Apples pulled us back into office 3 days a week now and I get about 25% less work done between driving, parking, walking across campus, walking .2 mile to the bathroom and cooler talk.

This week in k8s land, learning persistent volumes and claims. Im hating every moment.

Man apples been a lot of pressure. I’m either going to acclimate to this high stress environment or burn out. I’ve had to learn to deploy a k8s cluster and manage one in 3 months along side maintaining an app, shipping features and bug maintenance. They treat devs like special ops all in ones. It’s great experience and there are dead periods but the learning potential is a lot.

Trying to transition to 50% of my work being in VIM. Using Macs ultimate vim package and its pretty great. But Im having trouble with a few things that maybe you seasoned vim users can help with.

1.) I prefer two tmux panes over using vsplit. Is there a way of using visual copy/paste between two vim sessions ?

2.) I need more code completion. Ctrl+x -> Ctrl+o isnt doing it for me coming from jetbrains especially when dealing with alot of interfaces. Is this where we just admit that jetbrains is doing alot of stuff that vim was never meant to or is there something out there that competes ?

3.) PHP/Nodejs debugger: is there a preferred solution for vim ?

Just got into tmux after years of iterm2. Now I’m wondering what I might be missing with eMacs.

I open this app for the first time in 6 months. It crashes on the first rant I read. Yep….

Tired of language and framework bashing. Every language is capable of being clear and concise. It’s the programmers job to understand how much hand holding is needed.

Im not on here often anymore. The new jobs got me making decisions left and right and highly focused where my last position left me nothing but time to complain. So I'll be using dev rant primarily for collecting opinions and hearing everyone else's take on best practices.

My question today: What are some best practices and patterns that you guys use with SPA apps? I've been pretty dedicated to the container component abstraction to separate all my business and state store logic from the view component. It doesn't always work like it does on paper and often times works against the flow I need when working with more complexity. Very curious what everyones advise is around separation of components and general principles.

I have a GET endpoint that simply fetches a report but takes multiple filtration parameters. I don't want a crazy long url to abide by and enjoy the idea of these filters being abstracted from the URL where the user can tamper with them so Im base64 encoding a json string representation of the filter parameters.

Is this cringy or brilliant or adequate ?

As an app developer with a focus on web apps, what can I possibly use bitwise operators for?

DDD encourages brute forcing a solution for quick value abstraction followed by later refactoring. Idk how I feel about that.

Im pretty convinced that you cant be an exceptional software engineer and not suffer from some form of OCD

I’m in the background check phase of my verbal offer. The check is on its second week pending which is normal and from the status update it looks like it’s almost done. But my recruiter told me yesterday that I would receive an offer letter by the end of the day that is contingent on the finalization of the background check. I received no letter by the end of the day. It makes me nervous because the VP has to sign off and approve this offer before it can be sent to me. Is it possible that they would put me through seven interviews, many recruiter calls, and now a background check just to tell me that it’s been unapproved last second? My mind goes there instantly , I know realistically the background check phase means I’ve got the job contingent on the fact that I didn’t kill anyone or lie about my résumé. But damn why tell someone they’re getting an offer letter the day of and then let it never happen? I’m losing my shit over here. So much time effort and mental well-being has gone into this process that I can’t even imagine it falling apart

I always have last minute panics during the last background process of hiring stages. I’ve seen people actually get offers pulled over degrees. Granted it was ibm which is a very old school org but it’s always nerve-racking. “Stay positive, stay positive”

I’m Just venting. I’m really not this dramatic in person. Just putting my clouded thoughts out there.

Just realized the PHP of a Pojo is a Popo 👮🏻‍♀️🥁

Got a very surprising call yesterday:

I got the job!! Getting converted 🥳

Pro tip for beginners: It is better to pick an algorithm that remains practical while being simple enough to remember and easily reason with then to have to look up and relearn the harder approach each time its needed.

Of course this comment is not directed towards any approach with highly varying results. If the simplified approach yields 2x the time to execute, by all means use the right approach. What I mean by example is: There are at least 3 different ways you can utilize a sliding window approach. If you combine every approach out there is prob more like 50. Some are complex with dictionaries to track seen values. They remain O(n) but are overkill. Some just use a temp value and call it a day while maintaining same tc. If one clicks with you but is not necessarily the orthodox approach, fuck it.

Use what makes sense. There are mathematical solutions to most problems that can reduce your code to one liners and absolutely no one including yourself will understand what it does. We have to understand that most of us are not math majors but are dedicated to writing comprehensive software.

Anyone in the Austin new silicone valley (round rock)? How are things feeling over there? Would you move into that market if given the chance and a good job?

A fair live code assessment includes at least an email with a description of the problem 10-15 minutes prior. Its a small enough window for the dev to digest the problem without the time to google a solution which if the problem is rephrased with care, should not be easily searched.

If your after the best talent the industry has, the guy that reads algorithm books on his spare time and is an absolute silo of a dev, go ahead and present your Josephus challenge and expect them to ramble off some formula they picked up in their 8 years of math centered schooling.

