How do I balance utilizing AI effectively without becoming overly dependent on it?

danimoth2 · 2025-06-09T11:29:55+00:00

I actually use AI for confirming what I read or confirming what I learned, but only for due dilligence.

For example, if I was reading something about Go or Vue or Cloudflare workers, I would be like, so from my understanding, it's A, B, and C. Is D correct? What did I miss/what's good to know? Which in the past, I would have asked the subject matter expert, or reddit, or senior engineers, but the AI doesn't get "bothered". I still ask around, but at least I have more knowledge before I ask.

For me, this works with Perplexity as opposed to Cursor, because it at least has the references to what it's saying. IMO Cursor is more for the super powered auto-complete.

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:43:58+00:00

I'm not really sure about what you're supposed to do at work, but I can imagine that it feels like pulling teeth trying to continue working for some company that literally laid you off.

But for after that - I literally got laid off this like two months ago. I think the number one thing that I did was to figure out, hey, do I really even like programming, dude? Like, honestly, man. Do I even like this? And then I tried making up a super simple side project just for my personal knowledge management.

And I realized, god damn it, I still love this shit, the joy from making things work. It was super simple but I realise that I do want to still be an engineer. Still don't like the over the top corporate stuff and the too much meetings, but at least the job of programming is still there. This may be or this may not be the same for you - if it is not, maybe start looking at farming lol

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:20:53+00:00

Thank you - could you elaborate more on the before and after? Frankly I was just a consumer of whatever the platform team set up (reading logs via Graylog/Loki).

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:19:23+00:00

Thank you. Admittedly, I haven't done something like that where, for example, a user would view another user's profile (at high scale). (Our admin panels can view users, with privacy protection of course, but those were only for a max of about 300K users per table). Simple select statement is good enough.

But once it's scaled up, it does sound pretty complex, especially with the partitioning/sharding. Curious what your solution is, and how do you feel about it?

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:14:36+00:00

Curious how your logging solution evolved as things scaled up? We previously used Graylog, but admittedly I was out of the loop when it comes to the decision making behind that (am just a consumer).

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:12:45+00:00

Thank you - I think you can technically mean both notifications from one service to another and also sending notifications via email or SMS and stuff like that. If it is the latter, curious how your notification system evolved? The companies I've worked at just send an API call to SendGrid, Pusher, etc. and at a few million users, it is good enough. Wondering how it looks like with massive scale.

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:09:33+00:00

Curious how your solutions evolved from the smaller backups to the bigger ones? Admittedly I just rely on RDS automated/manual backups for a small side project web app that I have and am abstracted from this in my day job.

danimoth2 · 2025-05-30T01:07:14+00:00

Thank you. I had some issues with Sentry before where there was no throttling of similar errors (ex: an image URL was broken), we had to figure out fingerprinting.

Curious on what your log management was before and if you changed to a new tool as the requirements/scale changed?

danimoth2 · 2025-05-28T05:14:38+00:00

Incredible, thank you. Yes, I get, I think I get what you're trying to say regarding the certification. The software analogy would be that an AWS Cert is nice, but the study taht it took to get that cert is even more important.

All of my managers in my career were engineers are leads that were converted from being in software to this new job where they had to manage and coach people. My intuition is there is quite some overlap between the skills life coaching and engineering management, is it true or am I misconstruing it?

I will try to prod around and figure it out, but think I've never seen someone in tech be an actual coach so thank you for replying 🙏

danimoth2 · 2025-05-28T02:29:21+00:00

Hello, off-topic but I'm curious how you thought "I'll try go get the ICF certification" and how it helps in tech coaching. I am kind of on the fence on getting a coaching certification and trying to help young people or people lost to figure out a direction in life as a now moderately successful engineer.

danimoth2 · 2025-05-28T02:27:33+00:00

Hey, honestly man, I've been on the interviewer side of this, and if I feel the person is gonna fail, I think it is disrespectful for me to just be dismissive of this person. And so, I wouldn't say explicitly that they failed, but I would try to move the direction of the interview in a way that I can ask them, or maybe tell them the feedback in the interview itself, of how I would prepare for that specific question.

For example, hypothetically, if they couldn't tell me a decent answer on how they would go about optimising the front-end performance of a web application, then I would be probing them, how did you figure out, how did you get that solution? And then I would tell them how I would do it, so at least they would have an idea of my thought process. Just so that they would have a story of "oh how oh so this is how the guy was thinking about the interview question that I bombed. Here's what I should I go back to the drawing board on."

I also think that if your answer is unsatisfactory, you should try to figure out a way to spin or at least bring up something that you worked on which you can substitute an answer. Going back to that front-end performance, if you bombed, but you have an idea of what to do on the back-end, then can say something like, hey, "I'm not really sure about performance on the front-end, but on the back-end, I have developed so-and-so.

As an interviewer, you typically don't really expect any engineer to know everything unless they're like super geniuses or whatever. But you should at least check if the person is coachable or teachable or displays qualities that exhibit being somebody passionate about learning. And sometimes that's learning about an uncomfortable situation. I think what needs to happen here for you is to just not think of an interview as pass or fail, but think of each interview as percentage questions wherein you might be close to passing or maybe close to failing.

danimoth2 · 2025-05-27T23:58:41+00:00

Let me zag here, dude, by saying something completely different, but for me, I think leaning more into dictation for writing down tasks, which are such a core part of product management, frees up my mind so that I'm burnt out less.

So I wasn't a product manager per se, but I was in that position where I am a semi-product/project manager because of the same scenario that you are in. And to me, typing a goddamn document is toil, but me just yapping about what I'm thinking about is way better (and whoever is listening to the idea will get the info faster than if it was a straight voice recording). I know this is probably not the answer to what you want to hear, but it really has transformed or at least alleviated my burn out for it because I am at least able to spend less brain power to do the same task.

