AWS: Want Serverless? We’ve got 84 data centers!

GCP: Want Serverless? We’ve got 88 data centers!

Azure: Want Serverless? We’ve got 164 data centers!

…

Blockchain: Want Serverless? We’ve got ∞ data centers!

The opposite problem also exists.

I had first.last@gmail.com and indeed got a lot of email that isn't mine. A few years back I switched to token1.token2@gmail.com, where token1 = something vaguely similar but not my first name, and token2 = nonsense word. Basically an address that is something between random string and insider joke.

Of course I always include my correct real name in the From: field, fill it correctly in all the relevant fields on forms and have never suggested to anyone that my actual name is "Token1 Token2". Nevertheless it's not uncommon for people to assume that this is my name, and I get people writing to me "Hi Token1," or "Dear Ms. Token2". I even had an expensive electronic item shipped to my correct home address but addressed to Token1 Token2, and returned to sender, since such a person doesn't live here (and likely doesn't exists at all).

Some people just don't understand how email addresses work.

A decentralized blog … what a splendid idea!

Inspiring, uplifting and beautiful, Long Promised Road surveys the life and career of beach boy Brian Wilson. A gentle, if tortured, soul, who continues to find refuge in creating beautiful, weird music.

https://intellectronica.net/ (mostly just aggregates stuff I post elsewhere, also some local posts). Hugo and a bunch of Python scripts for scrapping, GH actions and deploying to Azure Static Web Apps.

Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State [The Knowledge Project Ep. #134]

Balaji Srinivasan makes a return appearance to The Knowledge Project, this time to go in-depth on Web3, Crypto, and the state of the world today. Srinivasan offers his unfiltered thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of established democracies, the Russia-Ukraine situation, housing as an investment, education, legacy wealth, and which country he would bet on to dominate the future.

You might not agree with everything, you might not agree with anything, but if you’re looking for an opportunity to hear about the extreme libertarian take on Web3 and its place in our future from someone who’s intelligent, articulate and well-meaning, this is it.

I just signed A Declaration for the Interdependence of Cyberspace! (about) sig:0xc4b0dddef8f868dde539f75dc6dbdebf1620ae4aa6d61480a234afcd1557dcea6faf84a5d102db29563be92016444beda6a794f315f8a2d19d38e76d15d9810e1c

Resolved my first manifold market, on the rather mundane and meta question of whether Manifold Markets will provide a non-Google login by April (no, they didn’t). I took the liberty to resolve it 3 hours too early (the official end of the month is at midnight when I usually sleep) but I think that’s acceptable by Manifold Markets’ relaxed standards. During the month and a half of the market’s lifetime it behaved pretty much as expected - initially predicting high probability (driven by many hopeful users) and converging towards single digit as the deadline approached with no sign that the feature will be released.

Snipd is a new podcast player with some really cool AI features. Talk is automatically transcribed and the podcast is divided into several chapters for easy lookup and for saving fragments as highlights to Readwise. It also has a nice podcast discovery system based on these fragments.

What seems to work for me and many people is: soon after you join, start meeting with many people one on one. First with your immediate team, then with people in closely related teams, stakeholders, people doing a similar role, people who are a bit more senior, etc ... It can be a bit awkward initially to schedule these meetings, but almost everyone would be happy to have a chat, tell you about themselves, the company, the projects they're working on. They will often also tell you about other people you should be talking to. Listen well - people will tell you what's important, what they would be interested in collaborating on, what are some gotchas you should watch out for. After a while you'll kinda naturally get a feel for who are "your people", so just continue talking to them and find excuses to do cool stuff together. Most people are biased towards not doing enough of this sort of thing, so unless you know yourself to be some kind of hyper-social connector, assume that you're not doing enough of that and correct by forcing yourself to do more. A good rule of thumb is to meet someone new every day for a few weeks.

- Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't by Jeffrey Pfeffer

- What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith

These two books are not specifically on the topic of becoming an engineering manager but cover the important aspects of how to work effectively as a leader in organizations. Turns out that's very important too.

Excellent book. Also many great posts on his blog https://lethain.com/

Manifold requires users to log in with their Google ID, which is undesirable to some users. Will a feature be added where users can use a username or email and password combination to log in directly and without required a connected Google account?

Resolved to YES if on 2025-01-01: - 10 cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants - Have a taxi service of fully self-driving cars (no test, backup or remote human driver - passengers are the only humans in the car and they control where the car is going by specifying a destination). - The service is generally available (anyone can register for the service and order rides with no restrictions other than the obvious ones that would be placed on similar human-operated services like Uber and Lyft - for example: need a smartphone, credit card), subject to availability (supply constraints are OK). - It is reasonable to assume that the service is not considered a restricted experiment by the operating company or local authorities (based on publicly available media and reports). Mar 4, 8:27pm: John Carmack is betting quite a lot of real money on a very similar proposition, but 5 years later: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1499803694522589187 | https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-2030-self-driving-car-bet/

The Cardano blockchain system is heavily based on Haskel. It is one of the largest ecosystems in this space and is growing rapidly. The author can try to find work with IOHK ( https://iohk.io/ ), the Cardano foundation ( https://cardano.org/ ) or one of several other companies doing commercial or research work around Cardano.

