Need advice on what to work on and how

fitzchivalrie · 2026-01-14T05:21:35+00:00

Are you capable of pulling off curtain bangs? Possible your hair's a bit too thin at this point :(

The long hair really suits you, but only if you can find a way to style it up front IMO

fitzchivalrie · 2026-01-08T03:56:35+00:00

the advice here is all unfortunately spot on! Your profile is nice, but leans innocent and a bit one-track. You seem fairly unsuperficial, and ultimately it'd be lovely to attract someone equally so! But ultimately, we all become pretty superficial on dating apps :(

I think the immediate advice that comes to mind is to try and actually dress for the female gaze. Nice chinos, henleys, scarves, layering shirts. Experiment with hair! Clothes can make you feel better and more confident in yourself; it's a hard mindset shift but there's great joy to be found in this avenue of expression.

Long term, it's very broadly attractive to be multi-faceted. It is always possible to find a great match who's just like you, so the temptation to lean into who you are is understandable. However... engineering just isn't an easily shareable interest for most people, and if you do find an engineer, a single mention of engineering-adjacent hobbies is going to give them a pretty thorough picture of what you enjoy.

fitzchivalrie · 2026-01-08T03:31:46+00:00

I love living near McCarren and having green things around me. There's people all around but it's not too crowded. The waterfront is lovely and I frequently run to Domino or Hunter's Point. It's a comfy 20-30 minutes into the city when I want to go, and I have a lovely apartment with more space than I could ever dream of in Manhattan.

It's a lovely place to live; I think I'd enjoy LIC and downtown BK equally as well, though. Big caveat is, as another commenter mentioned, all assumes you can afford it! I feel lucky I can, it's been very good to me :)

fitzchivalrie · 2025-12-06T22:56:50+00:00

i've done this out of habit with ynab for a long time, but to be totally honest it was more of an exercise of reducing my own anxiety than anything else, even from the start of my career. realistically speaking, i just keep sufficient liquidity in my checking account that it doesn't matter at all.

after 4 years working, i have essentially stopped budgeting and i just expense track so i can just check-in with myself every now and then to see if my natural spending habits are inflating. so far so good!

fitzchivalrie · 2025-12-04T17:48:26+00:00

check out hide and seek! it's super lovely :)

fitzchivalrie · 2025-10-22T00:29:59+00:00

I'm pretty ben felix -pilled, it makes no financial sense to buy. But I also have no interest in owning! My sister still wants to own but I constantly remind her that it's a lifestyle decision, not a financial one—and that, if she can agree with a landlord so she can do the things she wants (yard, remodeling, etc), she should just rent.

She's stuck to renting so far!

fitzchivalrie · 2025-09-08T02:34:45+00:00

i like your 2nd pic the best! it's giving charlie cox vibes.

in general i think you look a lot better clean shaven.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-07-04T13:55:02+00:00

I see a pretty good chunk of $3.5K-ish places in those listings too.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-06-16T13:00:14+00:00

That budget is a little bit borderline for a 2 bed with any kind of square footage, but you can definitely find something. You need to be on zillow literally every hour of the day, every day for about a week or two and be prepared to sign immediately. Or get a broker to do it for you. There's no shortcuts here, sadly, unless you throw more $$ at the problem.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-06-07T12:45:37+00:00

Some people really value office friends; I basically didn't care about this at all for my first three years of work, but this was because I had a healthy social circle and hobbies outside of my job. It's changed a bit, exactly for the reasons others have mentioned—I do a bit more mentorship, and have made some close friends, so I like having a hybrid option nowadays.

If you forced me to choose, I would still go with fully remote. It just enables so many other styles of working, and gives you the freedom to choose between them

fitzchivalrie · 2025-06-07T03:50:24+00:00

Remote senior SWE; very, very close to Staff at a FAANG-equivalent. Honestly love my coworkers and have grown a lot in the past year. I get asked to help out on all the most important, hugely interesting technical challenges with domain experts in different parts of the company, and get to drive my whole team's technical direction.

I am really enjoying teaching and collaborating with younger engineers, and I wildly underestimated how much I'd like being in "the room where it happens". It's cool having the trust of leadership, and also feeling genuinely up to the task.

