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...

For you Mechanical Keyboard peeps out there, I just wrote a review about my SliceMK (Erogodox clone), Model M and RK84:

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

Fixing a broken clock...

I just finished up a blog post on using debugging tools and Python to download HLS videos:

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

After some amdgpu issues, I have Sway/Wayland another shot. It still had several issues I encountered before and then some:

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

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.