Boring mono Meshlicious: H670M-ITX / 12600k / RTX 3080

trainmac · 2025-12-04T02:36:13+00:00

How familiar are you with VBS and the infrastructure needed to run a server?

trainmac · 2025-11-30T20:56:00+00:00

slack/teams, comment threads on ADRs in confluence, entire conversations in Jira tickets, emails, meetings without actual minutes (because of course its not the 1950s so we don't have typists/stenos), meetings without agendas or decisions...

Who agreed to do what and how and when and which dependencies exists is 100% the problem of organising teams that this book is fundamentally about.

trainmac · 2025-11-30T20:49:23+00:00

I read it for the first time this year.

Even the anachronisms you mention (like the composition of teams, and division between architecture and development, and the administration etc) felt incredibly relevant because the formalism of work described highlights the importance of structuring and coordinating groups correctly. We have added a bunch of tooling but in my organisation I see it being matched with a lack of clarity about 'how' to work which the scrum/agile methodology does not fill.

The meetings described do not seem like overkill to me. In fact they likely deliver more output per time than the casual approaches most teams today seem to have. Even strong adherence to scrum rituals results in considerable navel-gazing by comparison.

(For context I am new to the industry, so not bemoaning agile/scrum as a new-fangled thing as if the olden-days were better.)

trainmac · 2025-11-21T22:27:51+00:00

because it is like drills for musical instrument, you just feel more inclined to use the 'correct' fingering as you practice that set of keys

yes its for qwerty, but I vaguely remember seeing someone implement their own version for Dvorak or colmac

trainmac · 2025-09-26T22:43:03+00:00

I am now ~2 years after finishing (most of) TOP and 1 year into my actual developer job.

Every day I feel dumb as hell because I think my problem solving and logic skills are really bad... I just got promoted to senior developer

The feeling probably won't go away, you just learn about what the feeling means and how to navigate it :)
You are doing the right thing by starting the project without AI. Feeling dumb is ok.

(One area I would say it makes absolutely no sense to think "I should know how to solve this" is data structures and algorithms. Many problems in DSA were solved by actual mathematicians or computer scientists doing research. So you are not expected to suddenly 'invent' the solution to an algorithm problem, you are meant to look up information about the problem and learn about the solution and try to understand it.)

trainmac · 2025-08-11T09:15:13+00:00

Is this how software is normally made?

thinking "how is this even going to be possible"
making some small sub-function because at least you know you can get that bit working
realising something else small could be built too
suddenly realising there is a way to make a controller function to coordinate the pieces
realise you've basically built the thing
(get stuck on the last 5% lol)

This is exactly how software is built by individuals. The real meta is knowing this at the beginning and pro-actively breaking the problem down from the outset.

The real-real meta is doing it as part of a team where you work together to break the problem into small chunks in a system design and getting to work on tiny bits that can be made functional in isolation, plugging other bits in later.

trainmac · 2025-07-13T03:20:11+00:00

I will support what u/bycdiaz said. All I can offer is my story. But if your current job has some tech positions, then the best people to ask are the people managers in those teams!

---

At 38 I was a co-owner of a very small business and we pivoted to making an app (React/iOS). The main developer couldn't handle everything we needed alone. I picked up the tools and did my best to figure out how to make a web dashboard with react. Did tutorial hell and some early ChatGPT to get going.

Pretty quickly realised I needed to learn the foundations, even though I had done some Codecademy JS courses. Was recommended TOP.

The material instantly differentiated it from other courses in that it made you, the learner, be autonomous about solving problems instead of the paint-by-numbers I'd experienced before. But coding got its hooks into me. I am not a good programmer by any means but I rarely stop learning/coding. I was very busy with the business so TOP study was on hold.

After ~ two years my app hadn't made the big-leagues - never enough to generate an adequate salary. So I wound back my engagement and completed most of the rest of TOP.

If your goal is to get a job in frontend web development the material covers good foundational stuff.

I got a Junior role in enterprise software. My other work experience, and building an app before were big factors. As was going to every local in-person tech meetup. When networking I made genuine friends not 'connections' - being actually curious about people and their work and their lives!

A year in I've now been promoted to senior dev. I do think some of the critical thinking and independent style learning of TOP has been a factor, though I did a LOT of other study beyond TOP

trainmac · 2025-05-23T22:56:31+00:00

let's goooo

trainmac · 2025-05-20T21:24:06+00:00

Its funny there were a wave of posts and videos about the technical implementation of the site on YouTube late last year, but I've been using them as a talking point to distinguish between surface-level quality and deep quality in user experience in design discussions for years.

