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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • This is a very personal question, and it’s really just whatever you are comfortable with. I personally:

    • Try to be open about it and my experiences with friends, if only because I’m sure people had suspected I had it and I so wish someone had mentioned it. I’m willing to cut friendships if I’m judged negatively, but ADHD is common in my social circles so it hasn’t been a huge issue.
    • Have been debating with my ADHD siblings how to broach the subject with my definitely ADHD parents. It’s definitely common among my extended relatives, but I just feel it’s not worth the fight.
    • Would be very guarded in a workplace. Accommodations for ADHD are hilariously trivial asks, but I’m skeptical I’ll ever work somewhere I can (safely) get them.
    • Try to avoid the subject with older generations.

  • This is already said, but it cannot be too emphasized: This is not your fault. This is entirely on them. Three months is far too short to evaluate someone even if they were secretly unhappy with your performance. It might be worth talking to an employment lawyer, but likely you’ll have to take this on the chin. In the immortal words of the great Captain Picard: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”

    As everyone has said, you can expect to get questions about it, and I would definitely have a prepared, rehearsed statement. Some recruiters and hiring managers make a big deal about these sort of things, some won’t even care. Again: this is not your fault and do not be apologetic about it.

    Five weeks is not a lot of time to get a new software job, even in a hot market. This is the unfortunate reality and I would start making contingency plans. If living in NYC remains a goal, then this is a setback but a far smaller one than it may seem right now. You don’t have a mortgage or a family hanging over your head. Moving back to NYC will be in play, likely sooner than you think.

    Spending time on career development is a good idea. Something with a firm outcome like AWS Solutions Architect is also good. I have the associate certification which I started working on while at Amazon. It hasn’t really done much for me, but I’m not seeking positions where it would hold much weight.


  • Mostly just as a wrapper for Docker. The main issue I’ve run into is Docker’s union file system functionality doesn’t work when backed by ZFS, so disk usage can balloon out of control. I wouldn’t use this in production but don’t tell me how to live my life mom.

    Beyond various Docker stacks I also have a Certbot container that uses Snap (sigh), and Hashicorp Vault container which runs as a vanilla SystemD service. I run Wireguard as part of my OPNSense VM. That’s something I would run in a VM since it’s exposed to the internet. I have an older MinIO and Concourse CI Docker Compose config that I’d love to run in LXC but I suspect that isn’t realistic.

    Note on Vault, I haven’t been able to get mlock to work (used to prevent sensitive memory from being swapped). By all accounts it should just work in LXC, but since it isn’t and there’s no swap on the host I just turned it off. I may migrate Vault to a VM at some point.

    I’m personally just interested in lightweight environments with good enough isolation and don’t break all the time over nothing. Docker mostly accomplishes that for me. LXC + Docker also mostly accomplishes that.

    (My heart yearns for FreeBSD Jails but with decent tooling)


  • I originally excited by Podman, but ultimately migrated away from it. Friendship ended with Ubuntu and Docker -> CentOS and Podman -> Proxmox + Debian LXC (which has its own irritations but anyway). Off the top of my head:

    • Can’t attach a containers to multiple networks. Most of my Docker Compose stacks have an Nginx reverse proxy and a network for each service.
    • But you can use pods. However since they share the same network interface if you have multiple legacy services that both insist on, say, port 80 they can’t be in the same pod. They also don’t isolate services, nor can you assert a specific pod is the one listening on a forwarded port.
    • Pods also have DNS issues with Nginx. It kept crashing since it couldn’t resolve the hostnames of the other containers in the pod, even if they were already running. If you launch a shell inside an Nginx container the other container hostnames resolve fine. I suspect the problem is the container is launched before its behind-the-scenes DNS infrastructure is ready.
    • Podman lets you use secrets on normal containers (yay) but if the secret changes you have to recreate the container. Amazing synergy with rotating TLS certificates.
    • Endless issues with SELinux and bind mounts. My Nginx container kept crashing because SELinux didn’t like the TLS certificate bind mount. This is where I reflected on the endless parade of random issues that I had no interest in solving and finally threw in the towel.

