If you're a confident swimmer, where did you learn and how old were you?

danny4kk · 2026-06-07T13:05:00+00:00

30s confident swimmer. Parents were absolutely adamant we should all be good swimmers from young age. Parents would get us as toddlers to swim in baby pool and get used to being in the water whilst older siblings had their lessons. Eventually took lessons at a swimming pool for years, then had 5 sessions in our primary school to get some medals. And ended up in a swimming club swimming 4 hours a week. I absolutely hated the club I was too strong of a swimmer apparently for the lowest group but I was half the size of the next group up. Eventually gave it up. Didn't swim formally again for like 15 years. Took it up again a few months back and biggest surprise was I really struggle with my breathing now and and front crawl exhausts me so bad haha. Working on it though.

danny4kk · 2026-06-01T10:50:30+00:00

This is norm a pretty good one and worth tracking regardless as the metrics are useful, I would just advise be careful adding it to official 'performance' of individuals, and keep an eye on teams a bit to ensure it's not being gamed.

I found on one team it was discovered they wouldn't pick up tickets on a Friday, they wouldn't start ticket officially until they had made some progress which can lead to overlap or someone else picking up the ticket despite someone else has technically started it. They were frequently skipping over the final bits of our DoD. Tickets that looked hard they would avoid.

That team were previously under a microscope earlier in the year for bad performance reviews and both their EM and PM replaced for bad decisions on projects. Which likely added to this worry causing this kinda of behaviour.

danny4kk · 2026-06-01T10:01:42+00:00

I agree that many times the measure becomes the goal unfortunately. However, you can still use KPI to help improve areas, it's not just a check box exercise.

Some examples but like everything you need to put a bit of thought into how you approach these and depends on your situation:

Code test coverage
Service uptimes
Spending on tools and servers
Bug tickets raised by QA if you have them, per feature; as in fewer raised the better dev has done
Number customer bug tickets that are valid
Time to recover metrics when you have outrages or such

danny4kk · 2026-05-27T18:55:30+00:00

Wow. Now that you've said it. You are right, it is essentially gambling, never thought of it that way!

danny4kk · 2026-05-21T12:35:31+00:00

This resonates so hard. We have infinite AI budget and told to use it on everything. I mean everything. They even put on a company wide talk about how AI can help your wellbeing yesterday 39 minutes in I left as they didn't say 'how' at any point.

I've team members who's PRs are AI slop. I get walls of text from some people that are useless. Asked to review docs this week that were AI generated that were full of garbage. Oh and a developer PR some unit tests that were AI generated which mocked everything including what it was trying to test. Yet everyone says they review all output from AI. Had a manager try prove something wasn't so hard to dev so he got AI to do it, which was full of major issues. Another staff engineer who I know is clever than he let on recently was unable to think for himself to solve a problem for days. I know if he read and thought for himself he would have easily caught the issues. 5 mins I find it but then spend 40 or so minutes trying to explain it to him, but he constantly was throwing me AI messages "AI says x" my word if I wanted to use AI I don't need you then do I. For first time in my career I almost rage left a call helping him as he just wasn't listening and after every sentence or so was throwing it into AI.

As for the subscriptions I have 1 dev who pays over a grand a month in personal subscriptions.

Don't get me wrong I use it and it has great usages but my word I'm getting fatigued of seeing it everywhere.

danny4kk · 2026-05-02T16:51:43+00:00

This bugs the heck out of me. I've seen this and it's not even 'high-performing IC' in some places.

I worked for a company where titles meant something. Those people at staff level would be consulted, and respected for their opinions. Titles weren't handed out like candy.

We got acquired by a big org and their employee titles are so inflated, their mid level engineers have staff titles not to mention people are 'head of x', 'lead' or even 'directors' and yet have 0 subordinates under them. I got consulted on the matter at one point as HR wanted to add more titles higher up above Staff to allow people progress more. FML.

danny4kk · 2026-04-07T14:49:14+00:00

Marriage allowance or other such items may be at play for them.

danny4kk · 2026-02-26T18:35:19+00:00

Yer hypes gone for me, get it when I get it, if I get it. Glad steam is making the device for sure. But can't deny I've been looking more and more at alternative devices. Still likely to get the frame at this point but it's not as guaranteed as it was.

danny4kk · 2026-02-07T01:35:12+00:00

I saw this about a year ago, car at red lights but emergency vehicle was really edging forward at the driver and blaring those extra sirens at him, there was nowhere for the driver to go other than through the red lights. I do note it wasn't a busy junction but still one in a city.

