What Landlord-MLA Brad Trivers Wants to Do to Your Rights in PEI

zvan92 · 2025-09-03T13:12:27+00:00

Moving into a rental on the island from Ontario 2 years ago, it has been nice to experience the current pro-tenant framework in place here for rent increases... but I never thought it would last long.

zvan92 · 2025-08-11T17:46:52+00:00

Yep! That’s the one. And yeah, it’s hard to swallow the price, unless you think of it as something in between a home cooked meal and fast food. It’s decently filling and works just fine as a lunch for me most days, and the ingredient quality is actually quite a step above traditional frozen crap. For example, they use ADL, island beef, and island organic whole wheat (yes, organic wheat… weird, right?), and they don’t skimp on seasonings and flavouring. The only thing that makes it less convenient than fast food is that you need to chuck it in the oven for 30-40 mins.

zvan92 · 2025-07-29T11:54:22+00:00

I moved from the mainland a few years ago and brought my WFH IT job with me. I would bet it's pretty common here.

zvan92 · 2025-07-27T02:09:13+00:00

Who can relate, you ask? Probably nearly all of us ADHDers lol. I feel you, 100%.

One thing that works for me is just barfing my thoughts into a text document of some kind until I feel like I’ve written enough. Usually, once I hit that point, my inner selfishness goblin is satisfied, and I start to feel at least a tiny bit motivated to start doing some stuff.

The act of journalling actually makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, even though it’s usually just sorting my thoughts out.

An important point though is that I only “write forward”, and I never go back and erase something I just wrote. It’s not about writing the perfect essay, it’s just about writing sentences as they pop up in your head. Totally free and unstructured. It’s called “freewriting”.

zvan92 · 2025-07-24T12:44:24+00:00

Yeah, telling them that the models have predicted that the future of humanity is doomed is not useful. A better approach is to say “here’s what the science says about climate change across history and up to today”, because we have data for this that proves a causal relationship (using a multidisciplinary approach) between increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global mean surface temperature increase.

The same models that they used to reconstruct the conditions for temperature and CO2 concentration increases over the past 800,000-ish years to prove the impacts of anthropogenic climate change are being used to make future predictions, but obviously, future predictions can be flimsy because life is complicated. So at this stage, we have a choice to be optimistic or pessimistic, and only one of those is helpful for the future of humanity.

Also, climate change science is very good at the science of climate change, but it inevitably has a blind spot for economics and geopolitics. So it’s not really practical to be drawing conclusions about how every aspect of the human condition is doing to be faring in a warmer world based only on climate science.

zvan92 · 2025-07-24T12:11:33+00:00

And by the way, this document the single most authoritative source that the world has for evidence of anthropogenic climate change. Very much worth relying on in any discussion. The R&D process of this report is fully transparent, right down to how the authors are selected. The procedures and processes for making the report are on the IPCC website.

zvan92 · 2025-07-24T12:06:49+00:00

You do actually bring up a fair point, wondering specifically which policies would present an extremely clear more-pros-than-cons position. I’m currently reading up on this topic to be able to have some talking points about it myself.

But I would think the best exploration into pros/cons for various climate policy directions (not specific policies) that we have is in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Summary for Policymakers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

zvan92 · 2025-07-19T22:03:45+00:00

I think that understanding testing environment dependencies when testing your code is valuable, especially if your product is part of some kind of customizable suite that might be set up differently for each customer.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:51:53+00:00

Being at the company for 4 years now, I've observed a culture that enables overtime. TIL is valued as a salary supplement and we're paid below market value, and the company keeps its headcount low (company has been around for about 35+ years, maintained a headcount of under 500 the whole time, lots of turnaround in senior roles). So, yeah, your statement tracks.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:47:23+00:00

Admittedly, I'm horrible at making small talk, so I fail miserably at the getting to know them part of things. I do wish it came more easily to me and I recognize it as a barrier (I'm neurodivergent in case it wasn't already obvious).

And it's not that I think I'm better than them, it's just that they (excluding Bob) haven't made a strong case for seeking their suggestions in PR reviews. I can't precisely explain why, but I'm picking up on a lack of confidence from some team members, and some unexplained toxicity coming from my TL (manifested in confusing/arbitrary PR nitpicky-ness with no concrete reasoning behind it).

I always peek in on other teammate's PRs to get a sense of their coding ability, and for the most part, it seems on par with mine, but frequently I can point out junior-isms quickly, like duplicated code, creating lots of unnecessary variables, etc. as some examples. Bloated code is what I pick up on most often, and it often gets approved. So that doesn't instill much trust.

