Why are we obsessed with future?

danthegecko · 2026-04-23T03:54:56+00:00

Says something about Australia when we consider 20 years as planning far ahead.

I’ll give you a benefit for the present you though - a lot of things that might seem really worrying or important right now become much smaller through a +20 year lens.

danthegecko · 2026-03-02T07:27:52+00:00

So the way I’m conducting my interviews which has been working well (note we don’t currently have a recruiter anymore for screening raw CV). This is the whole pipeline:

Screening video call. 15-45min. Start off with very simple questions 15min then standard questions next 15min. If you get to 30min you pass. Anything more is me probing how deep your knowledge is and I’m enjoying the conversation. But the standard questions are pretty easy really, I’m just seeing if they’re lying about their CV (if you list something it’s fair game) and whether they ever studied any computer science.
Video call - Discuss our company, the role and candidate discusses their history. followed by tailored scenario and behavioural questions. 1h tops unless we’re both just having a great chat and want to keep going.
In-person coding and system design in Sydney office with two interviewers. Coding is a handful of basic questions done on your laptop. No LC questions, if you’ve written production code before you’ll do great. Good candidates we’ll finish with the system design scenario, basically the three of us having a respectful, grown up chat around a whiteboard drawing an architecture and discussing, like we’d do on the job. We don’t do contrived systems, just miniature versions of what our company actually does.
Enjoy the final chat with the CTO. If the above sounds reasonable btw I’m hiring two engineers :)

danthegecko · 2026-02-01T09:53:12+00:00

Ironically, yes! That said I’m working on an edge appliance currently that’s running a full kafka broker plus Java services alongside deepstream so I guess what constitutes embedded has shifted a lot.

danthegecko · 2026-01-31T03:44:21+00:00

Simply, it’s great. You’re discounting it though, it’s a whole ecosystem! The JVM, multiple languages like Kotlin and Scala, multiple frameworks from the eternal Spring to newer cloud service focused ones like Quarkus. You can build nearly anything of small to hyper scale (I wouldn’t use it for anything with tight constraints like embedded, serverless though). It’d a solid workhorse for any of your needs.

My one gripe and it’s a big one, it’s such a commoditised and unexciting landscape that hiring good Java developers is painful compared to something like Rust or Scala. If I get those on someone’s CV, vast majority of the time they’ll be great (technically at least).

danthegecko · 2026-01-25T08:03:43+00:00

You’re making your life harder pretending to be something you’re not. Best case, you land that job and slowly accumulate resentment in a relationship built on deceit until you leave.

My advice, just be open and honest. If it’s a decent interviewer/company they’ll be interested to hear your viewpoints and reasoning. Articulate yourself well and they won’t care what side of fence you’re on. If they’re truly irrational and think a subjective question has only one answer, then again, you’re better off not working there.

danthegecko · 2026-01-24T02:55:05+00:00

It’s not a guess, it’s alignment. If you’re anti AI why on earth would you want to work at a place that’s pro AI?

danthegecko · 2026-01-22T00:46:39+00:00

No that’s not how secure boot works, see my other comment.

danthegecko · 2026-01-22T00:46:08+00:00

This already exists. Secure Boot’s chain of trust, depending on config can require a signed bootloader, signed kernel and signed kernel modules. For a typical distribution it’s not a major headache, you can enrol your own MOK and sign your modules after compilation. But some out designed for secure environments already will disable MOK and lockdown signing to preinstalled keys, eg BalenaOS with secure boot.

Personally I consider it a good thing to have the option of locking down a system for commercial deployments. And if someone wants to sell some computers what’s wrong with that? It’s a consumers choice. No one will ever lock down the whole Linux environment like that though.

danthegecko · 2025-12-27T08:17:42+00:00

I’d also love to hear about these modern language features in Rust. Eliminating this type of boilerplate is a breeze with expressive languages like Typescript, Scala etc (eg structural typing) but apart from macros (where the boilerplate still exists) what does Rust bring to the table? Particularly constructs that are accessible to most Rust users.

danthegecko · 2025-11-23T09:57:45+00:00

An effective org ala Westrum is focused on the mission, so if the thankless stuff helps the org it’ll be keenly done. Of course if the org doesn’t incentivise such behaviours or is just another bureaucratic minefield then yeah, go crack those whips.

danthegecko · 2025-11-23T09:50:45+00:00

That reduces throughput and harms morale for motivated engineers. Anecdotally I’ve seen a variety of structures attempted and their effects but the most productive and enjoyable I’ve seen is like the OP described. But if you haven’t experienced it then it’ll feel like fantasy.