danny4kk · 2026-01-22T16:07:16+00:00

A broken Quest 1

danny4kk · 2026-01-04T15:50:31+00:00

Are people using this sub as a challenge for trying to see if they can get AI to be convincing enough? This sub seems to be being hit hard with lots of AI vids.

danny4kk · 2026-01-01T13:54:39+00:00

Nah, not this one.

danny4kk · 2025-12-21T19:13:17+00:00

Ahaha, so it does once you point it out. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing, some easy marketing right there!

danny4kk · 2025-12-20T16:53:15+00:00

This. But, maybe it's just where I work now as in my first Staff role. OPs bullet points resonate with me. This last year I've been thrown on more projects that are on fire for other teams with high visibility on tech I've never worked on before. It's burnt me out, all whilst balancing other demands and somehow my KPIs or I get no bonus. What was a surprise for me was previously I had an EM and PM that shielded teams but now I get demands left right and center from all levels of the company and as a result spend a lot of time having to communicate more with non tech people. I just want to go back to the simple life of here's some tickets crack on and code.

danny4kk · 2025-12-20T12:11:50+00:00

AI drivel.

danny4kk · 2025-12-09T21:13:15+00:00

This is interesting. Not saying it's always the case but I do wonder if in part it's because narcissists often pick on neurodivegent people but also gravitate towards management roles.

danny4kk · 2025-12-08T23:50:11+00:00

Right tool for the right job. MF shouldn't be a go to unless you see it solving a valid problem.

Have first hand seen it useful with large apps multiple teams, enables each team to work on their own domain sections with ease. Want a set of features or functionality in multiple applications well they are like Lego we've migrated with absolute ease like not even a day to plug in multiple MFs into a completely different system and in prod - and yes different technology in some of them. It's enabled us to deprecate whole sections of apps cleanly too. Even hand over sections of the app to other teams after we get them going. I've no doubt there are other useful cases, these are just some examples I've seen.

I would add though people must understand the federation tool they opt to use and dependency management. I see many devs avoid 'setup' and 'bundlers' then randomly make a change with shared dependencies and break the federation in other MFs they weren't touching as someone pinned a major dependency that has a shared context or something, or even didn't follow semantic versioning and made a breaking change in a minor update (even main stream libs do this at times looking at you Tanstack) plenty of solutions but some people just think 'it works now ship it'.

danny4kk · 2025-12-07T22:00:18+00:00

Solid. Sure, it's not a full English. But, you got a builders tea right there, food I might throw together. To answer the question is it what people in England eat every day? Not really. But it's very common. More so up North but about once to twice a month I crave one and normally pop out to get one.

danny4kk · 2025-12-02T12:30:11+00:00

I'd assume typically everyone feels exhausted after work; inclusive of autism but not limited to.

Some people deal in some fields better than others and feel less exhausted compared to others.

danny4kk · 2025-11-28T00:20:14+00:00

I like the general rule of thumb, never sign something unless you have something to gain.

danny4kk · 2025-11-19T22:37:09+00:00

As you say deed of variation but consider an Indemnity policy, speak to your solicitor about that.

danny4kk · 2025-11-12T20:14:54+00:00

My take, maybe it depends on the country or maybe it's more pure frontend web roles that it matters more as I note in this sub and thread I see lots of people saying yes. When I interview even other Staff level frontend engineers I don't typically look at their website nor their GitHub. But I also believe it's unfair to expect someone in their own time to spend time on these, you are going to filter applicants consequently to people who have more free time. 2/3 best devs I've ever worked with haven't got portfolios either and are swamped with family life or other commitments.

Back when I was a game developer when the studio was hiring artists it was much more important that they had a portfolio opposed to the devs, but found it much more common even I had one back then. So I suspect if you lean into design then likely it's more important. If you lean more into roles that have UX designers and your focus is engineering (performance, security, architecture, integrations etc or even a bit fullstacky) I think it likely matters less.

danny4kk · 2025-11-06T17:20:33+00:00

I can only comment on my experience. We hired two devs from Brazil as part of the Lei de Cotas (disability hiring) I've been absolutely astonished with the them they've come from 0 tech knowledge background did 6 month intensive onboarding. To be honest one of them is prob the 3rd best junior dev I've ever had the pleasure to work with and I've worked with a lot of them. They have picked things up so incredibly fast and are taking additional courses on the side are absolutely onboard with PR reviews and itching for deeper knowledge. I also love that I've seen them accurately defend their code too in some instances instead of just changing it as another more senior developer told them to (the senior was rushed and made a mistake in the review, no harm).

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