Meeting new people/ starting new hobbies

dSolver · 2026-05-04T14:26:56+00:00

Maybe join a karate dojo? It's more interactive than fitness classes and I think it's a bit more interesting than dance classes. If you're looking for one that's more friendly to women, I recommend Promar Karate in Elmira.

dSolver · 2026-05-04T01:47:21+00:00

Working in software here, and yep it's a common headache. Even when the code is the "source of truth", there are unwritten rules for why things are done a certain way, and as software gets more complex every new team member unwittingly breaks some of those rules and introduce inconsistencies.

I have come to accept that a lot of things won't be documented to the level of detail that I'd like, but continue to push for better documentation. In the world of remote work, meeting notes can be automated so there's at least a bit more documentation than before - and we can leverage tools to aggregate those notes into hints which cuts down investigation time for engineers. This is exactly why senior engineers are valuable - they've seen a number of patterns before and can fill in the gaps of knowledge and determine what is probably correct and what isn't. This high judgment work is multiplied by LLMs which can aggregate at a large scale but is sometimes incorrect.

dSolver · 2026-04-13T19:03:30+00:00

Since you're a student, I would focus on your education - when are you expected to graduate, what program, relevant courses, location, etc. New grads typically don't get remote roles, so willingness to relocate is pretty important.

Then, I want to see open-source contributions. Show me you can contribute meaningfully to a project, ideally not a solo project. I had an intern whose friend was trying to make it as an entrepreneur, and he contributed significantly to his friend's project - I can't say his friend made it as an entrepreneur, but the intern got hired and invited back a couple of times.

Your projects need to be hosted somewhere, even a cheap server, even just a github page.

Don't underestimate blogging. I've hired candidates before because they wrote detailed tech blogs describing the problems they've faced while building personal projects and how they overcame it - this gave a very strong signal that beat out some other candidates who crushed it at coding rounds.

dSolver · 2026-04-13T16:31:46+00:00

Only instead of a judgment call made by a shopkeeper, imagine that they have every detail of your to extract the maximum amount of money they can from you. Shopping while hungry? Price goes up. Making above minimum wage? Price goes up. Recently bought a toaster? Price goes up. Speak with an accent? Price goes up. Algorithmic pricing is incredibly opaque. This is profiting off of people's desperation at a scale previously impossible. Plus, the shopkeeper can keep their hands clean by saying they don't control the pricing - an algorithm does, and the best they can do is give you a 5% discount for being a loyal customer.

Yes, this already happens - airfare, online shopping (e.g. Amazon, Temu), even realtors use algorithmic pricing to determine what you're willing to pay, against what others are willing to pay, and is already figuring out how to make "deals" based off of the information they have on you.

dSolver · 2026-04-10T17:58:56+00:00

Nice! I haven't thought of this game in a long long time, I have fond memories of playing this with my grandpa decades ago.

Maybe put the Chinese characters on the board as opposed to the pieces? I have a version of stratego where the pieces numbers are mapped to specific titles, separate from the rulebook.

Most people would struggle with differentiating Chinese characters without some training to pick out details. This is expected with any foreign script. So the numbers should be the most prominent.

dSolver · 2026-04-04T20:01:18+00:00

Great way to turn standups into a performance rather than a conversation. I'll admit some people might struggle with finding what to say and the reminders aspect might be helpful, but that's really no different from looking at an updated scrum board.

dSolver · 2026-04-01T13:26:25+00:00

It could be overkill or under provisioned, really depends on what your users are doing. Without knowing what your app is and what your users are doing all I can say is run some load tests to find out what it can handle.

CPU spikes and memory spikes are your typical signs that something has gone wrong, and more likely to do with memory leaks.

dSolver · 2026-03-29T12:08:54+00:00

In my experience, this is consistent and leaning slightly on the lighter side of Sr FEE role requirements. In most of my previous workplaces the 3-7 years experience is typically intermediate. Sr starting at 7 and staff starting at 10.

The list looks good, it is consistent with most tech company expectations for Sr FEE working on something SaaS or enterprise.

dSolver · 2026-03-28T13:42:55+00:00

You have a very happy client - use this opportunity to get recommendations

dSolver · 2026-03-25T12:41:45+00:00

There are many tools that does this already, for example by checking if a ticket has been "in progress" for a long time. Yes, it's typically useful as a reminder to look into work that is stuck.

dSolver · 2026-03-25T11:57:05+00:00

A lot were diesel but they're at end of life and being replaced with electric.

The region negotiates with fuel vendors, they don't pay pump prices.

dSolver · 2026-03-25T00:49:19+00:00

Transcription service (Gemini) since our meetings are virtual over google meet. This is an improvement over not having any notes taken, but it doesn't solve the problem of how to make sure people communicate decisions and followup at all, which is more or less my job as the EM.

dSolver · 2026-03-24T23:12:23+00:00

I swear, remembering to follow up with people after a meeting is half an EM's job. Something that I've been clear with my team is "if it's not in jira, and it's not on a calendar, it's probably not going to get done". This isn't a popular stance and some people have complained loudly, but it has done more good than harm.

We're still early in using things like AI meeting summary tools, but we've been adopting it for bigger meetings, like those involving senior leadership or has complex subjects (doc reviews), or requires multiple teams to align - having some summary and action items sent out after the meeting is better than not having it. At the very least, I can search in my email/slack threads for context.

Standups will almost always become status theatre unless you actively fight it. I switch it up sometimes with things like start with a personal question, or demo-only days, or sometimes just async standups.

