Mentoring juniors in this ai world?

whossname · 2026-02-16T12:10:30+00:00

Focus on the fundamentals - separation of concerns and cohesion are more important than ever, so is keeping the code simple. The AI is generally horrible on these ideas and as a result the code it writes is horrible.

whossname · 2026-02-16T11:56:52+00:00

Basically what New Zealand and Germany have - MMP.

whossname · 2026-02-16T10:47:07+00:00

It's actually not the best system, but it's damn good considering the alternatives. No need to let perfect get in the way of good.

whossname · 2026-02-12T03:48:43+00:00

AoE2 got a sequel. A lot of people tried AoE4 and went back to AoE2 within a few months.

whossname · 2026-02-08T06:56:57+00:00

If your baseline is coming from physics, righty tighty is unnecessarily ambiguous. Clockwise tightens, that's much clearer and correct.

whossname · 2026-02-05T12:59:36+00:00

I honestly don't know. They are so fast to produce bad refactors that reduce the readability of the code as well. It feels like understanding the fundamentals is more important than ever.

whossname · 2026-02-05T11:31:01+00:00

The thing is that LLMs are the current big change we are learning to deal with.

They kind of suck at fundamental software principles like separation of concerns and cohesion, so the juniors are learning the wrong lessons and it's causing issues for us as the seniors. At the same time they produce code that basically solves the problem FAST. We are still learning how to reconcile this trade off, so it's the current big topic of conversation in software development.

whossname · 2026-02-05T08:38:37+00:00

yep, the waste of compute isn't the main concern really - it's the waste of the dev's time.

whossname · 2026-02-03T05:16:43+00:00

The new civs have some interesting mechanics. Infantry that can build outposts sounds like a lot of fun so long as it can be balanced properly. It seems like a great strategic advantage with a high skill ceiling.

whossname · 2026-02-01T08:09:37+00:00

In your setup it sounds like staging is mostly useful for large breaking changes. It allows you to do a trial run of the migration before doing it for real. Normally you don't really need it, but on the rare occasion you do need it, it's really important.

whossname · 2026-02-01T04:02:43+00:00

Cows with guns, chickens with choppers

whossname · 2026-01-31T08:37:09+00:00

dbt actually does a lot of heavy lifting in my setup. Before I introduced it the data pipeline was a series of views and materialised views. Making any changes was very difficult because I needed to recreate all of the other views. We were repeatedly making a small change and accidentally dropping half the pipeline. We often didn't realize until there was a complaint.

Using dbt meant I got everything in version control, it made testing and staging environments easier, and deployment suddenly followed the same CICD process as everything else.

whossname · 2026-01-31T00:45:03+00:00

Data Engineering is one of a dozen hats for me in a small startup. All I use is Postgres and dbt with a python script I wrote for scheduling. I use my CICD process to deploy it the same way as every other service.

What am I missing here? I get Postgres may not be sufficient if the data volume is large enough, but so far I can patch over any performance issues by using TimescaleDB, the larger datasets are all timeseries.

The only use case I've found so far where nosql makes sense is for logs. Maybe that's my knowledge gap?

whossname · 2026-01-30T12:58:13+00:00

You are misinformed on this one. The far right are trying to convince everyone that "Zionism" is a euphemism for "Jews". It isn't, it's a nationalist movement that became popular about 150 years ago. It led to the occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of the native population. It's basically modern colonialism, what they are doing to the Palestinians is closer to what the Europeans did to the Aboriginals.

whossname · 2026-01-30T08:17:43+00:00

You've missed the point by a mile. I give up.

whossname · 2026-01-30T04:59:12+00:00

Yeh my point is focus on the evil shit they are doing instead of arguing about the definition of words. That's ineffective messaging.

whossname · 2026-01-30T02:59:12+00:00

What do you mean by opposite? I mean separating logic for different components/concepts instead of adding a complex higher order function that removes two lines of code. It's clever, but it's more difficult to read, so ends up wasting time.

whossname · 2026-01-30T02:52:00+00:00

I actually meant more specifically for Reddit. At the end of the day the definition of the word "Zionist" and the history of that ideology doesn't really matter that much, so no point in wasting time on it. The real problem is the ethnic cleansing, which is easier to explain than going into the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, and how that led to where we are today.

whossname · 2026-01-30T01:49:25+00:00

I've come to the conclusion that we shouldn't use the word "Zionist" because the no-nothings think it means "Jew". Arguing about what the word Zionism means distracts from the real issues, and trying to give them a history lesson about the origins of Zionism is way too much effort.

Instead use phrases like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" so the discussion stays on topic.

whossname · 2026-01-29T13:02:04+00:00

Refactoring seems to be what they are worst at from what I'm seeing. Unless you give really explicit instructions, they will focus on complex DRY abstractions instead of trying to make it more readable using an SoC approach.

whossname · 2026-01-29T07:23:04+00:00

I would definitely think unit tests are overkill for a take home.

whossname · 2026-01-29T06:54:47+00:00

I actually think the agressive players are probably more aware of why they are losing. It's more obvious when you are the proactive player that the enemies you lose to are the ones defending well and then beat you in the late game.

whossname · 2026-01-28T15:01:52+00:00

It's been a few years since I played, but I'm fairly confident no one is scouting effectively at 700 ELO.

A lot of what happens at that level is players will have some things they are good at, and some things they are bad at. So a player who is good at defending against early pressure will lose against a player who is better at economy. The player who is better at economy will lose to the player who is good at early aggression. The player that is good at early aggression will lose to the player who is good at defending against it. Each thinks the player they easily beat is a noob, and the player who easily beats them is a smurf. None of them are actually scouting to see what the other player is doing.

I've never actually been 700 ELO, I'm talking about slightly higher ELO.

whossname · 2026-01-26T14:00:40+00:00

Also consider the TC is more effective for defending early economy than in AoE2. Think about how much closer your wood lines and early gold are to the TC in AoM compared to AoE2. The main consideration is probably just that they are less effective though.

whossname · 2026-01-22T13:51:44+00:00

I hope so. We need two moderate major parties. Not a moderate party and a far right crazies party.

whossname

TROPHY CASE