I finally finished up my post on Bibilobunny, my book note extraction tool for Kindle and Play Books:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

I hope to add support for getting notes off Nook and Kobo next. You can follow the instructions to create your own book quote bot, and you can follow mine here: https://tweeflood.com/@bookquotebot

8am meeting on Monday. It gets cancelled at 5am (while I'm asleep) and gets moved to tomorrow .. at 8am 😪 😡

I hate working with Europeans

I've been using Void Linux on servers for years. I decided to finally contribute some packages, and wrote a tool to make it easier to build packages outside of the standard repository. This post covers some useful tools in Void, my voidup package building tool, and many of the issues I encountered which make me wonder if I should keep support Void Linux.

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

I'm not one of those people who can just buy a phone and use it. I have to unlock it, flash it, de-google it and customize it before first use. I don't changes phones often, but my 2019 phone is slowly dying.

Here's my whole new setup with a Sony Xperia 1 V:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

Is there anything more demoralizing and cringe than the All Hands Meeting?

What is up with the Internet Archive?

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/...

Performance review again. I don't know why our company bothers. We're a startup, everyone here has survived two rounds of layoffs, and we barely hire anyone new to fill vacant slots even as we got series D funding.

At every other company I've been with, a performance review is like two forums, or a single page essay .. maybe a round of 1 paragraph feedback reports from some teammates.

At my current shop, it's a full on Pando assessment. It takes an hour to get through. Then it takes two hours to go through it with your manager, only for maybe 3 people to get promotions every year and less than 5% of people get any type of pay change.

It's so exhausting.

A job description that looks like it was written by actual developers

I've been at this company 2 years and 9 months. I never use e-mail. Evolution just runs for the calendar notices.

Man, this guy really hates the nano editor:

https://github.com/rwxrob/nano

I archive a lot of shit. I've been archiving YouToob videos for the past few years. Nearly 20% of my archived collection is no longer available on YouTube:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

I wrote a tool if you want to check your collection too:

https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/youboot

The project lead I have likes to go cowboy and run off and do a bunch of stuff on his own. He makes cards, assigns them to me, and then goes and does it himself negating my work.

He's engineering all our graphql queries to be totally different from literally everything else that exists in the codebase (every mutation is idempotent). The frontend guy brought it up and agreeded with me.

In our alignment meeting, the project lead tried to say these weren't bugs; that we can just handle the state on the frontend. I said they were definitely bugs that should be fixed on the backend.

Guy then says "You approved all my code reviews," implying I approved of the way we were doing things and they weren't bugs.

I told him, "I'm not trying to assign blame," and also, "Yes, I missed those bugs in code review."

I am fucking sick of this guy.

Spent yesterday working on a card for adjusting a Graph query to properly sort records. Made all the specs. Tests them all. It gets approved.

Rebased today, and the project lead (who made the card I worked on, told me to work on it and approved my PR) put in a sorting scope that's totally different, in order to "unblock" a frontend dev.

After examining it and discussing it, my work was totally unnecessary, and didn't do what we really needed anyway. Closed my PR. Don't feel like doing shit today.

I've been trying Hyprland for the past couple of months. So far, it's the best tiling composer I've seen:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

The C Standard Library has a Hash Table implementation, and it's a man-made horror beyond comprehension:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Ruby code review tells me to add additional scopes to an unrelated model

Literally scope creep

My primary Linux box has been getting rolling updates since 2012. The machine has changed, but I keep copying the current image over. It's a bit of an involved process, and I finally turned all my old notes into a kinda reference guide:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

Finally published it, since I think I'm going to switch to zfsbootmenu to make the whole process easier using snapshots.

Weird frontend problem with a test that doesn't make any sense. Ask two frontend engineers and they're not sure what's going on. Rebased today and it passed. 🤷

MAGIC!

I don't like contributing to e-waste. I also don't buy the "extended warranties" because most things I just repair myself.

My Dell died just short of two years. It is my work laptop, so I replaced it with a Framework, but I also wanted to fix the Dell. This was the process:

https://battlepenguin.com/technolog...

TL;DR ...I still failed. Hopefully the eBayed parts will make themselves into a refurb. After putting together a Framework, I can't see myself using another laptop brand ever. I hope it holds up.

This Pull Requests requires code reviews from four different teams, and most people in those teams are in timezones where they're already off work and I just started. 😩

I was assigned as an on-boarding buddy for a new hire in finance. I wish I had know they were hiring finance as I would have recommended a friend who had to relocate to Nashville to get her job back with Amazon.

They're hiring finance and sales people, but my company has yet to replace any of the developers who have left since the layoff last year. It's a startup, so I understand them needing to generate revenue more than anything else, but it really doesn't look good for the company.

I got the logic for the time off rules wrong .. or rather the people who wrote this didn't bother to have the functions make sense. There's an `effective()` function .. which also includes all the holidays for previous years (how the hell are they still effective?!).

I'll just ask in the time-off room ... oh look ... no one has posted any chats in here for months. It's all just log messages. I bet everyone has it muted.

I hate working on this shit.

I haven't been playing as many games lately. After 36 hours over the course of 8 weeks, I finally got through Stellar Blade. Not the greatest and a rough start, but overall I give it a 73%. Read my (spoiler free) review:

https://battlepenguin.com/gaming/...

I met my manager over the weekend. I've worked with him for over two years and we've never met in person. He was vacationing in the US with his wife and daughter and I drove out to the beach to see them and have lunch.

I really hate how stuff can disappear off the Internet, especially if it's behind a paywall. People aren't encouraged to download and archive stuff. I just wrote this script to archive things off of Locals:

https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/...

I really rushed to get it done because my subscriptions are expiring, and I really no longer want to support these people:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/...

My company has a board on Blind (semi-anonymous social network for corporate employees). We're a startup and have had two layoffs in the past two years, with very few pay increases.

I voiced my thoughts about the future of the company. We're pulling in a lot of revenue (millions a month) but still have a crazy amount of costs.

Someone responded that a bunch of our revenue ops people left for other companies. Another person replied the director that left had a good opportunity, thought we'd get another round of funding and that the company has had some purchase offers (with valuation being the big sticking point).

If it's true, it should feel like some job security. I can't help but also wonder if anon is lying so people purchase more of their stock options to generate more runway.

I finished up this blog post listing every tablet I've ever owned. I had a Samsung that lasted eight years, but it fell off my bed and the screen started displaying only magenta.

https://battlepenguin.com/technolog...

I get plenty of sleep and wake up to my manager talking about escalating tickets. I'm on support this week and my queue was empty yesterday, but there were several new "urgent" requests that never got assigned to me.

Wait, so I'm responsible to assigning tickets to myself now? Our support is so shitty now. Our good document got hacked to pieces and now I can't find anything, and the customer support people are constantly bitching if things aren't done right now for tickets I was assigned while I was asleep.

I asked a team member about a simple update for a customer's country/state code and he started saying we should build an event handler and publish and event and I'm like "woah woah... this is before they're engaged."

Thankfully he said, in that case, my original idea of just handling the update is correct. Phew ... that could have been way more complicated than it needed to be.

I finished up a blog post on ignoring notifications, for those of you who want to learn about killing that dopamine hit:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosoph...