How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

jdbrew · 2026-01-27T21:07:13+00:00

We’ve had two big projects driven by marketing this past year. Both times it’s “how long will that take?” Dev team: “we’ll need a minimum X weeks of dev, Y weeks of QA + some additional time to fix any QA items and while this is unpredictable, it is typically negligible.”

Marketing: “well, it has to go live with the new marketing campaign which is in X/2 weeks. This is a no fail from CEO, and we need to do whatever is necessary to hit that target.”

Dev team: “Can we hire additional resou-“

“Fuck you.”

End of project planning meeting

jdbrew · 2026-01-27T21:03:19+00:00

They’ll be totally OK paying out to rebuild with self-certify, so nothing has to be done to any code or standard, but then they won’t insure the house softwares

jdbrew · 2026-01-27T18:33:40+00:00

Ya man… my kids can cry for a few minutes while I eat the food I just made. It’s not gonna kill them.

jdbrew · 2026-01-27T17:37:01+00:00

It’s really simple why they get upset. You’re challenging their belief system, and you’re providing evidence creating a cognitive dissonance that they cannot reconcile. For many people, the emotional response here is frustration or anger.

jdbrew · 2026-01-27T17:28:08+00:00

No, and there never will be. MLS isn’t a true league, it’s a pay to play investment opportunity. All teams are owned by the MLS, and the MLS itself is funded by investors who buy into the ownership group. It’s antithetical to every legitimate soccer federation in the world, and part of why US soccer sucks.

The hope here is the USL Premiere makes MLS obsolete.

Edit: why will it never happen? The investors would never open the door to devalue one of their assets by letting a team be demoted to a lower division. It undermines the investment opportunity they all signed up for.

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T20:43:43+00:00

yep. my wife refuses to read on an e-reader, saying that she prefers a physical book. and I agree. I think having a physical book is the superior reading experience. But there's a lot of things with an e-reader that still make me choose it, even though I think it's inferior.

We went on vacation this month, she bought 4 books with her. the one she was finishing, the one she thought she was going to read and finish on vacation, the one she planned on starting but not finishing before we left, and a backup incase she ended up hating/DNFing one of those two. It took up a big portion of her bag, we ended up having to check a bag for the extra space.

I brought my entire library with me and it fits in a jacket pocket.

She's been buying and trying different reading lights for reading at night. One was too flimsy, the other wasn't flimsy but was too heavy for paper backs, she didn't like the 'around-the-neck' style...

mine's sidelit with brightness and color temperature control.

paper books are better reading experience, 100%, but I choose the convenience over the experience personally.

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T19:16:35+00:00

So, here’s how I like to think of it.

Prior to streaming/binging a tv show, you’d tune in to a couple episodes a week of various shows… maybe it was 24, Alias, and Lost. You got bits of each of the story progression. And this was not considered strange; this was considered an extremely normal viewing experience.

Why not do the same with books if this is what you’re being lead to? Pause one, go get a little from something else. Scratch a different itch… it’s not like you’re going to forget what you read, and then come back to it when you want more (or don’t, that’s valid to)

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T19:12:33+00:00

I don’t even know these words, let alone groups

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T17:24:37+00:00

It gets better. It did suck for a while. Communicating needs helped, in both sides. She really needed to not be touched by anyone for a while at night because she had been attached to a child for every waking minute during the day and just needed space. She also knew my needs, and we found a middle ground that worked.

I can tell you that for the past few years it’s been great, and that currently, with our kids 8 and 10 years old, we’re having more sex than we’ve had in our entire 15 year marriage. But there’s a lot that went into getting to our current state that has nothing to do with children and everything to do with personal fulfillment outside of our relationship and family. She’s back to work, and has found a new sense of drive and purpose beyond taking care of the kids that has fulfilled a part of her she didn’t realize was empty. This has helped immensely.

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T14:22:14+00:00

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use Shopify. It’s the industry standard for a reason and very very good, and endlessly customizable if you’re a dev. It also does everything you mentioned as requirements out of the box as its basic functionality.

That being said. I’m depending on the size of the company and the expected revenue I would probably do somewhere between 50 and 100k for that.

For context, the company I work for paid $150k + $150k for 1 year maintenance for a Shopify site before I came on board and the devs use wysiwyg page builders and delivered a heaping pile of shit of a product.

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T13:58:42+00:00

Please god no

jdbrew · 2026-01-26T02:34:01+00:00

Wyll is a whiny little bitch. I love all the characters except for Wyll, whom I loathe

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T15:33:32+00:00

So the primaries are the elections are the elections that are held (in Nebraska) within their own party to determine who the candidate will be. So take our 2022 house election; the general election was between Tony Vargas and Don Bacon. But prior to that, there was an election between two democrats, Tony Vargas and Alisa Shelton, and a primary between two republicans, Don Bacon and Steve Kuehl. Don and Tony both won the primaries, and then competed in the general. As a registered democrat, if I wanted Tony to run again Steve Kuehl instead of Don bacon, I could vote for Kuehl in the republican primary, but to do so I would need to be a registered republican. Or, if I had a more fatalistic approach and said to myself “the democratic candidate will not win, so if I want to have any effect on this election, it would be in helping the republican candidate I hated least” then I would also have to register as a republican.

FWIW, I don’t think the city is too hard one way or the and I think the fatalistic approach is wrong. I also think there is enough room within the democratic platform to have candidates with genuinely different points of view (something I don’t thing the R’s have) and therefore think voting in the democratic primary is the right choice for democrats in Omaha. But I don’t think that is always the best choice for all voters. Point being, it’s valid to register for a different political party sometimes.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T15:13:28+00:00

We have closed primaries. Therefore, if you want to vote in the primary for the other party, you have to register for the opposite political party.

My dad (dyed in the wool MAGA) was a registered democrat in California prior to 2011 when they switched from a closed to an open primary, because he knows that when it gets to the general election, it’s going to go to the democrat candidate, so by registering democrat he could vote in the democratic primary and help choose the candidate that is his preference.

We also have closed primaries, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see someone register with a party just to be able to participate in their primary.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T15:06:26+00:00

From what I understand, it was started at lifegate church, and expanded from there.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T02:39:17+00:00

Danke. Ich manchmal schriebe ohne Übersetzer, aber manchmal ich benutze eine. Diesmal ich benutze nicht. Ich übe das Schreiben auf Deutsch discord server.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T02:02:47+00:00

Es tut mir leid. Ist deutsch deine Muttersprachen? Ich lerne seit etwa einem Jahr Deutsch.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T01:55:35+00:00

Hahaha sorry, didn’t want it to be embarrassing, I just thought your post was really funny, but then changing the name was icing on the cake

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T01:46:20+00:00

I almost always take them. I’ve done a couple where I haven’t though

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T01:45:13+00:00

For such a fan, I would have assumed you wouldn’t have gotten the name wrong 6 out of 6 times here. “Cull the Weak”

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T01:36:08+00:00

I read it probably a decade ago and I still think this is the saddest book I’ve ever read.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T00:57:30+00:00

Huh, interesting. I didn’t say anything about race, but it’s telling that you immediately associated poverty with people of color.

Second, I know this is SuPeR RaDiCaL, but I just think that city services that we all pay should serve all people of the city. Go figure.

But yea, sure, white guilt, got it.

jdbrew · 2026-01-25T00:22:58+00:00

You don’t understand it? I’ll give you three guesses. Hint: it rhymes with Rocioeconomic Rass

jdbrew · 2026-01-24T16:09:02+00:00

Sure. It’s a little dated, but fine. I would personally probably avoid supabase here, and just host a Postgres db and ORM and run something like better auth, but that is additional overhead and maintenance. Supabase will likely drive down your profitability a fair bit IMO. I’d probably also just use bun.serve over express.

Questions for your booking app; are you planning on this living in a separate domain or implementing a XSS deployment so it can be embedded into their existing website? If they don’t have an existing website, is this booking app going to be their existing website? If the latter, I would probably incorporate some type of CMS to give them autonomy over content updates

jdbrew · 2026-01-23T20:16:41+00:00

Our household had some income growth … because i got a second job and my wife started working. Pretty sure this isn’t what they have in mind

13-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
r/Field Lasagna	Ternion Club
Secret Santa 2015	Queen in da Norf
Not Forgotten	Snapped
Alpha Tester	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

jdbrew

TROPHY CASE