Finishing my job and leaving the IT industry! My last day is Wednesday, then I'm going to ArcTanGent, then a week off and then I start a PGCE (PostGraduate Certificate in Education, the qualification in the UK to be a teacher).
The main point is that you get a lot more direct immediate reward from helping a 14-year-old understand quadratic equations than writing some code that lets a scientist access environmental data so they can do research that might help the government make a policy change that may improve biodiversity or flood/drought resilience. Also I think it'll take away a lot of opportunity for distractions (like lobste.rs...), and I shouldn't have to compete with LLMs any more.
It's the biggest career shift I've done in a while though, and it is going to be quite a shock having to turn up at an exact time looking presentable, rather than the relaxed academic/software culture I've got used to for the last 6.5 years.
I had qualifying to teach in mind from early on, but I wasn’t quite ready to do so for a few reasons at the beginning. Unfortunately when I started planning to do so in 2021, I discovered that Australia had phased out the single-year postgraduate diploma option five years prior. Had I learned that was happening back in 2015, I would probably have done it then; but the new best option ended up being two and a half years spread across three years (having to include a bit more undergraduate maths as well, because of the selection of university required for doing it remotely, as I had moved to the country), and at that point I just couldn’t stomach it. I wonder how many good potential teachers they’ve lost with that move. And at the same time they started some other scheme whereby some could start full-time teaching only six weeks into their master’s degree. Really doesn’t make much sense to me.
Now I live in India instead. I might follow things up here at some point. It hasn’t been clear to me quite what the requirements are, because a lot of things simply aren’t done online here, so you end up with wildly mixed and inconsistent and incorrect information.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that. I'm not entirely against it due to teacher opsec though. It's just the web interface, the actual ActivityPub endpoints are all fine, so I think you should still be able to follow me by pasting my handle into your client.
Yeah, I gotcha now. If you move forward with the teaching thing, do post!
I'm blocked to do my paperwork for a similar course in Spain until September 1st when my university reopens. I have my doubts about what stuff to teach and how (gov't worker vs. private schools, etc. but also maths, technology, coding...)
Congrats and good luck becoming a teacher! I suspect your background will be an asset to your future students who are interested in learning how to code but don't know where to begin.
I was under the impression that teaching/education in the UK was being highly pressured/replaced by LLMs, so I hope I'm wrong and I wish you good luck! I wish I could switch to something more "IRL", too.
Working, but also being anxious about my career. I won't be too specific as to not sour the mood too much, but the recent developments have me uneasy about the LLMs and our industry as a whole. I'm not necessarily worried I'm gonna be replaced on a technical merit, but on an economical one. More and more companies are drinking the Kool-Aid and it feels like just a matter of time until mine does too and starts buying into the alleged "cost savings" and optimizations. This is a problem because I don't have a degree and my health issues would make it difficult (if not impossible) to perform many other jobs.
In short, I'm going to try and think about possible options if working in tech ends up not being feasible, happy to read any recommendations you might have!
Other than that, I started reading a friend's blog post on adders (ripple carry, carry skip, etc.), and since I lack formal education in that regard, I'm taking my sweet time digesting and understanding it. Started a side project to aid me in that, namely a visualizer where you can put a bunch of different logic gates, connect them with wires and go through the process step by step to better understand it. Sebastian Lague's video is a big inspiration, but I'm not aiming for something as general purpose as that -- I want this toy to satisfy mostly my needs and potentially be helpful to others.
Working on more pixelart for my games and my blog articles, i just published one and lets say, the style i converged on is just walking the line between shitty and funny, see evidence 1 and 2. Both from the same article about ARMv7 emulator improvements. Otherwise at $WORK performance stuff so the customers can actually use the product and in bilbao ill probably visit the start of everyone going crazy for the Aste Nagusia
Digging deep into the Linux kernel to learn what can cause a process to be delayed when woken up from a nanosleep, specifically the things that cause a delay BEFORE the task enters the run queue.
