The state of high value startups

Floating points...

Small signs of the growing dystopia:

https://nohello.net/en/

I was talking to some buddies of mine the other day about remote work: is it sustainable long term. If remote work starts to collapse, everyone who has moved out of the cities might find themselves unable to afford homes. I wrote a whole post about it here:

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

Write nothing; deploy nowhere:

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/...

The Owen Wilson Wow API:

https://owen-wilson-wow-api.herokuapp.com/...

New Ranger

Video social calls are the absolute worst. I have a shitty Intel 11 series chip in my laptop; which is a waste of sand. My laptop often slows to a crawl on calls, so I can't work on things, and I have to listen to them all prattle on about kids and things I don't care at all about. Sometimes we play games, which is tolerable. My company is international and 100% remote, so this will never end so long as I work for them.

Someone in the #us slack channel posted about how, if other Americas were dealing with roe v wade, they could come to the mental health channel.

I really want to respond about how Americans are a diverse group, and some are thankful for a judgement that preserves what some consider life, and to keep our diverse opinions in mind.

But I'm not going to. I'm not stupid. It's not worth starting a fight or potentially losing a job over. So I remain silent, like a coward.

I earn a lot of money, enough to ignore ideology I don't agree with, and messages that would have been considered totally inappropriate at one time.

I hate the growing trend in IT to be "diversity" or "embrace diversity." It's Orwellian because embracing diversity is a form of uniformity. None of these companies want diverse ideas; they want you to believe in a specific ideology.

I wrote a full article on this the other week:

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

I've been at my new company for about a month. It's a startup that went from a dozen people last year to over two hundred right now. During the dot com era, that type of growth typically spelled disaster. It's crazy how many people I've met have only been at this shop for one to three months. Everyone is 100% remote, across multiple countries, and vast timezones.

Our company is changing the default branch on our main repo from master to main.

We're literally on the verge of global genocide and a holocaust, and people are worried about over-sensitive people's feelings. I'm sure a branch change will end racism.

I started a new job, got through on-boarding and took my first ticket. Made my modification to the code base and the tests fail .. each time I run them .. on different tests .. randomly.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

Use your status codes

funny out of context...

I drew the on-call rotation for Christmas this year. I really hope I get that job offer so I can throw a wrench into the entire rotation.

Team member just requested a code review in French (s'il vous plaît)

Yea, I'm not reviewing your code you pretentious prick

I just went through a super long debugging process trying to figure out what was going on with my ZFS volumes. It turned out I had bad memory:

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

Be prepared...

I finally got around to migrating all my e-mail services off an ancient OpenBSD 6.3 VM and onto my current Docker Infrastructure:

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

Finally go around to de-Googling my phone:

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

Feels good reducing my tracking footprint

Apple legacy recovery...

New guy likes to both approve and merge other people's pull requests have he approves them. Please don't merge other people's pull/merge requests. Other team members may have comments too! The person who created it should merge it.

Kotlin and nested pair destructing...

Remember defragging?

All Tech meetings: I think over 50% of people open the video and keep it on mute, 45% use it as background noise while they code, and maybe 5% of people actually pay attention.

Encapsulation

I finally got IPv6 working on my home network with a custom Linux router. It's pretty neat. I wrote a full tutorial:

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

The most senior person on the devops team just turned in his two week notice. I started a month after him and am now the most senior. Our old manager was fired back in the spring.

I really need a new job.

We have a brand new employee who won't ever shut the hell up. He likes talking about "my scripts" a whole lot. Guy really loves scripts. He'd admitted to copying these strings from his previous company.

We had an all-tech meeting today and he went on and on, talking about what was at this old company. He's so damn annoying. Listening to him is pure cringe.