I haven't been on in a while because I got laid off two weeks ago. I made it three years and survived two layoffs. I'm relieved honestly; got a decent severance package. Technically I got an extra week of "PTO" where I still had access to two Slack rooms if I wanted to say goodbye to people.

I've taken two weeks to unwind. Time to update my cover sheet and get back into the flow of contacting old buddies to see what work is available.

I've been at it for over 20 years at this point: Java, Scala, Python, Ruby and even a couple of years of devops/sys admin. Let's see how bad the remote and local job markets suck now.

I've been off caffeine for over two months*. I've also had a ton of 8am/9am meetings and they hurt so much. Last week I picked up a vape for the nicotine because I desperately need a stimulant for focus as I'm behind on tasks at work. I'm hoping I won't need another vape once this runs out.

Thankfully the US has the daylight savings switch next week, so my 8ams move to 9. It lasts for three weeks before they move back to 8 since they're scheduled by someone in the UK and their DST comes later.

I'm also going to talk to my manager about the 3x 8am meetings last week and how I'm not doing that again.

I hope I can get this PR done today.

* (with the exception of 1 Dr Pepper Blackberry Zero, and 1 Coke Orange Cream Zero because they're new and I wanted to try them)

Does anyone actually like Notion? My current job uses it for all our documentation and I hate it. The organization is a mess, the search isn't great, and the UI sucks.

It's like a massive step backwards from tools like Confluence. I've had to use it for over three years and I still hate it.

I woke up early for an 8am today that got moved to tomorrow because one frontend dev couldn't make it.

I was angry enough I responded, "Could you do this the night before in the future?" with 😴 😩 emoji.

I had an 8am Monday, 9am Tuesday, got up for an 8am that didn't happen today and now there's an 8am tomorrow.

One of the devs was let go after his probation period. Today was his last day. I didn't review a lot of his code, but it seemed to be fine. I'm not sure if his output was just slow.

Either he wasn't working out or the startup decided maybe they shouldn't have hired new people yet. There's been a freeze for a while and this guy started in October. The company's revenue targets keep slipping. Profitability was moved from 2026 to 2027.

We're on a slowly sinking ship.

Why does the girl in the Google Meet permission dialog have anal beads for hair?

I wonder if the devRant devs have ever considered implementing ActivityPub and opening this site up to the Fediverse, in the same way Minds (🧠) or Threads (🤢) did.

It would make this a less isolated corner of the Internet for sure.

I'm on the 2nd week of a support rotation. One of the support reps contacted my manager about two tickets, one that is about an automated e-mail that didn't go out (which .. doesn't even seem necessary since the action has been completed?) and one because I accidentally put in the postcode on the 2nd line of an address field (which I immediately fixed when he commented on the ticket, minutes after, the same fucking day!)

We also had a super cringe all hands meeting today. I got plenty of sleep and am already exhausted.

My old roommate/landlord/co-worker sent me a text about his company needing devops people. I should probably finish updating me resume today.

Best UI...

You should build your next project in G

There's a guy in our all-hands who always does a magic trick on camera before starting. It's always very cringe.

I finally finished up my post on Bibilobunny, my book note extraction tool for Kindle and Play Books:

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

I hope to add support for getting notes off Nook and Kobo next. You can follow the instructions to create your own book quote bot, and you can follow mine here: https://tweeflood.com/@bookquotebot

8am meeting on Monday. It gets cancelled at 5am (while I'm asleep) and gets moved to tomorrow .. at 8am 😪 😡

I hate working with Europeans

I've been using Void Linux on servers for years. I decided to finally contribute some packages, and wrote a tool to make it easier to build packages outside of the standard repository. This post covers some useful tools in Void, my voidup package building tool, and many of the issues I encountered which make me wonder if I should keep support Void Linux.

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

I'm not one of those people who can just buy a phone and use it. I have to unlock it, flash it, de-google it and customize it before first use. I don't changes phones often, but my 2019 phone is slowly dying.

Here's my whole new setup with a Sony Xperia 1 V:

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

Is there anything more demoralizing and cringe than the All Hands Meeting?

What is up with the Internet Archive?

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

Performance review again. I don't know why our company bothers. We're a startup, everyone here has survived two rounds of layoffs, and we barely hire anyone new to fill vacant slots even as we got series D funding.

At every other company I've been with, a performance review is like two forums, or a single page essay .. maybe a round of 1 paragraph feedback reports from some teammates.

At my current shop, it's a full on Pando assessment. It takes an hour to get through. Then it takes two hours to go through it with your manager, only for maybe 3 people to get promotions every year and less than 5% of people get any type of pay change.

It's so exhausting.

A job description that looks like it was written by actual developers

I've been at this company 2 years and 9 months. I never use e-mail. Evolution just runs for the calendar notices.

Man, this guy really hates the nano editor:

https://github.com/rwxrob/nano

I archive a lot of shit. I've been archiving YouToob videos for the past few years. Nearly 20% of my archived collection is no longer available on YouTube:

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

I wrote a tool if you want to check your collection too:

https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/youboot

The project lead I have likes to go cowboy and run off and do a bunch of stuff on his own. He makes cards, assigns them to me, and then goes and does it himself negating my work.

He's engineering all our graphql queries to be totally different from literally everything else that exists in the codebase (every mutation is idempotent). The frontend guy brought it up and agreeded with me.

In our alignment meeting, the project lead tried to say these weren't bugs; that we can just handle the state on the frontend. I said they were definitely bugs that should be fixed on the backend.

Guy then says "You approved all my code reviews," implying I approved of the way we were doing things and they weren't bugs.

I told him, "I'm not trying to assign blame," and also, "Yes, I missed those bugs in code review."

I am fucking sick of this guy.

Spent yesterday working on a card for adjusting a Graph query to properly sort records. Made all the specs. Tests them all. It gets approved.

Rebased today, and the project lead (who made the card I worked on, told me to work on it and approved my PR) put in a sorting scope that's totally different, in order to "unblock" a frontend dev.

After examining it and discussing it, my work was totally unnecessary, and didn't do what we really needed anyway. Closed my PR. Don't feel like doing shit today.

I've been trying Hyprland for the past couple of months. So far, it's the best tiling composer I've seen:

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

The C Standard Library has a Hash Table implementation, and it's a man-made horror beyond comprehension:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Ruby code review tells me to add additional scopes to an unrelated model

Literally scope creep

My primary Linux box has been getting rolling updates since 2012. The machine has changed, but I keep copying the current image over. It's a bit of an involved process, and I finally turned all my old notes into a kinda reference guide:

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

Finally published it, since I think I'm going to switch to zfsbootmenu to make the whole process easier using snapshots.

Weird frontend problem with a test that doesn't make any sense. Ask two frontend engineers and they're not sure what's going on. Rebased today and it passed. 🤷

MAGIC!

I don't like contributing to e-waste. I also don't buy the "extended warranties" because most things I just repair myself.

My Dell died just short of two years. It is my work laptop, so I replaced it with a Framework, but I also wanted to fix the Dell. This was the process:

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

TL;DR ...I still failed. Hopefully the eBayed parts will make themselves into a refurb. After putting together a Framework, I can't see myself using another laptop brand ever. I hope it holds up.