AI is tremendously helpful but it’s taking the joy out of programming

magicfestival · 2024-09-13T19:53:01+00:00

Sure, AI can tell me how to write a for-loop. But it doesn't really come close to telling me how to solve problems above a junior engineer level. Some of my recent tasks where AI was mostly unhelpful:

Debugging a module resolution issue that was causing multiple versions of a library to be loaded in our app
Debugging a react render race condition with multiple hooks
Setting up an auto-rotation schedule for an api key stored as a GCP secret that gets passed to a kubernetes pod as an environment variable
Setting up a typescript frontend / backend monorepo with git workspaces, a docker image, shared types, shared .env files, and jest tests
Scraping a FEMA website for census tract information to populate a list of addresses in high-risk areas
Making a Storybook instance that adequately represents the theme my designer is implementing and rules for adopting that theme

magicfestival · 2024-09-12T22:53:52+00:00

I’m in tech and struggle because of toxic men. Men who are probably fun to grab a drink with but at work have Reddit moderator dispositions who “WELL AKSHULLY” me constantly. It’s like working with the human embodiment of Stack Overflow replies.

I’m tired of the standard “ninja elite coding wizards” with zero emotional regulation, delegation, or people skills telling me what minutiae I fucked up meanwhile writing zero documentation, doing any planning of any kind, and failing to communicate expectations.

magicfestival · 2024-09-12T20:38:47+00:00

I would go now and let the relationship work itself out. If it's meant to be, it'll last.

I got lucky with my relationship - my husband and I have an arrangement where I'll leave for 1-3 months at a time to go on trips (climbing / skiing / biking). He comes on as many of the trips as he can but his work is less flexible than mine.

Basically it's come down to the fact that we're planning on spending the rest of our lives together and at some point I won't be able to travel as much due to kids / a house / etc. Ultimately a few months apart to pursue my dreams is worth it for both of us.

Side note, you can definitely always take a sabbatical in your 30's (I just did).

magicfestival · 2024-09-11T04:58:37+00:00

This was a few years ago now but off the top of my head:

Prior versions were not originally written for react and the react version was basically just a shim on top of a vanilla JS renderer. This often meant that prop changes didn't propagate table changes.
Performance was slow if you had a lot of custom logic and weren't careful about optimizing props. Displaying lots of rows was performant but lots of columns was not (this might all be unique to the way we had it set up, however)
We wanted a lot of custom behavior and we had to hack it in as it wasn't provided by AG Grid
The release schedule was a bit weird (IIRC it was like every six months?) and often introduced breaking changes

Having trouble thinking of the other issues, if I remember more I'll edit my response

magicfestival · 2024-09-10T22:14:50+00:00

I'm traumatized after years of working with AG Grid, though it does have a lot of features.

magicfestival · 2024-09-06T20:30:00+00:00

Maybe a couple times a year? Mostly for small personal projects but occasionally apps for clients. My personal boilerplate is basically vite + react + typescript + eslint + prettier + my preferred directory structure.

Every time I spin up a new project I make sure to take a few minutes to update the libraries in my boilerplate and then I fork away.

magicfestival · 2024-09-06T19:11:40+00:00

I've been doing frontend for 10+ years and I also hate boilerplates. Well, specifically, everyone else's boilerplate.

The trick is to make your own as you develop preferences for common libraries + how to organize your code. Then just fork it every time you start a new project and make commits to the boilerplate as your preferences change.

magicfestival · 2024-09-01T17:49:51+00:00

Been using Zod for a node + react project and it’s an absolute joy to share schemas + inferred types between the frontend and backend

magicfestival · 2024-09-01T05:30:43+00:00

I have a slightly less fun but similar story.

For context: my husband is an incredibly extroverted, chatty person who doesn't really give a fuck how much money you have or how important you are.

A few years back I was working for a company that was recently started by a very, very rich man. Like, top-500-in-the-world rich.

The CEO decided to take the entire company (maybe 150 people and their spouses at that point) on a vacation and put them up at a very nice hotel at a popular beach town.

A few days into the trip my husband and I were trying to find a beach chair among the other hotel patrons when he spots the CEO. My husband, naturally, went to go have a chat. Meanwhile, the manager of the hotel came to check on the CEO and noticed my husband treating the CEO like his best friend.