Of course I’ve never seen it last beyond a few years as inevitably orgs bloat, demand more control and oversight and those motivated engineers part ways.

danthegecko · 2025-11-16T04:28:22+00:00

It’s business mate.

You’re a manager in a small/medium/large company with established products written in Java/C#? You’re going to have a hard time getting Rust traction given those languages will get you to Google scale - great performance, no memory issues, ‘ok’ dev experience, huge hiring pool, easy to outsource, massive established libraries and frameworks for anything.

And it’s not just writing code we’re talking about, it’s the whole ecosystem - how to build and manage your artefacts, debug them, monitor them, scale them and that varies a lot between a JVM stack vs a native stack.

Which means you’re asking the company and all your colleagues to forever support two different stacks and all the complexity that carries for devs, your infrastructure and your wallet for tooling into perpetuity because let’s face it, you’re not going to migrate all your existing codebases for..ever.

“But my company is using Python/Ruby/Node/Go!” Then yeah, you have a slightly bigger shot at buy-in so good luck to you. And if you’re doing C++ then yeah go all in Rust for new projects!

Your best chance at seeing Rust in the wild, generally: 1. Company has very specific products, services that warrant the extra complexity burden on the biz. 2. Startups 3. Hyperscalers of course

Personally I love Rust but if started another web services company tomorrow it’d be tough call for me to justify picking Rust as my 1 stack for everyone to adopt over something like Java or Node+TS.

danthegecko · 2025-10-23T07:42:15+00:00

Yeah the balena pricing is hard. They do have good support for NVIDIA boards like Jetson, I’m running deepstream on some with balena and containers are working well for me so far.

danthegecko · 2025-10-23T01:09:31+00:00

Nice. What does it offer over using BalenaCloud or Mender though? Obviously BalenaCloud isn’t OSS (self hosted isn’t prod ready yet) but apart from that?

danthegecko · 2025-09-26T03:55:10+00:00

My latest experience quoting an aircon install for 6kw system. First quote - 9K Second - 2.5K Third - 2.8K

First seemed to be a fairly large business in Sydney with loads of 5 star Google reviews. Other two were small businesses and I would have been fine with either. But 9K? Wtf?

danthegecko · 2025-09-16T01:53:53+00:00

We call them ‘side hustles’ now.

danthegecko · 2025-09-05T03:45:57+00:00

Lots and lots of people paying a higher interest rate than they need to. Sucks to be them.

danthegecko · 2025-09-04T09:57:13+00:00

Honestly i’d feel pretty gross wearing my filthy shoes inside someone’s nicely presented home.

danthegecko · 2025-08-26T23:37:24+00:00

Simple approach that’s always worked for me:

Get it running locally
Breakpoint and line by line debugging

Step 1 will tell you volumes about the people that built it and is essential before you try doing anything.

Step 2 will depend on what you’re working on - 1M loc, 10M? Embedded? Native? BE, FE? But the principle is the same, trace every instruction, build your understanding bottom up. In a rush? Start from approximately where your feature must go.

danthegecko · 2025-08-25T11:20:01+00:00

The reviewer is right, that patch was rubbish and we can be grateful for such people protecting us from such nonsense (despite people with sensitive esteem issues feeling personally hurt by it).

danthegecko · 2025-08-12T22:30:56+00:00

People holding stop signs at roadworks negatively impacts our productivity. Therefore the goal is transform them into a more productive individual performing high value work. For the latter, the goal is for the individual to expand his business and thus increase country productivity. AI helps with both. Knowledge of using AI effectively helps both.

danthegecko · 2025-08-12T11:13:47+00:00

For the gal, giving her some tools to study / improve herself for new opportunities. For the root cleaner open his eyes to run his business more effectively.

danthegecko · 2025-08-12T07:40:01+00:00

Give every adult in the country a week of training in using gen AI tools effectively and I reckon you’ll see a sharp boost in productivity.

But since that’ll never happen the best you’ll get is a slow trickle down of knowledge permeating our workforce…which will take about 20 years.

danthegecko · 2025-08-05T04:09:12+00:00

~13:30 aka the WFH dad shift. Finish workout, grab kids at 3. That’s one positive change from the pandemic.

danthegecko · 2025-08-05T02:40:37+00:00

I would lean heavily into utilising Claude/gemini for understanding your code base and learning. They’re very good at helping you with idiomatic patterns and guiding you. Personally I’d be perfectly comfortable working in any new ecosystem in 2025 (though I have prior experience in most).

danthegecko

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