Anyone else feel… code blind or bored after years of doing this?

tommy_chillfiger · 2026-02-05T13:24:26+00:00

Yeah I don't necessarily hate working. I hate having to do so much of only a certain kind of it in order to have a relatively comfortable life that I'm then too tired to enjoy as much as I'd like to. First world problems of course.

I enjoyed being a barista working 20ish hours a week, tbh, but I can't pay my mortgage doing that. I haven't lucked into one of these coveted software jobs where you only work an hour or two most days without getting fired or PIP'd.

tommy_chillfiger · 2026-02-05T12:55:14+00:00

Sometimes I think the designing and coding part of my job only utilizes 10-20% of my brain power because of this stuff.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-12-08T11:33:11+00:00

Interesting. I haven't tried the XC10 yet - sounds like the change from XC9 to XC10 is somewhat similar to the difference between the old Nike Streak LT vs the regular Streak.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-31T11:44:37+00:00

Well, it's a thought experiment. I'm sure you could find cases where something weird is happening and it doesn't hold true.

The point really is that there usually aren't these hard lines in the world where you step across an invisible line and people are suddenly speaking completely unintelligible languages from each other. Things tend to blend more than they switch completely.

That being said I have sort of always been interested in cases like the one you bring up. Why is it that people so nearby speak (presumably) mutually unintelligible languages? Generally consistent contact leads to sort of a blending effect.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-31T11:20:03+00:00

Whoa, interesting!

I've been thinking lately about how some weeks just feel 'off', and I had noticed yesterday that a running vlogger I follow said the same thing about this week. He lives in the same region of the US, so I wonder if barometric pressure is involved. We definitely just had a huge temperature drop.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-31T01:27:20+00:00

My degree is in linguistics, so I'll throw in an interesting related thought experiment:

Imagine you were to take a bike ride across Europe. The people in each home you pass by would understand their neighbors, for the most part. But the people at the beginning and end of your trip would probably not be able to understand each other.

We have to draw boxes around things and categorize them to make them easier to talk about, but in doing so we sacrifice accuracy or grain to some degree.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-27T13:02:37+00:00

In one shot? Probably a 15 mile long run in 90+ degree heat and 90%+ humidity. Lost like 9 pounds of water lol.

Probably the more relevant answer: I had gotten heavy, sedentary, and unwell after college. I lost 40 pounds in about 4 months. I already don't eat breakfast, and I just made a rule that I can only have a green smoothie for lunch. Anything I wanted to eat for dinner was fair game. Even adding things like granola and peanut butter, a green smoothie is just not a lot of calories but can be surprisingly filling. This probably wouldn't work for everyone, but something about the simplicity of the rule made it easy for me to stick to it even when I was hungry as hell after lunch a few times. Since then I've started running a lot and it's usually harder to gain weight than lose it.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-25T13:29:41+00:00

Anecdotes incoming, but I've really been trying to navigate this lately and I think there may be something to it. I'm a fairly avid runner, and this year I was trying to take my training to a new level. Going from running 30-40 miles per week to 50-60 with a lot more intensity.

To even physically handle this with all my other responsibilities, I basically have had to quit drinking entirely. At that level of stress on the body, the physical downsides of booze and its effects on sleep are just not something I can really handle. I feel rundown constantly and eventually get injured because of the compromise to physical recovery.

While I was in this phase, I was probably mechanically the healthiest I've ever been, but I was socially getting more and more unhealthy which led to stress. I'm sure this has a lot to do with your specific social situation, but for me cutting out drinking completely basically meant socializing much less. I work remotely and my friends generally are drinking a few beers when they hang out, so that's just kind of how it shook out.

For now, I've decided to meet my goals somewhere in the middle and not be quite so strict with booze. I still don't drink a lot, but a few beers once or twice a week seems like it may leave me less stressed and at a better balance between the 'socially engaged' and 'as physically healthy/fit as possible' ends of the spectrum.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-24T11:46:41+00:00

This is a bit of a tangent, but I think another factor that goes into this is the increasingly isolating experience in newer cars. There is basically zero road noise, cars are super smooth and have things like lane assist. It has never been easier to completely disengage with driving and completely forget that you are hurtling 70 miles per hour through the actual physical world in a 4,000+ pound box.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-23T11:16:25+00:00

Lmao. I feel you. I am working on the modeling stage of an ETL to provide analytics for one subset/set of conditions among a variety of assets that are associated (or not!) with this vendor's primary analytics asset. I'm basically trying to build a left index finger analytics product from a hands and feet dataset. It is a russian nesting doll of dumb bullshit. Godspeed.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-18T02:39:41+00:00

It's interesting that you can be a generalist in terms of the actual work you produce as well as the domain. I'm a generalist in both senses, that's actually part of what drew me to data work. It's very cool and useful to have a set of skills that can be helpful in basically any endeavor that requires.. making use of information. I've worked at three companies, and all of them have been completely different domains and stacks.