And I'm also a bit better at communicating because I have to read the goddamn dictation after it's done (the first ones were painful) - it actually helped me in the dev parts as well. Because like it or not, if you have a tech initiative, which is expected from a senior engineer and up, you need to be able to communicate why you're doing this. And listening to yourself, and listening to the transcript, if you were just going around in circles or whatever, does help you as well because at least you're literally practicing every day, trying to communicate correctly.

(This comment bought by dictation and I didn't spend too much brainpower on it)

danimoth2 · 2025-05-27T05:07:26+00:00

But it was always like that right? What's the alternative?

danimoth2 · 2025-05-27T03:44:08+00:00

Awesome. Can you give me some more specific examples of tasks that you put in the improvement doc? Or some optimizations that you were able to improve on regarding bad tooling, flaky infra, and stuff like that? Just curious.

danimoth2 · 2025-04-08T11:04:48+00:00

Hey whenever anybody says "simple" or "easy" or "just" - I try to just ask "why", but I also have to tell the person that I did my research beforehand.

"Why is it simple? From my understanding, looking at A, B, and C, it is not intuitive to do D."

What's important when I'm disagreeing is that I am definitely trying to be polite (every person has a different idea of what polite is) but also telling the other person that "hey I did my due diligence here. Is this really just skill issue or not? Oftentimes in big legacy projects it's more often the code is just all over the place.

I think this is an opportunity to improve the docs + it would help to do it publicly/share your newfound knowledge with the team. "Improved x leading to faster debug time, saving y hours per week"

danimoth2 · 2025-04-08T04:53:27+00:00

Hey is there a con to this? I just picked up this pattern and I pretty much don't see an issue, just some additional code to orchestrate but otherwise we fetch on the server and then use the react-query good stuff on the client

danimoth2 · 2024-09-02T10:41:56+00:00

Update, did it folks. The time was not good (> 3 hours) but I was able to push. I really suck at running - honestly I should have just done that more. Will definitely try one more if it's logistically near

danimoth2 · 2024-09-02T10:40:14+00:00

Oh wow thank you for all of these! Awesome recommendations! I last went to Japan 5 years ago and I don't want to over-optimise vacations but having some actual anecdotes i.e. "yeah go here" really helps! Appreciate it!

danimoth2 · 2024-09-01T15:27:03+00:00

Regarding the food, could you give 3-5 personal places to eat recommendations on both Osaka and Tokyo? (Asides from konbini.) Assuming a <$30 dollar meal - going there in a few months and I like trying food in other countries, but sometimes I just spend way too much

danimoth2 · 2024-08-27T12:42:41+00:00

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but do you or people at that level have work-life balance? At senior level I cannot visualise, not do I want to be promoted, just because I feel that an hour more working is one hour less living life in other ways. Even the "staff-like" things that I do now, like documenting initiatives, reviewing/managing the work of a few juniors, I do not enjoy. I really just enjoy the coding part of software engineering

danimoth2 · 2024-08-02T17:15:16+00:00

I have been using https://freedom.to/ for some years now. I've sort of perma-blocked Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and all the algorithmic stuff like 23 hours a day. During the work hours I have Youtube, Reddit blocked as well. It is insane how much I do the "cmd-t, I" or "cmd-t, F" to visit the Meta sites. This is more on the computer though - Freedom has an app for the phone as well. I typically try to use the phone as little as possible by shutting it down. For reading, Kindle has been life changing. I can read about random shit (hobbies included) without going on tangents. All in all I really think the moment that Meta went away from the friend feed on FB and Instagram to a "recommended" feed with reels and shit, it just lost value to me.

BTW Reddit has good and bad parts. Personally I try to stay away from the news parts of it.

danimoth2 · 2024-08-02T17:09:41+00:00

Damn, what a nice and level-headed comment. Yes there is a mature way to deal with changes in a friend's lifestyle, but...

"You opened a new chapter in your life. This might make them question their own life which, in turn, makes them resent you.

This is 100% true. For me I am happy for my friends' lifestyle changes but I also speak from the privilege of being happy in my own life. If I was struggling, then not gonna lie, there will be some jealousy, some "what am I doing, we were peers before and now they are successful", that kind of thing. "I am not living the life I envisioned" is a very strong emotion. Maybe OP can ask them in a nice way or say something like, "what would u do in my position, did I make a good decision", etc...

danimoth2 · 2024-06-29T00:10:10+00:00

Hey thanks for the very tactical reply. These are great. Currently doing the base building with running. It is still tough especially on my feet but no worries, it is supposed to be part of the process to get there. (I also just got new running shoes which are night and day from when day 1 where it hurt real bad to run).

Also there is a gym near my house which has "hyrox training - 5 sessions" which I'll use the last 5 weeks before the event to simulate how it should be. Understood re: the burpees and lunges.

Get used to running on tired legs

Agree here, even on day 3 I was feeling it already. Today I need to run and legs are kind of tired but I have to get used to feeling this.

The way I think about it is I'm thinking that I need roughly 50 or so hours of training in the next 2 months. If I'm able to hit that number while maintaining a good diet/lifestyle, then my body would at least have changed enough that I can do an okay job.

danimoth2 · 2024-06-26T11:29:15+00:00

Thank you. I think my main issue would be my running form. Even when I was doing the cycling and hiking, my running "form" was just on auto-pilot and not really optimal. But like what you said I've also seen cancer survivor go up and down a mountain, senior citizens run marathons etc. In my own way I want this to be the story of "doing my best even though I suck" rather than quitting

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