Took last week off for vacation with my family, so this week I'll be catching up.
An automation I built broke while I was out of town and I realized no one knew how to fix it. Fortunately there was a simple workaround, but I'll be writing documentation for it and fixing the problem with it.
Honestly just doing projects I've been meaning to. I quit a crappy job last month and have been living on my savings for a month now (my buffer is fine, so finding work is not a concern), plus I've been on SSRI's for two months now. Safe to say it's been good, and I'm enjoying programming without the pressure from higher-ups.
The most important thing for me to do is keep translating slides into Spanish and practicing an upcoming remote talk on Wednesday. I've never given a talk in Spanish before so I'm excited!
Interleaved with that I'm helping somebody else with an upcoming short talk they'll give about how constant lookup works in Ruby, which is fun to help with and relearn some stuff!
On Thursday and Friday, I really ought to try to get momentum behind deploying a more complex domain to AWS lambda using my framework. Somebody else did the work to make that possible and I was able to do it with a simple domain. I want to do it with a complex domain and use what I learn to help make their gem better as well as make my framework better. There's definitely a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot vibe there but definitely must focus on the Spanish talk first.
At work I'm upgrading a library that had a fairly disruptive release where they made big changes in C++ compatibility and moved and renamed basically everything, as well as deprecated some older features we're using. I hadn't worked with this code much, so I'm using the opportunity to learn that area of the codebase, move to more modern C++ on our end, and refactor things a bit.
I've been thinking about quitting and taking 6 months off to get out of a non-compete agreement that I regret signing, but before I do anything that extreme I need to think it through a bit and come up with a plan. I wouldn't mind getting out of software development entirely, but I'm not sure where to start.
Outside of work I'm waiting for a new System76 laptop to arrive and will have some work to do setting it up.
Getting into making Android apps - set up an Android emulator on my laptop which I'm enjoying because my last one didn't have GPU acceleration.
Smoooooth!
Also I can finally try an authentic phone when looking at how webapps display on phones. Usually when I get in the zone, dealing with physical phones is frustrating, scrcpy was good for a while, but this is faster, and I don't have to reach for a phone.
Using my homelab Forgejo Actions CI more and continuing to learn electronics.
Firecracker helps me a lot to set up Forgejo Actions in kubernetes. Last year I could not figure out how to run the forgejo actions runner in Kubernetes. I think Docker-in-Docker worked but could not figure out unprivileged DinD so I cut it. With Firecracker as a security boundary for runner pods, I can just make a Forgejo Actions runner image with plain old Docker, run the container as root and im off.
Electronics wise I spent a while trying to install OpenWrt on an unsupported router (TP-Link Archer c50 ver2). Failing to solder UArt with a cheap 20W gun and plumbers flux. Shorting one of my ESP32-C3s with impatient dumb probing. I love that the thing ran MIPS. I got root via injecting shell commands via ping to have telnet run bash. Sadly I ended up bricking it after patching the boot partition in an attempt to add TFTP boot path. Anyway, I have another unsupported router in my closet so time for attempt #2.
Vacation! For the first time in a year I'm on vacation. I'll take the time to spend time with my daughter, fix things around the house, do some interior decorating to make our place nicer to live in. And I think release the three side-gigs that I'm building to hedge myself against job instability due to AI shenanigans. I'll feel a lot better if I have at least some money coming in that is not directly related to a third-party employer. All three are very close to a public beta (one in particular that I'm focusing on right now).
Finishing my job and leaving the IT industry! My last day is Wednesday, then I'm going to ArcTanGent, then a week off and then I start a PGCE (PostGraduate Certificate in Education, the qualification in the UK to be a teacher).
The main point is that you get a lot more direct immediate reward from helping a 14-year-old understand quadratic equations than writing some code that lets a scientist access environmental data so they can do research that might help the government make a policy change that may improve biodiversity or flood/drought resilience. Also I think it'll take away a lot of opportunity for distractions (like lobste.rs...), and I shouldn't have to compete with LLMs any more.