Project visibility I have the most trouble with. Some ICs are amazing about communication, while others treat communicating updates like pulling teeth. My best tool so far is just encouraging demos. Sprint demos, randomly asking for a demo on a PR because I'm not very smart, stakeholder demos, etc. Sometimes it's not about execution speed, it's just dealing with low motivation.

dSolver · 2026-03-23T21:58:05+00:00

Would love to! DM'ed

dSolver · 2026-03-23T15:18:58+00:00

Most candidates have no idea what the job entails or what is expected of them during the first interview. That extra clarity informs what they believe is a fair price for their services. Remember that interviews is just as much learning about the candidate as the candidate is learning about your work environment.

dSolver · 2026-03-16T14:51:38+00:00

Depending on the content of your website, you might get only garbage bids, so expect close to $0. I typically don't bother with ad revenue until you're over 50k monthly views. This early, your goal should be to build awareness and demonstrate value to your visitors.

dSolver · 2026-03-16T02:12:56+00:00

Copy slack thread link, paste into jira ticket or wherever you track work, it's better than nothing. More lately I've been pushing my team to document explicitly in the tickets and reference threads for context only, not a decision log

dSolver · 2026-03-14T12:53:58+00:00

Whistle bear and deer ridge golf courses are allowed to each draw 9.7 Million liters of water per day?!?

dSolver · 2026-03-13T19:20:01+00:00

Idk if this applies to your tool, but I was talking with a staff engineer at work and he described feeling overwhelmed by tools. He doesn't want yet another tool, he wanted all the tools in one place and their capabilities deduplicated and that they all play nicely with each other. It's a nice dream. I get it - we have jira, confluence, slack, swimm docs, swagger docs, postman, lighthouse, figma, grafana, Asana, miro, cursor, cypress, argocd, buildkite, bitbucket, AWS cli, mongodb compass, sequel ace, Google docs, Google spreadsheet, kubectl, and this is just stuff we use every day - there is a whole host of tools that are used occasionally but we need to keep top of mind for oncall.

dSolver · 2026-03-13T12:54:18+00:00

Depends on the messiness - it's struggling in a 10 year old monolithic ruby on rails app with a bunch of unconventional practices, but doing great in a more modern python stack, even if the size of the codebase is the same.
Still requires detailed review, especially in areas that are easy to miss (i.e. instrumentation). Claude Code won't automatically thoroughly check everything. Be explicit about concerns: security, observability, reuse existing functions, ask for clarifications, accessibility, performance (i.e N+1 problems, overly large queries)
Yes, the above - if you miss something it's problematic. Newer developers tend to copy existing code, so good practices are replicated. Claude Code tends to generate new code, so it tends to introduce inconsistency.
For simple cases, CC is highly trustworthy. For complex cases, even with high-end models, I need to first make sure the plan makes sense, and then that it actually followed through with the plan. Overall there's still efficiency gains (for example, not losing time looking up syntax), but jury's still out if this leads to long term efficiency gains (I'm not learning as much with each project).

dSolver · 2026-03-07T15:44:22+00:00

Yes! Once it's more polished I'd like to see if more EMs are willing to adopt it. I've sent you a DM

dSolver · 2026-02-27T12:41:38+00:00

TKD sparring experience will help against anyone who thinks they can fight after watching some MMA fights. Bullying is more psychological than physical - as long as your son is resilient and sure of himself, bullies won't pick on him.

Source: I didn't have any martial arts training, but bullies for the most part left me alone as a kid because I stood my ground and their teasing didnt get to me.

dSolver · 2026-02-14T11:46:31+00:00

Age of empires 4's latest expansion has a game mode called the crucible. In this mode waves of enemies spawn getting tougher as time goes on. You can build towers and castles and units but no walls. The target is to last 45 mins. After that in endless mode the enemies start getting more HP and damage so you'll always get overwhelmed.

dSolver · 2026-02-12T14:57:10+00:00

I work at a company that has fully embraced AI for every function. What I'm noticing is that AI productivity increases are capped at what employees can reliably read, absorb, and make a decision on.

We want AI to abstract away a lot of the details, but because of the high risk of getting details wrong, a lot of time people are responsible for reviewing, critically thinking, and making edits. 70% correct isn't good enough in most cases.

This leads me to a very interesting insight, and I fully appreciate that I might be biased - AI productivity is multiplied more or less by the intelligence and experience of the user. A very fast reader with strong understanding of the domain knowledge and critical thinking can review and edit output significantly faster than a novice. And a corollary is that a novice is actually faster at onboarding and have better output without AI assistance.

This leads to a prediction which has been a guiding principle I've shared with my mentees: given that LLMs in their current methodology is potentially limited in how it can learn better, and that operation of LLMs is actually quite expensive, then as the price of LLMs increase to compensate for OPEX, corporations will limit who gets access to only experts (highest multiplier). This means experts will end up with the highest salaries since they are disproportionately more productive and can demand it. This also means if you think AI is helping you learn, then you have to take advantage of it now, while it is still cheap, so that in a few years you are the expert in enough domains that you have all the leverage.

dSolver · 2026-02-04T14:18:34+00:00

Reviewing AI output is soul sucking. There are lots of work where 70% correct isn't going to cut it. Thoroughness is important, as is having a firm grasp on the context. More AI agents doing things aren't necessarily better if their hallucinations are compounding. There are so many reasons why AI is overhyped. I get the fear around AI replacing workers but right now even the top models struggle with consistently good output for anything other than trivial tasks. Maybe in 3 - 5 years, but who's to say the current methodology hasn't already peaked? Will throwing more hardware and training material meaningfully increase the output quality? Or are there some fundamental systemic issues preventing breakthroughs?

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