I’ll eventually be in the position where I’m interviewing regularly. I haven’t been due to the yearly lateral moves needed up until now I’m my career. And I can promise that will never be my expectation regardless of the ego around my team.

Code samples should be discussed, some of the developers best work should be brought to the interview to discuss his approach. If most of his works on private repos, bring their best personal work. If their not working on any open source or personal then 🚩.

Live performances are not realistic. It’s the one time in their careers that they will code for an audience and are expected to on the fly solve issues more complex then their regular work.

Let’s get real

7 days of interviewing and 5 days after no word …. I’m contracting here already. I get but would never condone leaving external candidates waiting. Those contracting on your teams even more so. Mutual respect

Interview question: "So given you have 800,000 orders that are placed an hour, surely this table will grow beyond what our architecture can handle rather quickly. How would you handle this".

Response: "Well indexing can only take you so far (eyes raised at this. They didnt like hearing this). Horizontal partitioning always feels like a quick and temporary fix. Ive heard its actually a sound approach, after a few weeks to archive orders in a json format and store them in an s3 or glacier bucket, depending on how often its needing retrieved. If the user needs their order history often, S3 is infinitely scalable and quick to access. If you want to save money and save it on glacier then customers can make formal requests for their history."

Their response: "..... ok but what if amazon was not at our disposal ?"

Like tf dude, im giving modern solutions to modern problems. Do you want to know that I understand the core basics of design or do you want someone who can keep up with tech and provide sound solutions ?

For those following my interview process with apple, I asked for feedback on one of my 7 interviews.

I’m glad I did. Was very insightful and, well discouraging but helpful. After rambling about the projects I’ve led, green-fielded and planned over the last 7 years for an hour, she replied:

“your very experienced…. But we have a few candidates who are more seasoned. You have the experience but just not the same seasoning”

It’s a senior role at big Texh so I knew what that meant. College graduate, 10+ year track record, neck beard in the industry.

That helped me take it less personal. They’re not after a 27 year old college dropout that clawed his way from startup to startup, leading every chance I took to finally get a shot at big tech while raising 4 kids. They don’t need someone who compulsively assigns two hours a night to get ahead in the industry. They don’t need my sympathy story or my best efforts. They need “seasoning”.

Discouraging and out of my control.

Todays been the worst day ive had in awhile.
Im already awful at doing in live coding interviews. The ability to demonstrate in front of people is just rarely the same as being able to perform without the pressure.

In the interview i was asked to take an array [1,2,3,4,5,6] as example. Provide an "nth" value (lets say 2) and recurse down in this ring around the rosey fashion like [1,3,4,5,6] -> [1,3,5,6] -> [1,3,5] -> [1,5] -> [5].

Just typing it out still makes little sense to me or for that matter, why I would ever need to know this. Has anyone else had to prove this kind of apparent hard skill in an interview ? Ive been contracting with the company and leading projects for half a year. They did a four hour analysis over what I did and felt confident.

This just f'in sucks

I still think node is gonna continue taking the F off server side, eventually becoming a norm of sorts. No matter what organization I join, it’s the same song and dance. Migrating slowly to node services.

I’m not marrying node here so slow the defenses but it’s an undeniably trending pattern

Its just rude to hand someone the ugliest service you wrote and ask them to fix the massive amount of issues with it. I dont care how well we get along, dont F me like that. I will leave jobs over that shit. Its not my job to maintain someones rushed filth when they're still here. You can argue that it is but I wont do it.

Instead of continuing to hand the guy that writes garbage more feature sets, have someone responsible do it while he cleans up his past services.

I had never heard the word cartesian used prior to apple. Now its all I hear. No one can form a complete sentence without using the word "cartesian" and "hollistic".

Every sentence goes like "When looking at thus issue holistically, yada yada cartesian product is restored". The terms lose their ability to project intelligence after being repeated in every standup.

I just about lost my job cause query logging to stdout was enabled and causing OOM crashes across the now live platform. It was a one liner to disable.

crazy how small of things in this field can to make or break you/it.

Personally I’m devastated and tired

Just gave a long overview of nodejs and building servers with it to someone coming from c#/.Net. Explaining the differences between the two kinda gave me more appreciation for node and the freedom it gives devs to build the way they wanna build. Agnostic tooling always wins. Save the opinionated software and visual studio for the birds.

When your given an in between phase at work, seize that shit. Find an excuse to Build something that could be useful and that pushes your boundaries. Do something crazy. Opportunities sometimes are made but most of the time created.

Im really liking python alot.

However I am not enjoying django. The framework feels dated. The documentation still has a template focused approach to it which is understandable sense its a MVTemplate approach. Even the Rest framework utilizes the same "views" convention that just feels wrong coming from years of MVC.

If I know anything at this point its that I learn the quickest by enjoying what im working with so im moving on to either flask or FastAPI which both seem to resemble modern server frameworks more.

Anyone have suggestions on the next thing to stab at ? Preferences ?