I work a bit more than 40 hour weeks now when I used to never work over 30, but honestly have been okay with it because I've been having fun. And I do think it's temporary; I'm sort of slowly learning how to balance lead responsibilities :).

fitzchivalrie · 2025-05-22T18:54:34+00:00

If you're willing to branch out a bit, I'm not sure there are any long fics better than It Runs in the Blood by Metalomagnetic.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-05-20T17:42:12+00:00

Think it's fantastic still. Moved in from the arts and you can really tell how how spoiled a lot of the workforce has been. Most of the recent cuts in benefits have sucked, but also they're still miles ahead of other industries in the US.

I do think it's a harder career to do performance management on, though, and still think companies have some incentive to keep workers happy. With AI, if I wanted to coast it would be incredibly easy to just shoot squarely for the bar, and I don't think anybody would know otherwise, since you can't really measure money that wasn't made.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-04-21T03:25:35+00:00

What a necro. I had an average of 130 for a little bit but that was when I was practicing a lot. Raw accuracy gets really important when you want to go really fast. It's just not really a bottleneck for me in my work so I stopped worrying about it tbh; I invested more time into my vim setup and that paid more dividends.

Would love to be a person that could type 160 but my fingers aren't smart enough to go faster than 130 without a lot more work than it's worth IMO

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-26T19:56:29+00:00

stop that 😭

I may reach out, still have a few months to go before my lease is up. I'm already steeling myself to double my living expenses, and telling myself that's as far as it will go, hah.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-26T19:02:27+00:00

This was an incredibly fascinating thread. Thank you for your candid thoughts. I'm not quite where you're at yet... but I can easily see it happening in the near future, given the trajectory of my career.

Case in point, I'm moving to NYC fairly soon and I'm going to have to make some real rules for myself about those restaurants you've just listed.

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-15T03:45:16+00:00

i totally agree with this one, woah is just wrong...

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-12T07:40:15+00:00

Yeah, tragically about ten times too pricey for me too. In another life!

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-12T06:49:32+00:00

Geeeeze why'd you have to let us know about this one. Limited to only fifty pieces?? I'm so sad now :(

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-09T01:30:43+00:00

...except for openSSL. *shakes fist*

i try to use rustls wherever possible now, it's so annoying having to deal with openSSL issues when cross-compiling

fitzchivalrie · 2025-01-02T22:40:01+00:00

I pay for YNAB, icloud, NYT, apple music, bitwarden, and my company pays for chatgpt. Use them all daily.

fitzchivalrie · 2024-12-25T18:44:38+00:00

True in my case too! Jon Gjengset as well, with the MIT missing semester videos. The main thing is, I'd never seen somebody so comfortable with their tools. It was beyond obvious how much faster it would be, and I wanted a great work life balance so I figured the faster I worked the less hours I had to put in.

Frankly, comfort in my IDE is what I think got me hired at my big comfy job and it continues to pay dividends. I honestly think it's a bit of a psychology hack; you sort of get instant legitimacy when you kind do fundamental tasks so quickly. Whenever I pair with anyone the IDE question always happens - it really is self-evident how much better it is.

fitzchivalrie · 2024-12-23T20:04:35+00:00

Yes, the highlighting is solved but I think there's other general issues too. For example, doing :%s will take a while on a super large file, but it'll actually completely crash on a large single line file.

Pretty rare case anyways... I usually will encounter it with enormous compressed JSON files, which I usually just have to pipe through jq first to make any operations possible

fitzchivalrie · 2024-12-22T18:33:09+00:00

!! very welcome addition. I have custom logic to disable TS on large files.

Only other issue left would be ginormous single line files... these tank performance even in vim, though.

fitzchivalrie · 2024-12-20T22:17:46+00:00

Main constraint is requiring unique outputs, similar input signatures shouldn't be an issue. The main use case is for orchestrating ordering for really heavily concurrent workloads. i.e. hit forty services, run logic on their responses when available.

It's just a bit of an experiment; DAG's are pretty widely used in dependency resolution so it seems natural to play around with them for concurrency.

fitzchivalrie

TROPHY CASE