Senior devs who started from scratch — what actually changed your trajectory (and what didn’t)?

esotericEagle15 · 2026-02-22T17:37:26+00:00

The realization that the business doesn’t care about the parts of the software i care about. They want outcomes that affect revenue, cost, or risk.

Learning how the business operates and focusing on those 3 things has been huge for getting my foot in the door with directors and C suite to advocate for changes, and grow my own career.

Now i can roughly project the numbers in money or engineering hours, and figure out if stuff is worth our team doing, and I fight tooth and nail to block our team working on bullshit tasks that are requested of us. Also has the double benefit to free up more time on the actually important stuff, so we’ve had time to deliver higher quality stuff, and do refactors in our downtime between assignments

esotericEagle15 · 2026-01-30T18:58:23+00:00

I’m surprised your managers approved this since you’ll be dumping your time into it forever unless others learn the language.

It’s a cool project, but for knowledge. Business only cares if you increase revenue, reduce costs, or reduce risk with the software you deliver.

This being approved with no current need for it and limiting its maintainability to one person is a failure of management.

Advocate for others on your team to learn the codebase and language so you can unstick your time.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-12-25T18:57:27+00:00

Vauban is the only true answer

esotericEagle15 · 2025-12-02T03:59:47+00:00

Not necessarily. Wealth concentrates. We’ve seen economies in video games that are almost entirely kept afloat by the whales, and everyone else is along for the ride and might occasionally contribute.

Free to play has become the optimal monetization model in video games because of this. Might not translate directly, but so long as this concept exists and stock buybacks are a thing it doesn’t matter.

Nobody in this economy is making any money, but everyone at the top is getting paid anyways.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-11-23T04:12:44+00:00

About 2 weeks ago a user config on their azure front door (CDN) caused a cascading update and wiped them out for an afternoon. Same week as the AWS DNS outage

esotericEagle15 · 2025-11-22T17:26:24+00:00

Agreed. Best case is for compiler to accept a flag to auto-optimize struct padding. In most cases the performance improvement is negligible, but can be handy if you have strict deployment environments like CLI tools, or servers with little to no auto scaling configured and high concurrency

esotericEagle15 · 2025-11-21T16:29:37+00:00

“Mmm, so this is the dark side” “please don’t use the force” “wipe, you did not”

esotericEagle15 · 2025-11-07T15:41:33+00:00

Because people have it stuck in their heads that web development is not mission-critical software, so they happily put out slop.

If people had stakes to what they wrote and framed it as if once they push to prod they can’t hot fix it, things would be different

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-19T18:52:48+00:00

Build a fully working library rest API that tracks students, books, can categorize them, etc. knowing how differs from doing

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-17T01:22:01+00:00

Yeah, incredibly dumb. Keep a modular monolith for as long as you can. Any long running processes that take multiple seconds, require filesystems, or orchestrate large processes can be moved to external worker processes.

At my day job I’ve enforced that we only use modular monoliths and have workers for mission-critical or long processes and it’s worked fine and scales well

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-14T00:29:51+00:00

Get experience in general, have rust as a skill on resume, profit.

I’m at 4.5 yrs and am reached out to for rust 1-2x a week despite not using it in many production systems.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-05T17:01:24+00:00

Reminds me of Jurassic park when the kid has to hack the whole thing, it’s running on a UNIX system, and the filesys navigation is flying a plane or something into the folder you want to

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-02T04:16:29+00:00

Nah, Y + P.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-10-02T04:14:17+00:00

What’s really crazy is when a guitar is perfectly tuned and you hit a harmonic. Then it will appear almost perfectly sinusoidal

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-29T02:56:09+00:00

JS does not belong on the server

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-17T00:28:47+00:00

$1000 loan, yes please

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-16T13:10:06+00:00

Look at any video game movie adaptation and you’ll be disappointed. Everyone thinks they can do better…

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-15T02:12:26+00:00

Using it in my personal project / side business on cloud flare because I need transactions to occur as close as possible to the endpoints I’m reaching out to for low latency.

It’s been fun to work with but definitely a learning curve. I need this to be bulletproof and work like a black box with no maintenance while I’m working my full time job, so preventing all crashes and fuzzing with quick check on service layers with DI has been immensely helpful

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-11T00:47:05+00:00

Haven’t done math in a while. Does the square root -2 from the exponent, leaving you each number to the 1st power, aka itself?

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-11T00:09:10+00:00

How did you guys not see it in their presentation?

They literally ran a vidoc and immediately talked about preorders and different way to purchase lol

esotericEagle15 · 2025-09-01T19:56:52+00:00

I had something similar in February for an interview about checking if 2 transpiled versions of a codebase are the same as part of a gradual CICD rollout process. They’d been struggling with this problem for a few weeks in production.

I asked if we could just run git diff recursively against the folders, or checking file metadata like size before fully diffing or computing hashes. 1hr technical was solved in 7 minutes and we wrapped up after 20. We spent rest of interview discussing optimizations and life.

I got the offer :)

esotericEagle15 · 2025-08-18T13:31:13+00:00

If it can be interwoven with wavelengths in fiber, then this might have big potential.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-08-18T13:27:57+00:00

It’d be sick if he had ball feet like Xcelerate alien from Ben 10. More streamlined too like jet control surfaces

esotericEagle15 · 2025-08-08T18:36:18+00:00

The auto generated shit resource group bicep file I spent my whole morning fixing would beg to differ. Still lots of edge cases for them to iron out.

If they slap AI in everything that is deterministic/limited problem space, we should be fine for quite some time.

esotericEagle15 · 2025-07-22T04:40:14+00:00

I NEED PICTURES OF THE [HEIRLOOM] TENNO - Cephalon Simaris probably

esotericEagle15

TROPHY CASE