I've been in similar situations and it was both really hard and eventually possible to move on and continue growing and developing. There is no simple answer. What is required is balancing accepting and integrating the past experience with actually moving on and doing new things. You can't have one without the other, and you can't rush things. Rather, you end up advancing one step at a time across both fronts. It often takes longer and requires more effort than you would have liked, so being ready for a long run is important.

Accepting and integrating the past means approaching it neither through rumination nor through avoidance, but with as full awareness as possible and some distance and perspective. Learning whatever there is to learn. Making peace with whatever happened (and most importantly with yourself). Your past will forever be your past, you will never be able to change it, so better get comfortable with that.

Doing new things, living a new life, that's easier said than done, but can also be fun and empowering when you're ready. As the saying goes, today is the first day of the rest of your life. Exciting! But to avoid "contaminating" your future with your past, you really need to also accept and integrate that past. If you don't, the choices you make and patterns you establish might be dominated by that past experience.

Some people can do this all by themselves. Many don't. If you're not sure, assume that you are one of those people who can benefit from getting help and support from a qualified professional. Many people who did will report that this is one of the best investments they made in their lifetime.

The best interviews are designed not to filter out bad candidates but rather to allow good candidates to demonstrate that they are good. The best companies know that and design their interviews in that spirit.

Some technical test interviews appear pointless to experienced candidates because they are designed to give an opportunity to someone without any experience to show that they know enough to get started. That's how some companies can hire people without work experience.

Many (most?) companies are simply bad at hiring and use poorly designed cargo-cult test interviews. They have a vague notion that more successful companies use test interviews so they try to do the same, only without designing an actual effective hiring process. As a result, their hiring is essentially random - they interview some people, which they put through a test interview ritual, and then hire a random selection of these people. Even if you can get a job at such a company, would you want to work somewhere where you'll end up with randomly selected colleagues? These also tend to be the companies that have high employee turnover - they have to let underperformers go to compensate for their random hiring, and the best people leave because they don't like their randomly selected team.

If you have a realistic view of your own skill and fit for the role and the interviews don't make sense then either you're overqualified or it's just a bad company or both, and you wouldn't want that job anyway.

Yes, sometimes, but you need to have a good sense for what is actually impressive to the people reviewing you, not just impress yourself (and you are the easiest person to impress).

Merely the fact that you put in the time to build something isn't going to be that impressive for someone considering you for a senior role. They'll want to know that your work was valuable to others, that it had impact. So if you just built something for fun or as an exercise, I don't think it's worth showing it. But if you wrote or contributed to a popular open-source project, or built something that is used by a large number of people, or you got published somewhere respectable, or you were successful in achieving some impressive goal like helping a community you care about, do share.

Make sure to explain how your work was impactful with numbers, quotes, use-cases, etc...

Are you already working or can get a job at a large/growing company? Such companies have a need to fill very specific roles that are adjacent to engineering (for example: project/program manager, people/business manager, architect, writer, etc) and often make it easy for strong performers to make a lateral move. The advantage is the you can gain experience and refocus your career without having to start from scratch.

Map the book before starting to read end-to-end. Review the chapters, and the internal structure. Develop a mental plan for what you're going to learn from the book, and only then start reading. You'll be able to vary the speed a lot - some things you'll read very carefully and even reread to make sure you understand (and take notes for stuff you'll want to remember), other parts you'll skim or even skip altogether.

I took https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-mind-is-flat and it was great. Loved the book and the course was a great complement. The platform is nothing to write home about but the course itself was so good it didn't matter at all.

the owls are not what they seem

dog bites man

There are exceptions, but the vast majority of tech positions at Google are for generalists. Hiring managers, interviewers and hiring committees look for strong signal that a candidate is a good generalist and only incidentally that they have any specific skills (more as a proof that they are able to acquire a skill to a high level of mastery than out of need for that specific skill).

One day it was all froth and then all of a sudden there was no work. I was lucky enough to have had enough money in the back to be able to spend the following two years studying, travelling and working on open-source software, and actually had a really good time that I look back on fondly, but I knew many people who had to switch from a very lucrative job at a startup to waiting tables and such.

Lesson: if you're making good money now, save (and if you then find yourself with nothing to do which pays, try to make the best of that time by doing interesting things that you would normally not have the time to do).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita#Animal_welfare_contro...

The Emacs interactive tutorial (type "C-h t" to start) is awesome. After you complete it you know all Emacs basics and can get to work.

Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

Beautiful book, full of wisdom. It's short but I had to read it multiple times (and I'll probably read it many times more, each time discovering something new and deeper and relevant to my current state of play).