Today’s my work anniversary, which also means it’s the anniversary of the day my friend Kirk got a Twitter response from Missy Elliott after he tweeted about writing a function called missyElliott that takes a data structure, flips it, and reverses it (something that may have been a crazy thing that happened once but that we as his friends tell everyone about and celebrate every year, much to his horror).

https://kirkday.club
The org we volunteer for (and that he’s a maintainer of) even went so far as to create Kirk merch (https://store.virtualcoffee.io/sear...)

I’ve been making so many crochet things to give as gifts to coworkers during an offsite.

Ah, yes, Don’t Trust Anything from Anyone Day, my least favorite day of the year.

I’ve been crocheting … a lot.

!rant

“Are you drinking my soda?”
“Statute of limitations!”
“Did you know in some countries there’s a statute of limitations on murder?”
“And?”
“And that means sometimes it can run out.”
“And?”
“And that means you can’t be tried for the crime.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“What? No. Why?”
*gestures at soda* “You literally told me that after I took your soda.”
“Oh! Shit. You mentioned statute of limitations, _that_ was the connection, it wasn’t a response to you stealing my soda.”
“You looked me right in the eye and told me that some countries have a statute of limitations on murder.”
“I looked you in the eye because we were having a conversation!”

!rant

Pro tip: if you wear a full face mask with a BiPap, do not start puking in your sleep.

Glad my body apparently decided to nope the hell out as soon as I started aspirating, but it was still a singularly unpleasant experience I hope never to repeat.

Thankful to still be alive.

When you want to get up but this is your POV.

Latest crochet projects

Added googly eyes before realizing the grate is an exhaust. Here’s hoping this isn’t the way I die. 😅

The one awkward thing about amigurumi is when it’s a pattern that’s assemble at the end rather than assemble as you go and it feels like you’re collecting body parts. (Currently trying to make a Kitsune, which means that I have 1 head and body, 2 arms, 2 legs, 1 belly, 1 snout, 2 ears, and 9 tails)

It’s also nerve-wracking because I just know that these pieces are all okay independently but I’m going to suck at assembly and make it turn out awful.

😅😭😅

A recruiter emailed me.
And called me (and left a voicemail).
AND texted me.

About a job opportunity in California (I live in Texas).

That requires experience writing performance critical and thread-safe code in a large multi-threaded codebase (I work primarily in JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, fat chance of that).

Responsibilities listed as: Focus on Supercharger Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) software features. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.

Opportunity is for a 3 month contract.

Why are you so desperate, lady?

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Amigurumi frosted donut turned out really well

Amigurumi cow, first attempt

I just want a goddamn option to “Never trust this computer. Never trust *any* computer” when I plug in my phone to charge.

Also, only got an hour of sleep. No idea why.

But woke up to find an emergency alert that we’re in flash flood territory, so that’s exciting.

I hate the process of trying to get hydrated when I’ve gone through a period of apparently thinking I’m a cactus.

When I don’t drink water at all, I feel fine. No dry mouth, no symptoms of dehydration.

I *start* trying to hydrate and it’s like my body thinks this is the best time to start giving me all those dehydration symptoms it doesn’t even bother with when I’m not drinking water because it’s just given up on me listening to them.

I drank 64 oz of water yesterday and woke up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and my throat scratchy.

I know that I need to keep drinking water in large quantities for a period of time for my body to chill the fuck out again, but words can’t describe how tempting it is to just go back to being a cactus.

Hydrating sucks.

!rant Spent days reading Unicode docs, trying to make sense of what codepoints were included in every Unicode property escape in JavaScript and awk’ing the heck out of the different text files associated with them.

Then at around midnight the other night, it came to me. I was an idiot.

I could literally just create an array including every Unicode codepoint and write a program to iterate through the array and test if it matched against a Unicode property escape.

Unicode array: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

Program to compare against Unicode property escape: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

So. Much. Easier.

Happy 2024, friends.

I really need to learn to think through how many stitches I’m putting into the first row of a project.

- Takes over an hour to do one row
- Already used more than 2k yards on it and it’s not even short blanket length yet (though width is ridiculous)

Started a new blanket with stitches I’ve never tried before. Bottom is Victorian stitch, followed by a few rows of double crochet, followed by alpine stitch.

As a legal thing at work I need to have someone verify my citizenship by filling out a form for my I-9. They ask the person for their title. My husband can’t be serious, so he put that his title is “Keeper of the Swans”.

Here’s hoping I don’t have an awkward convo with legal over the validity of verification by a man claiming the title “Keeper of the Swans”

In his _defense_, the form didn’t let him leave “Title” blank.

Mounjaro side effects are kicking my ass. Second week somehow worse than the first week.

First week, day after shot was the worst. Had really bad nausea and only managed to eat 10 saltines. All day.

Second week, two days after shot, woke up just in time to go to the bathroom and projectile vomit (making me acutely aware of the fact that I haven’t puked in *years*). Took that day and the next off work.

Now I’m feeling a lot better on the puke/nausea front, but constipated as heck, desperately hoping that that resolves soon, and going back to work.

But self-reflections are due.

Y’all don’t know how much I hate writing self-reflections.

But I’ve lost almost a pound a day the last 10 days, so … yay?

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

Today was my last day before taking a week off from work. When I originally pushed my branch, GitHub knew I had 7 files changed. I squashed my commits and pushed so that there was one commit. GitHub then decided I had Infinity files changed. Fun way to end the week, posting “I *swear* that I didn’t just put up a PR for review before taking a week off that has Infinity file changes.”

It was then, after three hours of trying to get random tests to pass that she realized that when she refactored to make the function more verbose and to add comments, she had accidentally typed one `&` instead of two. And it took someone else looking at it to notice.

Words cannot express how frustrated I am with myself.

!rant
I did a lightning talk as part of a livestream on Friday!

Public speaking, good at it I am not jajaja

https://youtu.be/RtASfQrr6YQ

Today in Amy can’t remember words, I forgot the word nostalgia and instead said “pangs of wistful memory”. You’re welcome.

If there was a team architect role at your company per team that had no financial benefit tied to it and you were told it had no bearing on promotional chances and it came with a lot of extra responsibility and then you were asked to be interviewed (technical and behavioral) by two people outside your team in order for your manager to determine who on your team should have that role even though the last TA (who left the company) on your team was literally chosen by popular vote… would you do it? Would you feel insulted being asked?

Crocheted a Doctor Who season 12 scarf and then crocheted a mini version so my husband’s cat could match with him.

My work computer _really_ doesn’t like me.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with my mother for as long as I remember and made the decision years ago to more or less cut her out of my life. I thought if anything happened to her, I’d be okay, that it wouldn’t affect me.

But my mum died on Sunday.

And I’m not okay.