It's the biggest career shift I've done in a while though, and it is going to be quite a shock having to turn up at an exact time looking presentable, rather than the relaxed academic/software culture I've got used to for the last 6.5 years.
I had qualifying to teach in mind from early on, but I wasn’t quite ready to do so for a few reasons at the beginning. Unfortunately when I started planning to do so in 2021, I discovered that Australia had phased out the single-year postgraduate diploma option five years prior. Had I learned that was happening back in 2015, I would probably have done it then; but the new best option ended up being two and a half years spread across three years (having to include a bit more undergraduate maths as well, because of the selection of university required for doing it remotely, as I had moved to the country), and at that point I just couldn’t stomach it. I wonder how many good potential teachers they’ve lost with that move. And at the same time they started some other scheme whereby some could start full-time teaching only six weeks into their master’s degree. Really doesn’t make much sense to me.
Now I live in India instead. I might follow things up here at some point. It hasn’t been clear to me quite what the requirements are, because a lot of things simply aren’t done online here, so you end up with wildly mixed and inconsistent and incorrect information.
I might do a similar thing. Thought about following you via ActivityPub but the link in your profile errors.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that. I'm not entirely against it due to teacher opsec though. It's just the web interface, the actual ActivityPub endpoints are all fine, so I think you should still be able to follow me by pasting my handle into your client.
Yeah, I gotcha now. If you move forward with the teaching thing, do post!
I'm blocked to do my paperwork for a similar course in Spain until September 1st when my university reopens. I have my doubts about what stuff to teach and how (gov't worker vs. private schools, etc. but also maths, technology, coding...)
Congrats and good luck becoming a teacher! I suspect your background will be an asset to your future students who are interested in learning how to code but don't know where to begin.
I was under the impression that teaching/education in the UK was being highly pressured/replaced by LLMs, so I hope I'm wrong and I wish you good luck! I wish I could switch to something more "IRL", too.
Working, but also being anxious about my career. I won't be too specific as to not sour the mood too much, but the recent developments have me uneasy about the LLMs and our industry as a whole. I'm not necessarily worried I'm gonna be replaced on a technical merit, but on an economical one. More and more companies are drinking the Kool-Aid and it feels like just a matter of time until mine does too and starts buying into the alleged "cost savings" and optimizations. This is a problem because I don't have a degree and my health issues would make it difficult (if not impossible) to perform many other jobs.
In short, I'm going to try and think about possible options if working in tech ends up not being feasible, happy to read any recommendations you might have!
Other than that, I started reading a friend's blog post on adders (ripple carry, carry skip, etc.), and since I lack formal education in that regard, I'm taking my sweet time digesting and understanding it. Started a side project to aid me in that, namely a visualizer where you can put a bunch of different logic gates, connect them with wires and go through the process step by step to better understand it. Sebastian Lague's video is a big inspiration, but I'm not aiming for something as general purpose as that -- I want this toy to satisfy mostly my needs and potentially be helpful to others.
Working on more pixelart for my games and my blog articles, i just published one and lets say, the style i converged on is just walking the line between shitty and funny, see evidence 1 and 2. Both from the same article about ARMv7 emulator improvements. Otherwise at $WORK performance stuff so the customers can actually use the product and in bilbao ill probably visit the start of everyone going crazy for the Aste Nagusia
What are you using to make pixel art?
aseprite, its awesome
Digging deep into the Linux kernel to learn what can cause a process to be delayed when woken up from a nanosleep, specifically the things that cause a delay BEFORE the task enters the run queue.
Nothing important. I’m just trying to organize my move to the new house.
Took last week off for vacation with my family, so this week I'll be catching up.
An automation I built broke while I was out of town and I realized no one knew how to fix it. Fortunately there was a simple workaround, but I'll be writing documentation for it and fixing the problem with it.
Also gonna keep trying to learn k.
Exploring the "pi" coding agent. Hearing so many good things about it so I want to do a small project with it to build up some experience.
