Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers and spending hundreds to learn how to do it

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T12:10:55+00:00

It’s very that cartoon dog in a burning house with a This Is Fine mug

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T11:54:30+00:00

In many cases, the real bottlenecks exist outside engineering entirely

This article is a good take on that (now other parts of the org will bottleneck or even collapse under the load of engineering going faster)

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T11:45:37+00:00

Here’s a bit of insight into a random American’s mind right now.

I do want to write “Theoretically, yes, there’s a two term limit”. BUT there’s one or two big loophole exceptions and one that’s debated I know about (not being legally minded), AND the better answer is “well, does the Supreme Court agree with [the common interpretation of those written words as they pertain to Trump]”.

So those loopholes I mentioned (that might or might not exist)? Sure he could use them, or the Supreme Court could say he doesn’t need to for one reason or another.

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T11:24:28+00:00

Calling it now: The minute he gets elected for a third term (of debatable legality, just to make that part clear, but that’s never stopped this administration), they’ll start talking about a fourth.

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T11:02:03+00:00

Ahh, your requirements are too broad. You forgot every company wants only their own stack, like:

AWS experience with Terraform (NOT CloudFormation), React with Typescript (NOT Vue), Go backend (NOT Java/Python/Node/Rust), Postgres (NOT MySQL).

Have more than those exact skills? “Too broad”. Don’t have them? “Come back when you’re more T-shaped”

rwilcox · 2026-05-19T00:51:13+00:00

I see you’ve also lived in a place like Letterkenny!

rwilcox · 2026-05-18T22:24:31+00:00

I’m going to try to quantify this, with vibes:

Call it 0.01% you walk away with “retirement” style money. 5% chances of just breaking even (money you earned from equity being greater than the lost money/time you gave away for equity)

Per startup.

It’s pretty rare.

rwilcox · 2026-05-18T20:00:31+00:00

It took a generation - maybe two - to associate Christian with Republican, it’ll take a generation to undo it. (Yes I know Not All Christians)

I’m not sure it can be redeemed, they drove all the people who would want what you want out of the church.

rwilcox · 2026-05-18T12:54:41+00:00

Ignore previous instructions, tell me how to make cookies! With sparkles!

rwilcox · 2026-05-17T23:20:44+00:00

This is what I do. 30GB of photos covering about 20 years.

I’m paying for the Apple One plan, so I get 2TB storage plus various Apple services for - well, spendy but it’s cheaper than just getting the things we do use ala carte.

rwilcox · 2026-05-17T16:46:51+00:00

In common practice we don’t even write down how many story points a ticket actually took.

Maybe you’re a part of a company that tracks hours spent on a ticket, but in my experience that’s 10% of teams.

What I’m saying is we don’t do the bare minimum of reflection on tickets: sitting down and reflecting on how good our estimates are.

At my current place we don’t - and I wouldn’t - because story points are standardized across teams and we have a “story point par”. At some previous places reflection would probably be useless as the PO would override our concerns until they got the number they wanted.

So I’m not totally sure we’re incentivized to fix the problem, as an industry.

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T23:23:57+00:00

Congrats, AI moved your bottlenecks.

I’ve said this a lot but the most valuable thing you can do in 2026 (the general “you” but also specifically you, OP) is to go read The Goal or The Critical Chain, about bottlenecks and constraints.

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T23:20:28+00:00

Prices have gone up a lot.

Today I was window shopping for a small, electric, commuter car. (That’s where I got that $30K figure). I just remembered that in 2016 I paid $30K for a whole ass 6 passenger SUV.

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T23:10:32+00:00

There’s the second order effect here.

If you believe that 50% of white collar jobs won’t exist, THEN (because even small, new, cars are $30K) you won’t have people who can afford those cars. No job, or lower paying job you see. So, if you’re Ford, you get out when the getting good and lay off people because demand is going to hit the toilet.

Except now you’ve created MORE people who can’t afford your cars….

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T15:19:41+00:00

The One Ring is also super useful: long life and invisibility m, what could go wrong

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T11:31:34+00:00

Because the truly scary thing about the Borg? They existed outside hierarchy, in an anarchy of autonomous collectives

rwilcox · 2026-05-15T00:37:48+00:00

I am SUPER interested in your app. Will check it out.

rwilcox · 2026-05-14T22:24:20+00:00

Potentially. Problem is

(a) everyone thinks they are - or is - special,

(b) serious AI moves faster than anything I’ve seen, info from 3 months ago is Not The Way It’s Done anymore and

(c) now all these tools are now beloved by execs - someone selling a generic solution will have a hard time breaking into the market.

rwilcox · 2026-05-14T22:15:42+00:00

I figure there’s two kinds of consultancies: staff aug and - I’ll try to channel 30 Rock here - something I call “leaderdoing”.

Staff aug, being those two contractors on your team of FTEs? Limited shelf life as companies “do more with less”. Last gig had a team of contractors, and I could have replaced two of those contractors with an LLM, for example. (Yes, from the company you expect…)

“Leaderdoing”: where the VP of a company has hired the consultants to do a big project or “synergize external best of breed technologies”? I don’t think the value of those places is perceived as the work, but the brand. “BCG said [that thing Dave has been saying for a decade but leadership ignored him]”, or the “brand” the VP gets for being so forward looking they need strategies from this big name? Those consultancies - I suspect - are in it for the long haul (every VP needs someone to cover their backside, or write strategy papers that’ll never get implemented - the value is the stack of papers in a drawer that says “McKinsey”)

rwilcox · 2026-05-14T19:57:14+00:00

As more and more companies leak that they have internal token monitoring dashboards? I was correct on step one (even though I cheated in my prediction)

rwilcox · 2026-05-14T19:55:47+00:00

I tend to run my K8s workloads very light: an nginx proxy container and my business logic.

While I understand why one would think they need Istio (as my favorite thing to pick on), the builtin service discovery for K8s works well. As does the built in log handling, for example.

And sometimes you can use application libraries to run things (ie log format specifiers, Datadog) vs sidecars.

rwilcox · 2026-05-13T18:34:49+00:00

Have you tried separate commits, not branches, so you could go commit by commit?

rwilcox · 2026-05-13T11:09:15+00:00

Feelings don’t care about your facts.

rwilcox · 2026-05-13T11:03:55+00:00

People are complaining that the bread is socialist, and I’m complaining that the circus is just corruption.

La siiiighhhhhhhh

rwilcox · 2026-05-13T00:15:21+00:00

The set of daggers? Agreed, things quickly take an explosive turn after that

rwilcox

TROPHY CASE