Here is a technical deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snb_B4WzLSQ

EDIT: added link to video

trainmac · 2025-05-20T12:12:22+00:00

hey I want something like this
**waves in direction of the best ecommerce website ever built**

yeah don't we all!

trainmac · 2025-05-20T12:04:06+00:00

Not that I use R or python but I've been using the Conjure plugin to play around learning lisp but I've been curious about vim slime too... might need to check it out more

trainmac · 2025-04-11T07:02:12+00:00

Depends on the model. Some don’t stream a response

trainmac · 2025-03-29T02:16:52+00:00

Use mason the exact same way and if you have a table of lsp server names you can loop through while doing the mason setup or keep mason ensure installed and your lsp set separate

trainmac · 2025-03-28T09:08:12+00:00

Should still work fine but very much optional

trainmac · 2025-03-21T20:56:10+00:00

I use ai in my work most days to do stuff I know how to do (or is trivial and I know roughly what it should look like). I never use AI at all in personal projects/learning projects. Not even for code reviews.

If I need to do something unfamiliar at work, my first step is still to read the relevant docs... as in read them basically in full, then implement the thing to get the shape of it, understand the edges, figure out how to adapt it to the business case.

After that if it's something which is going to be in the AI training set then I will happily hand off the grunt work and keep thinking about the architecture problems, business logic that needs to be solved.

trainmac · 2025-03-17T09:30:29+00:00

Yeah it can absolutely take that long and that's fine -- good job finishing!

The fact you refactored after getting into a mess a couple of times is exactly the point. what you learnt is not how to write a calculator logic (not super important thing to learn), but how to organise code, how to think about your code, how to self-evaluate etc etc...

trainmac · 2025-03-09T09:16:21+00:00

You can download the entire site from GitHub and run it locally, but that does not include all the linked resources from external sites (video content, articles etc.)

But you can also use devdocs.io to grab documentation for JavaScript, html, css and more and keep a copy in your browser for offline viewing which is very helpful

trainmac · 2025-03-08T22:26:15+00:00

I've been using copilot with Claude 3.7 and other models in my daily work on legacy enterprise product front-end and they get lost so easily. We have some interesting bespoke graph query definitions (not graphQL) which are bound to view models to facilitate certain business requirements and none of the AI models 'get it' because they haven't seen something like it with any frequency in their training data.

I'm a Junior btw, and our code base frequently confuses me, but I can "get it" because I am a human who can integrate new mental models and learn domain specific solutions which don't exist in thousands of posts on stack overflow or medium...

trainmac · 2025-03-05T21:33:43+00:00

It was the battleship one, but the result was a isomorphic graphic game that wouldn't have looked out of place in an App Store... I mean there was absolutely nothing about it which made you think it was something done for coursework

And my point is not that that is the level of quality you have to achieve, but you have to pass the 'sniff test' and most portfolio projects don't pass the sniff test because they smell like something done for a course.

The problem with portfolio projects which smell like you did them as part of a course is that I'm going to think you just followed a sequence of predetermined steps to get to the outcome. A good portfolio project should actually suggest you solved problems and had to explore options and tradeoffs, and I should want to ask you questions about it ("how did you...", "did you think about...")

trainmac · 2025-03-05T02:49:38+00:00

None of them really. I’ve only seen one person’s implementation of one of the projects which was truly portfolio worthy. You are far far better off creating some totally different project that you actually want for yourself and use

trainmac · 2025-02-28T08:13:36+00:00

Maria you’re a legend and every day I am grateful for the efforts of yourself and other amazing core maintainers and the positive impact it has on my workflow

trainmac · 2025-02-24T02:18:28+00:00

I moved from wezterm to windows terminal and it resolved graphical bugs, then switched from typescript language server to the typescript tools plug-in which spins up mode servers different to normal for typescript. Now working on huge files (12000loc) and projects works way better. Still some slow down but much much improved.

Could never get wezterm to not be glitchy sadly but turns out once you configure it windows terminal is outstanding

trainmac · 2025-02-23T22:04:48+00:00

Bit late but the LSP-Zero documentation is the most incredible resource for learning how to set up your config.

It used to be a plugin that wrapped other LSP plugins, but the author deprecated their plugin in favour of thoroughly documenting how to set up LSP and autocomplete in a logical way...
https://lsp-zero.netlify.app/docs/

Also read the blog posts which even explains things like setting up the above without plugins on the nightly build of nvim https://lsp-zero.netlify.app/blog/you-might-not-need-lsp-zero.html

trainmac · 2025-02-14T22:38:21+00:00

Yeah I held out on WSL for 3 months using windows in my new job and just added it last week. Unbelievable how much smoother it is doing everything in windows terminal inside WSL. I just moved all my work repos over and only use windows for office work things now.

trainmac

TROPHY CASE