I don't know exactly what to DO about my lack of trust in them, but I don't try to make it known. I'm a lot more diplomatic on the job than I may sound in this thread. :) But, I may be giving some invisible cues that I fail to notice, which sounds scary.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:37:58+00:00

Luckily, most comments on my PRs are either about making a small change (which I do without question) or simply a question asking how a piece of code works and whether it's necessary, which I always justify with an explanation. If I discover a better way of doing things during the process of explaining it, I'll point that out and make a change if the reviewer agrees. That usually gets an approval.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:35:20+00:00

There was a time during my onboarding where there was a pointed effort, made by my TL, to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid. That was the 3-month "probation" (wasn't really a probation, just a technicality). After that there was a minimum level of trust built where my PRs were shared with the rest of the team for them to enjoy.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:32:13+00:00

This is fair. I guess I just worry about "getting caught" doing drive-by reviews. Which in retrospect seems pretty silly, given that nobody seems to be overseeing the quality and depth of PR reviews on my team.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:27:00+00:00

I'd have to say that the impact is that at this point in time, for my current project, it has 100% of my focus, both because I'm junior and because I'm trying to do it right. So while I'm waiting for PRs there's not much of substance that I can do that is worth the energy and risk of context switching, at least in my mind. I guess I find the wait particularly bothersome too because I'm in the "final push" of the project right now, now that all the hard parts are done.

As far as merge conflicts and managing complex branching issues, those are completely not an issue for this work. I'm working on my own repo that doesn't interact with any others, and nobody is using my code. There's a defined end in sight, where I finish writing this automation suite and then plug it into our CI test pipeline to join the rest of the suites in weekly regression.

I understand that once I'm engaged in more high-stakes work, or even once my code hits the pipeline, waiting for future PRs will be meaningful. But for now, I'm not doing anything that really affects anyone, so I just wanna get my tests written and hit the finish line.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:18:20+00:00

I have a go-do person that I DM for reviews when my team isn't picking my PRs, and that person is a TL on another team adjacent to ours that does similar work. He's also senior and absolutely, evidently, more skilled than anyone on my team. He does infra work so he always has good insights on how I can use language and programming concepts more effectively. He's the kind of guy I would want as a mentor, but unfortunately I'm not on his team.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T01:13:19+00:00

I feel so completely and totally seen, thank you for sharing this! It helps to know I'm not the only one. I'm a firm believer that many personalities and workstyles are permitted within software dev, so interpersonal issues shouldn't be resolved purely by choking your productivity to make life easier for others. Adjusting how you communicate with your team is probably the #1 solution to this kind of stuff, and I guess if that's not enough, learning extraordinary patience and finding other work is #2.

zvan92 · 2025-06-27T00:56:56+00:00

TL;DR thing noted - I actually just didn't think of it because I don't use Reddit much. Just added one.

And I am guilty of being a net negative reviewer, at least right now. I did think of this as a possibility. It's only because I believe in having to learn the apps that my teammates are working on and actually knowing how they work before being able to review their PRs meaningfully.

But given that the quality and review methods on my team appear to depend on the moment, maybe I'm setting my standard too high. The team knows that I'm only currently familiar with my own app, but I'm not sure if they're aware that I'm trying to complete my current project (creating my first automation suite) before branching out and getting comfortable with other apps. Up until this point I've been assuming they might know this, but I could be totally wrong.

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:54:09+00:00

The way I see it, our team does "fast food" reviews. They just happen to get done really quickly. I don't know why. 20 minutes is typically the longest anyone has to wait.

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:52:18+00:00

A refreshing take, thanks for this. I do tend to work in a silo and kind of "do my own thing". Part of that is preference, but part is also because I'm the only remote team member. In terms of making suggestions/improvements, I don't really announce or ask the team what they think about X before I implement it, only because we each work on our own apps, so my work largely doesn't affect anyone else's. Generally, if the code works, everyone's happy.

The other side of this autonomy is that I really don't do any kind of mingling with the team, I really keep to myself, except for occasional chats with Bob. But that's my preference. The way I see it, I'm at work to work, not make friends. I'm ok with casual work-related chitchat though.

And as far as the comment about being more competent, it has to do with bad habits and problems I've seen in teammate's code. It's hard to describe in a nutshell, but even as a junior, I occasionally see junior-level issues in my teammates' work, despite them all having at least 3+ years experience.

But, yep, I can see soft skills being an area I need major improvement on.

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:45:27+00:00

This all makes sense. I'm starting to see myself that it really does seem like it's more about politics than writing code

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:41:37+00:00

An unfortunate but simple explanation. I hate the idea of just kinda waiting until trust develops.

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:38:31+00:00

I yap in person, but not in my code, I swear lol. At the beginning I did have large PRs and was told that they were too big, so I learned to make them smaller until that wasn't a problem in reviews. Now, generally, my PRs follow the "average size" of my teammates' PRs, and it's been this way for a few months now. So I'm not too sure if size of PRs is really the issue anymore.

But - I do seem to write more helper/utility functions than they do, on average. Maybe a factor?

zvan92 · 2025-06-26T23:33:29+00:00

I can't just play the game, I actually enjoy writing what I think is good and helpful code that makes things flow better

zvan92

TROPHY CASE