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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I’m also a software engineer who doesn’t care about most new tech. I strongly believe that human made objects and software can both reach a state of doneness. For example, books are a technology that’s “done”. Both physical and digital books do a great job at delivering written content, so there’s no need to keep buying the same damn thing every couple years. Phones are similar, yet the new ones just get shittier (no removable battery, no headphone jack). Kind of reminds me of how Microsoft keeps trying to solve the “problem” of programmers being needed to create programs. Powerapps being one of the latest examples.



  • I use it as a search engine but not as my only source. It’s really good at regurgitating the most relevant Stack Overflow answer I might find, which may or may not actually be applicable to my situation. As a rule I never copy paste code directly, I always rewrite it “in my own words”, even in cases where it’s basically the same. If the code it provides is more than 5 lines or so I can almost always think of a better way. I feel like I’d still be better off with a really solid reference manual though, and a recipe book. But they go out of date too fast these days.








  • I can see how this could be unfair, but working as a dev sometimes does require you to be on top of things in a high stress atmosphere. For example, what if you’re proposing an excellent technical solution in a meeting but some jaded older engineer is hard to convince? If you can’t outline your thinking in that scenario, your solution could be discarded just because someone was louder than you. As someone who used to have performance anxiety, I believe it’s generally something you can and should practice for. On the other hand, if there really isn’t a need for this type of skill, it totally makes sense to avoid creating interview environments where you are filtering candidates based on it.