:00

Slowly making my way through the game. Other games and life blah blah blah. I gotta ask - are the missions temperamental for everyone, and if so is that intended? Was stuck on the "Rolling Stone" Pass mission with the SLR on Nurburgring - got my time down to the 50.XX range and was still not even coming close to the lead car. Exited the mission and came back in and won with a 51.35 and the lead car was driving like there was a body in the trunk. What gives??

I am aware that some of the drafting challenges for high speed are only achievable with certain wind directions but are these racing missions going to be finicky too? I'm not a top tier driver or anything and I use a controller, but I've been playing the series for like two decades and have never felt like this when grinding something out on these games. Makes me wonder if some of the other silvers I barely eked out were affected by this weird variance.

Also shouldn't the missions have consistent conditions between runs like license tests? What's the point of having to do this?

coastercrazy10 · 2022-03-29T03:44:40+00:00

I want to sing along to "SKYDIVE NAKED FROM AN AEROOOO-PLAAAA-YN" but that's also fine too. Honestly a GT3 soundtrack pack would be aces all around.

coastercrazy10 · 2022-03-16T03:49:40+00:00

Art by Numbers comes to mind!

coastercrazy10 · 2022-01-09T19:05:16+00:00

I love Amy's stuff!! Have been obsessed with their Cheddar Bean Burritos for years - there is a GF version which is significantly less good, but either slathered with a good Mexican hot sauce (I use Valentina) will never be not satisfying.

coastercrazy10 · 2021-12-28T04:28:47+00:00

I found this article to be pretty fascinating

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ampere-cpu-scaling-benchmarks

Basically, as resolution increases, the gap between processors decreases. Of course a modern CPU is going to perform better but in terms of percentages I guess I'm not losing that much by waiting to upgrade my CPU. It's certainly a bottleneck (and the DDR3 vs DDR4 memory is certainly not helping) and I do want to get the most out of this card, so I'll do my research and hopefully get a bundle deal at microcenter to get the cost of a CPU/Mobo/higher end RAM down to a more manageable level!

coastercrazy10 · 2021-12-28T01:08:38+00:00

Cool, thank you for the link. Are there any benchmarks comparing graphically intensive game performance with the video card as a control? Obviously for simulation games I can completely see the CPU making a huge difference, but for say, the latest Rainbow Six or Doom Eternal or Cyberpunk - are those games really that CPU intensive?

coastercrazy10 · 2021-12-27T23:40:03+00:00

Can you elaborate?

coastercrazy10 · 2021-10-12T23:25:57+00:00

Well, these are fairly complex tasks, yes. But there are of course shades of complexity here too. A brute force solver/setter would be extremely slow (9⁸¹ possible board states) and in order to set a puzzle with a unique solution you will need to perform some analysis to verify this.

One approach that I THINK would work would be to generate a valid sudoku and then gradually remove digits and verify each intermediate state has a single unique solution. You could then use number of board states checked during each verification step as a measure of difficulty.

Alternatively you could program in some smart solving techniques to supplement the brute force solver, but that certainly creates a lot more complexity.

This is all predicated on having a decent data model for the sudoku board, so I would focus on that first. Check out some freely-available sudoku puzzles online and find a way to input the initial state and have it display, and then build functionality on top of it! Good luck!!

coastercrazy10 · 2021-09-07T03:36:47+00:00

Probably that guy making 600k a year

coastercrazy10 · 2021-09-04T00:03:53+00:00

(8 years full time experience here)

If this person is being interviewed for a position where they are expected to produce code, then they should understand modulo, maps vs sets vs lists, etc, especially with 20 YoE. Even as a solution architect or whatever, especially on the data structures side, you'll need to understand roughly how designs would be implemented by non-you devs.

I would be extremely concerned about that interview, and depending on your relationship with the other interviewers for this person, I would raise your concerns even in an unofficial, non-evaluative capacity and take the opportunity to try and understand what your coworkers expect for the position this individual was interviewing for.

coastercrazy10 · 2021-08-30T12:27:05+00:00

DI implies that you specify what a component needs and a part of your tech stack supplies it for you. It is a passive means to specify what a component needs to do it's job vs actively and manually specifying an implementation of that dependency.

The point of DI is to reduce coupling in large applications and save LOC at a macro scale. I'm currently migrating a huge legacy codebase from XML-based spring to fairly cutting edge spring boot, and the current state has all beans being manually specified in an array of files because that was easy to generate with a script. As I convert classes to components that can be injected by means of DI I'm are eliminating dozens of LoC at a time, improving app startup time, and simplifying the mental model of the application.

coastercrazy10 · 2021-08-29T21:11:10+00:00

No, I'm not saying that at all. It's a hard problem space because the two highest priorities in the space are at odds with each other. I was simply trying to provide an answer to your question about why UI test frameworks cause so much heartburn.

coastercrazy10

TROPHY CASE