    I brought all this up in another community and was told the problem was [paraphrased] “people keep trying to use Podman like they use Docker” - whatever that means. I do like a number of design choices in it, like including the command used to create containers in the metadata, and how it’s easy to integrate into SystemD for things like scheduled updates.

    Cockpit is pretty slick though, need to install it on my bare metal Debian host.


  • I see them as a flawed indicator of the ceiling of someone’s theoretical computer science abilities. Having worked with some brilliant people that career shifted via bootcamps, I will contend there’s value in having that foundation. I also prefer Leetcode problems over having to memorize search algorithms. But yeah, it’s not very reflective of day to day tasks even in R&D heavy projects. The most algorithm heavy thing I’ve ever done was implement Ramer–Douglas–Peucker to convert points from mouse polling into a simplified line.

    (There’s clearly a “it’s what everyone else is doing” aspect to Leetcode, on top of being very practical to run, hence I why don’t see them going anywhere. They’re also as objective as anything in an interview will ever be, so as I always say: it can be so much worse.)

    I intend to make the hacker “dive into an icky codebase armed with a stack trace and fix a bug” aspect of software development a part of my interview process; plus lean more heavily on system design questions which is where non-entry level engineers really ought to shine. The parts that worry me are the ability to create new tests as they inevitably leak, plus whether I can truly objectively evaluate someone’s performance.

    I’m curious what you include and how well it works.


  • Yeah, they kinda suck and they are brutal to go into cold. Having to grind a bunch of leetcode problems is a burden, particularly if you currently have a job and god forbid a family.

    I would still take them over the puzzle questions that used to be popular, or the personality test nonsense that dominates most fields. At least Leetcode problems are reasonably reflective of programming skill. I’ll also take them over vague open ended questions - ain’t nothing more fun than trying to ramble my way into whatever answer the interviewer is secretly looking for.

    Personally, when the day comes when I’m In Charge, I plan on experimenting with more day to day type evaluations. I think there’s potential for things like performing a mock code review or having someone plan out a sprint based on a very detailed design document. “Here’s an icky piece of code, tell me what it does and what you would do to improve it” seems to have fallen out of style, though it’s not clear to me why.

    That said, like it or not it’s how the game is played and not changing anytime soon. Get on the Grind75 train, or don’t and keep failing tech screens.



  • I wouldn’t be. None of these are prescribed for ADHD minus a few at the top. Taking an extended release stimulant isn’t going to put you on the path to needing antipsychotics. Or paying a vet under the table for ketamine for your ‘horse’ or whatever the point of this meme is.


  • The layoff includes Mary Kirby, who’s been a core writer in the Dragon Age franchise since the first game. Saw takes that the layoffs are just eliminating multiplayer positions, but that’s not true.

    I’ve long suspected that Dreadwolf will make or break BioWare. Since it’s following the same script as Andromeda and Anthem - endless delays, no public progress just lots of b-roll and concept art - I don’t think development is going well. ME: Legacy might have bought BioWare some breathing room but I can’t interpret this as anything other than death throes for the studio.

    BioWare is dead, long live Larian and Spiders?


  • I’ve found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I’ve migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it’s been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.

    It’s damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of “we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case” - Proxmox doesn’t seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.


  • Honestly that’s where I would start. It takes some “no I’m in the driver’s seat, I decide what I’m working on, I decide when I’m done” reminders so I’m working on the right things, but I don’t really procrastinate. Unless it’s something I really don’t want to work on, but that’s kind of a different problem.

    If they’ve worked well in the past beyond the initial break in period I know some people do well with short breaks. Five days on, weekends off, though I would want to be functional outside of work days.




  • Poorly, in retrospect. The best period of my life was four ish years pre COVID when I got into the bad habit of drinking a lot of caffeine, without realizing that it was helping me. It was also inadvertently ripped away from me when I went remote and was cut off from my bottomless source of coffee and pop and energy drinks.

    One of my takeaways when I started proper medication is that I in fact did know all the organization tricks in the book - the missing piece was the medication, not knowledge.