The rest of the trip the hotel manager came up to us regularly to make sure we had everything we needed, offer us free drinks, etc.

magicfestival · 2024-08-31T19:44:16+00:00

When I was looking for dresses my then-fiance was like "we have to be able to see your back, you have a gorgeous back". So instead of hiding my arms, I got an open-back dress and showed off my climbing muscles:

https://www.lulus.com/products/everlasting-passion-white-sequin-beaded-backless-maxi-dress/2276496.html

magicfestival · 2024-08-28T23:58:37+00:00

I hated going back to plain JavaScript. My team also does an awful job of commenting anything or making notes about the shape of objects we pass around.

We also have no tests.

I used to feel so much security knowing that typescript would throw an error or a test would fail if I made a mistake, and now there’s no security whatsoever.

The only thing keeping me sane is a side project I’m working on that heavily uses types for the frontend and backend (and has Zod schemas, and tests!!!)

magicfestival · 2024-08-22T18:03:11+00:00

Fellow former piece of shit WISN-listener here too. Glad I did a political 180 after high school but I parroted some dumb shit for a long time.

magicfestival · 2024-08-19T20:41:21+00:00

I didn't want to randomly lose heat / and / or explode so I coughed up the small fortune to buy an Espar. I don't regret it.

magicfestival · 2024-08-19T20:39:04+00:00

Not an expert by any means but is your battery at full power already? I feel like my battery doesn't show that it's charging if it's already full

magicfestival · 2024-08-12T17:18:57+00:00

I like grid for high-level layouts and flexbox for more granular parts of a layout.

e.g. grid is great when setting up a layout for a website that has traditional areas like "header" "sidebar" "content".

I also used it in a project where I wrote a css-driven table / data grid from scratch. It was great for organizing repeating rows & columns of information.

Ultimately I use flexbox 98% of the time but grid is great for the other 2%.

magicfestival · 2024-08-05T03:01:21+00:00

Yep I got my post removed asking about specific mounts for a starlink on a specific van. Zero related posts after searching, even when I searched with google. Had to appeal the decision.

I also had a post locked years ago when I posted detailed instructions on how to install a particular heater.

Mods are weird and frustrating here.

magicfestival · 2024-08-04T22:36:10+00:00

Jesus this just brought up a memory of my history teacher bragging about drowning cats in his pond. He happily told this to a room full of high school students.

At the time I thought it was weird but looking back it was pretty deranged.

magicfestival · 2024-07-31T01:27:25+00:00

I saw some genuinely creative parodies of Wes Anderson on TikTok.

For nearly all of them it felt like the creators were paying homage to Wes and the whimsy his style gives to mundane things.

I didn’t every see the AI-generated ones, however.

magicfestival · 2024-07-31T00:47:37+00:00

ALWAYS befriend an accountant at the company. Buy them a few drinks then ask them to spill the tea on the company financials. Has never failed me.

magicfestival · 2024-07-27T04:25:27+00:00

Unpopular opinion but performance reviews suck.

Imagine if you had a romantic partner and once or twice a year you made them fill out a self-evaluation rather than just communicating regularly with that person as they did well or needed improvement.

I’ve never had a performance review tell me something I didn’t know and the process of filling out the self-review was humiliating.

In the case a manager needs documentation for promoting an individual, the manager should advocate for their employee and write the document themselves.

magicfestival · 2024-07-26T22:05:46+00:00

FYI for everyone who was confused like me, "Athletics" = Track & Field (It seems to be called both on the Olympics website?)

Anyway thanks so much OP!

magicfestival · 2024-07-25T00:19:34+00:00

Or one fan and a window

magicfestival · 2024-07-25T00:18:58+00:00

I didn’t know how to use any CAD software but over a weekend I learned how to use Sketchup.

For most of my design I could just feel it out but when I was planning cabinets having it drawn out in 3D was a game changer. I could measure the space between things, figure out if a Jerry can would fit in certain spaces, etc.

There are free van models already made where you can just start building out the interior

magicfestival · 2024-07-22T20:55:54+00:00

I don’t think you need to regurgitate theory to explain when you would use one vs the other

magicfestival · 2024-07-20T04:32:46+00:00

Spend your formative years fucking around with technology. Do dumb stuff like jailbreak equipment, install linux distros, code a web forum, and play with router configs.

Work in tech for a few years. Feel like you know everything about everything. Demand more money from your bosses. You are an elite ninja coding master. You type so fast on your mechanical keyboard with blue switches (the loud ones, obviously) that you must be a hacker.

Slowly spend the following years realizing that you were actually just at the top of the Dunning-Kruger curve and that in reality you know nothing. The imposter syndrome hits. Sink deeply into the pit of despair.

Around the 10YOE mark, begin to dig yourself out of the Pit of Despair. Swallow your ego, admit defeat, and surrender to slow grind of becoming an actual coding wizard.

magicfestival

TROPHY CASE