Let me know what kind of extensions you end up choosing. Very curious what's good now
Honestly just doing projects I've been meaning to. I quit a crappy job last month and have been living on my savings for a month now (my buffer is fine, so finding work is not a concern), plus I've been on SSRI's for two months now. Safe to say it's been good, and I'm enjoying programming without the pressure from higher-ups.
Working on my post on an Architecture for Passwordless Authentication for Web Applications.
Oncall and interrupts rotation at work this week.
The most important thing for me to do is keep translating slides into Spanish and practicing an upcoming remote talk on Wednesday. I've never given a talk in Spanish before so I'm excited!
Interleaved with that I'm helping somebody else with an upcoming short talk they'll give about how constant lookup works in Ruby, which is fun to help with and relearn some stuff!
On Thursday and Friday, I really ought to try to get momentum behind deploying a more complex domain to AWS lambda using my framework. Somebody else did the work to make that possible and I was able to do it with a simple domain. I want to do it with a complex domain and use what I learn to help make their gem better as well as make my framework better. There's definitely a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot vibe there but definitely must focus on the Spanish talk first.
Will be a mighty fun week for me, though!
Working and learning. I am going to make bindings to C3 of some C library, so currently deep learning the topic.
Watching https://www.githubstatus.com/ until I can work again, just like anyone else…
At work I'm upgrading a library that had a fairly disruptive release where they made big changes in C++ compatibility and moved and renamed basically everything, as well as deprecated some older features we're using. I hadn't worked with this code much, so I'm using the opportunity to learn that area of the codebase, move to more modern C++ on our end, and refactor things a bit.
I've been thinking about quitting and taking 6 months off to get out of a non-compete agreement that I regret signing, but before I do anything that extreme I need to think it through a bit and come up with a plan. I wouldn't mind getting out of software development entirely, but I'm not sure where to start.
Outside of work I'm waiting for a new System76 laptop to arrive and will have some work to do setting it up.
Getting into making Android apps - set up an Android emulator on my laptop which I'm enjoying because my last one didn't have GPU acceleration.
Smoooooth!
Also I can finally try an authentic phone when looking at how webapps display on phones. Usually when I get in the zone, dealing with physical phones is frustrating, scrcpy was good for a while, but this is faster, and I don't have to reach for a phone.
Using my homelab Forgejo Actions CI more and continuing to learn electronics.
Firecracker helps me a lot to set up Forgejo Actions in kubernetes. Last year I could not figure out how to run the forgejo actions runner in Kubernetes. I think Docker-in-Docker worked but could not figure out unprivileged DinD so I cut it. With Firecracker as a security boundary for runner pods, I can just make a Forgejo Actions runner image with plain old Docker, run the container as root and im off.
Electronics wise I spent a while trying to install OpenWrt on an unsupported router (TP-Link Archer c50 ver2). Failing to solder UArt with a cheap 20W gun and plumbers flux. Shorting one of my ESP32-C3s with impatient dumb probing. I love that the thing ran MIPS. I got root via injecting shell commands via ping to have telnet run bash. Sadly I ended up bricking it after patching the boot partition in an attempt to add TFTP boot path. Anyway, I have another unsupported router in my closet so time for attempt #2.
An inexpensive usb-c iron and proper flux would make it so much easier and can be had for <$50, which will pay for itself if you avoid scrapping even a handful of parts/pcbs. There are plenty of options, but could do worse than https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-soldering-iron/ and https://www.chipquik.com/store/index.php?cPath=350
I'm going to implement an ANF based IR for the compiler I've been working on for the past 7 years.
Vacation! For the first time in a year I'm on vacation. I'll take the time to spend time with my daughter, fix things around the house, do some interior decorating to make our place nicer to live in. And I think release the three side-gigs that I'm building to hedge myself against job instability due to AI shenanigans. I'll feel a lot better if I have at least some money coming in that is not directly related to a third-party employer. All three are very close to a public beta (one in particular that I'm focusing on right now).