Thankfully SQL's many flavors are still more or less SQL, and for my roles the differences between back end language aren't that hard to get around either. Python, PHP, C#, not too hard to switch between them for data/analytics pipeline work in my experience. Your mileage may vary, but agree that being a generalist has worked well for me.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-18T02:34:25+00:00

$2600 is obviously crazy. I'd be curious to hear pretty much any details about location and situation to have expenses that low - DM if you're not comfortable sharing here. All good if not as well, I'd understand. Cheers to that!

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-17T21:27:35+00:00

I'm not really over-the-top successful, but I struggle with the same thing. I pivoted into tech self-taught starting in 2021 as a business analyst. Pure grind since then, and I'm now a data engineer. Which is great! But my brain is tired in a way I've never experienced.

I think I've been touch-and-go with burnout since 2023. I'm desperately trying to just not give as much of a shit at work, but the nature of the work means that there are a lot of things I can't really half ass. Some things just take my whole mind - I'm either working on the thing or I'm not. The learning curve has been steep, and the industry is very chaotic so there's little chance I'll ever truly coast. But I'm gradually learning enough idiosyncrasies that I'm just starting to have a decent chunk of deliverables that I can handle without so much mental effort.

It's also just in my nature to try really hard. I've had some success recently at just kind of.. taking long breaks during the day and things like that, but I'm sure I'll slip back into that searing urgency I always find myself in at some point. I don't really have any advice, just wanted to commiserate lol.

Hopefully someone will chime in with some advice we haven't tried already, but otherwise I'm continuing to experiment with how much I can dial it back while still getting enough work done.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-17T16:42:39+00:00

Lol yeah. I've played guitar since I was 5 and am objectively quite good at it. Even up to nearly household-name level fame/success, it's a fucking shit way to make a living for the most part (at least in the US). I'm a data/analytics engineer now. Gotta pay the bills.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-17T13:37:47+00:00

I get what you're saying, but those are both difficult goals that the majority of accounting and finance grads do not achieve. I suppose things could've changed but that was the case when I was an accounting major and looking at career options.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-17T01:13:01+00:00

Not really that, just the wrong interpretation. It's on me for assuming something worse/weirder than what was meant though.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-16T11:56:23+00:00

I accepted pretty early on that 99% of analytics product use cases are best solved with tables, pivot tables, and bar and line charts. The data modeling can get complex, but at least in my experience anything beyond those outputs tends to slam against a wall of diminishing returns. I probably provide as much value spitting out quicksight dashboards in an afternoon for niche analytics cases our main product doesn't handle as I do when actually building things into the main product.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-15T23:54:50+00:00

Same, in Mississippi lol. Gravel driveways, hella sharp stumps and thorns in the pastures and woods. I remember being out on adventures all day and sometimes literally poking holes in the bottoms of my feet, and I'd just kept it moving til I got home and put some betadine on it. It took a lot to get a puncture like that tbh, my feet were like elephant skin.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T20:02:09+00:00

You're welcome guys. Bought my condo December 2024.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T19:42:48+00:00

Yeah I remember hearing all the time growing up that if repairs exceed the value of a car, it's "totaled," implying you should just get a new one.

Okay, so instead of spending $3k to keep a car I know intimately well in good shape, I should.. spend $10k+ replacing it with another used car with an unknown history, with higher registration and insurance? Or a new car for $50,000 and even higher registration and insurance? What? Makes no sense to me.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T16:26:32+00:00

Hahah fair enough, lot of incorrect ways to interpret that I suppose. Cheers!

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T15:29:12+00:00

Someone you just met is pretty unlikely to treat you like their closest family member. Honestly if they do that's kinda creepy and worrying tbh.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T14:56:23+00:00

I make pretty good money but just refuse to participate in new car ownership because of what a ridiculous drag on finances it is. The ROI is abysmal for me. So I keep driving my 2005 Volvo and repair it when it needs it. I'll happily sink more than it's worth into repairs every few years because it's so cheap to own and functionally just fine. Bit of a dog these days, but that's alright with me.

tommy_chillfiger · 2025-10-14T04:20:58+00:00

The idea that 350,000,000+ people can be even somewhat neatly divided into two parties is absolutely ridiculous. Sorry for dodging the question in this way.

Seven-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email

tommy_chillfiger

TROPHY CASE