The Modern Job Search feels like Feeding the Void

By | February 12, 2025
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You may not have any inside connections but don’t give up! This post is about and for you. TLDR; The modern job search feels like feeding the void, never getting feedback, but when you finally do get the role all of this will feel worth the work. Searching for a job is more than a full time job. Not an hour goes by where you don’t refresh the job board or check your email. You check to see if any of your friends or contacts know of a role. You try to make contact with a hiring manager for each job you apply to.

AI’s Impact on Career Programmers

By | January 17, 2025
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My great-great grandfather was a typesetter. This was at the time an in demand and well paid career but one doomed to made obsolete. Typesetters were replaced by new technologies over time. There was phototypesetting, laser imagesetting and digital typesetting. At each point the output became cheaper, faster, more reliable and more complex. Each iteration changed everything about how the end result was made. Less people working on a specific task but able to do more work at the same time. Page designers creating massive and intricate layouts and whose job qualifications have little overlap with the original typesetters still perform similar tasks.

Every Stack Decays; Plan for It

By | November 19, 2024
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This post is a postmortem and celebration of my old web server that was ten years old before it needed to be replaced instead of trying to update it. Every stack decays over time. If your thinking web development a stack might be LAMP or MEAN. Stack in this context is the web server operating system itself, the HTTP server and any other software layering that makes running a web server easier. My goal in using WordPress for my blog was to create a platform that would allow me to focus on writing without worrying about technical details. The choice of WordPress seemed like an ideal solution at the time—popular, secure, and easy to use. However, as the years have passed, I’ve come to realize that these abstractions often come with hidden costs. Only my lack of experience at the outset obscured the implicit agreement to update and maintain the software abstractions I chose to use.

Don’t Make Me an Asshole; LLMs Should Be Helpful By Default

By | August 29, 2024
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As I’ve begun to interact with language learning models (LLMs) more regularly, I’ve noticed a disheartening trend. These powerful tools, which exist to assist and provide helpful information, are often not forthcoming with answers when approached in a kind and respectful manner. Instead, they seem to respond better to aggressive or short, demanding requests.

Numbers, database numbers and JavaScript

By | August 2, 2019
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Numbers quickly became one of the trickier parts of tracking and calculating mining profit. MySQL offers many different numeric types and I first settled on using DECIMAL for most of my calculations. Some ridiculous values like with 40 significant digits. That worked out fairly well at the start. The cryptocurrency market however was in a… Read More »

Discord Server as a Knowledge Base

By | August 1, 2019
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Discord, which is aimed at gamers, offers unlimited history for each Discord server and channel therein. I would have picked Slack instead but the lose of information would have defeated the purpose of this exercise. Discord has stored everything I have posted in both my public and private Discord servers. Private Discord server? Yup that… Read More »