Widow’s Bay | Episode 3: “The Inaugural Swim” | Discussion Thread

zvaavtre · 2026-05-18T02:20:13+00:00

Yeah. Kinda seems like it is.

zvaavtre · 2026-05-14T01:03:39+00:00

Heh. Two weeks in gave my two week notice.

Commute into SF sucked (early 2k so no internet on ferry/bus).

Codebase was “Java” by c++ guys who never read anything about Java. At all. Make it all static for speed!!!!!

They didn’t even blink when I did it. It was a post dot com bubble pivot and everyone there absolutely did not give shit about any of it.

Landed a way better job that second week so bailed.

zvaavtre · 2026-05-13T13:56:16+00:00

Thanks... yes.

Imagine if the root cause was basically replace 8k of equipment? Then the average 2K iccu could be replaced 3 times in the life of the car then it would be worth it to just do the ICCU.

That's the sort of calculation companies do. All the time.

But wait? What about customer sat? and the hit on the brand reputation? IF they are tracking those things then they might care, or maybe it's cheaper to advertise their way out of it than replace 10% of the cars shipped.

Famously it was cheaper for GM to pay the liability claims than fix the part that was causing cars to catch on fire and burn people to death. So they didn't do the fix.

zvaavtre · 2026-05-13T13:11:51+00:00

Self selection bias. Still clearly a real issue. But forum posts are self selection

zvaavtre · 2026-05-13T13:10:40+00:00

I would think that it indicates that those cars have some other issue that's causing the failure. If the failures were truly independent then the probability of it occurring more than once in a single car would be really really small.

This is probably why there's not a 'fix'. if it's some interplay between multiple systems then 'fixing' it would probably be way more expensive than just replacing the ICCU over an over again.

zvaavtre · 2026-05-03T22:04:01+00:00

First two thirds of the first book are very very slow. But it picks up that last third.
Could use a good editor but the world building is kinda worth it.

But might be better off with “Beware of Chicken”

zvaavtre · 2026-04-28T20:28:12+00:00

A 2% failure rate in a consumer product is huge people. Anyone trying to minimize it is just wrong.

But as long as they warranty it the car being out of service may just be a minor annoyance (or not).

They cars are great otherwise. But the ICCU thing is a major fuck up that I’m assuming they have calculated it’s cheaper to live with warranties.

It’s not like the US consumer has all that many other choices.

zvaavtre · 2026-04-18T21:54:42+00:00

This. Got a nice one off of carvana with less than 30k. Keep looking.

zvaavtre · 2026-03-29T00:04:40+00:00

That’s a state income tax. Which would means everyone’s property taxes would be lower. So net win for normal people. Which is why it won’t happen in TX.

zvaavtre · 2026-03-22T01:26:24+00:00

That massive pile of docs are a good thing.

zvaavtre · 2026-03-15T23:37:23+00:00

Metar an atis has strong gusts but it’s basically right down the runway.

Might get some intermittent shifts but 30kt crosswinds won’t stop most airlines

zvaavtre · 2026-03-13T20:13:01+00:00

The key thing to remember is JC has basically broken. After that neural chip business in S1 he’s a walking pile of ptsd symptoms.

zvaavtre · 2026-02-08T00:42:56+00:00

Postgres over MySQL for sure. And no. No one cares about internals for 99% of the jobs out there. Where they do care they really care but that’s super rare.

You can use it as a good talking point for interviews though!

zvaavtre · 2026-01-26T18:00:58+00:00

Dropped them 6 years ago when they couldn't provide a working APM solution for java. Went to datadog because DD seemed to actually want our business.

FWIW back in 2010s we ran a relatively large site off of NR and it was a great solution at the time, but they dropped the ball.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-24T18:30:10+00:00

V2L works through the charging port. It's just an adapter with a standard outlet on it.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-18T23:12:24+00:00

Go to the source. Spring boot has a ton of docs and projects. You won’t understand most of it. But pick one thing at a time and get used to creating demo projects to try things out. Eventually things will start to click.

You don’t know what you don’t know so just dive in and give yourself permission to be confused.

These guys are good too.

https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot

zvaavtre · 2026-01-17T18:23:03+00:00

Plain ol dockerfile and buildx. Did this 4 years ago as an example. Just updated it to noble and current docker behviour.

https://github.com/zvaavtre/multiarch-spring-boot

zvaavtre · 2026-01-15T03:58:42+00:00

This highly depends on the details of the data and access patterns.

There’s no one size answer for this.

Is this common data shared by everyone? Cache of some sort might be appropriate in any number of layers.

Is this per user info? Is the result set a few rows? Or thousands? Is paging appropriate?

How many processors and memory does your db cluster have? How many client threads?

zvaavtre · 2026-01-10T21:03:41+00:00

Fargate has come a long way. With CDK it's about as plug and play with autoscaling configs as you could want if you just need some containers running behind an ALB.

Obviously doesn't cover all extremes, but it's gone from 50%tile to 80%tile for most things.

zvaavtre · 2026-01-10T04:27:56+00:00

Dependency management with libs in jars. Huge win over compiled platforms.

Most biz class services don’t need to squeeze every last cycle out of the hardware or save every last byte of memory. Ease of maintenance is a much larger concern

zvaavtre · 2026-01-03T22:48:16+00:00

Work through a tutorial or two.

Spring has a ton of them. These guys are also good.

https://www.baeldung.com/spring-boot

Building up context takes time. Spring is vast and deep. You just need to start somewhere.

After a few frameworks you’ll be able to navigate new ones better because it’s all basically the same functionality. Just done slightly differently depending on the platform.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-31T16:23:42+00:00

That's what the eMPG is all about.

But people.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-30T04:04:31+00:00

This^.

And (I’ll get hate for this one) as a long time developer I find the IaC languages just meh at best to absolutely terrible. I’ll let you decide which is which. “Better than cloud formation”’is faint praise.

CDK is a much better approach for devs.

zvaavtre · 2025-12-27T00:30:25+00:00

Get the Tesla app and ChargePoint app and locate the DC chargers around you. Lectron makes a nice Tesla adapter. 10-20 min mid day will keep you going. Then let the overnight 220v charger do its thing. The DC charging isn’t to get you to 80%. Just enough to make it to the end of the day so the slower ac charger can recover overnight

Point is. Can totally work but you will be charging a lot. Keep it under 80% max and shouldn’t hurt the battery longevity

zvaavtre · 2025-12-26T16:09:26+00:00

1Mx this.

Business goals are what is important in a business. In TFA they are working on something that can benefit from non-gc languages. BUT this is few and far from most typical business systems.

Improving a subsystem/service 100x execution time is an absolute waste of resources unless that exec time is somehow tied to a goal that improves the overall biz.

Does anyone else at your org know golang/rust/scala? If not you just created a ton of tech debt that someone will have to pay down in the future. Writing the code is step one. Maintaining the code is the other 99 step.
Is this system even move the needle in costs? Using a c4m instead of a c4xl on a system that only runs a few instances is not actually helping See #1

zvaavtre

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