indoorskier

Google phone interview long time ago. Can’t remember what I said or did wrong, but realised I wouldn’t get a call back when the guy asked: ”do you know what a set is?”

My 2c is to try the funky ideas to get a foothold/differentiator

I think your implicit intuition that indie gamers are keen to explore more titles than they currently (reasonably) can, is valid. I suspect they’re also keen to be involved in early development. And devs are interested in early feedback. So you could introduce something to facilitate that. Or introduce a Patreon/kickstarter type model where you can choose to fund development of games from your subscription.

Network effects are valuable to build in/explore - make it super easy to stream the games on Twitch, Share clips on YT etc. Might help with the chicken and egg!

Is this region dependent? In us-east I can’t get them to approve a quota for GPU instance families (G,P) for anything more than 4 CPUs. At one point they rejected my request citing “unprecedented demand”. Of course this is small time, just my personal account.

It is true I can get an instance most of the time, but not if I need >16GiB GPU memory.

Take risks, say yes to all opportunities, try to fail often.

I don't mean risks in the sense of things that put you physically or mentally in harm's way, but trying ideas, learning new things, new activities etc.

Some reasons: the explore/exploit tradeoff is massively in favour of exploring when you're young, you have almost nothing to lose, very few responsibilities and so much time (relatively speaking to later in life).

I agree, esp with ML models being where they are. For people writing blogs/articles it’s a similar problem - how do you stand out against the noise?

Honestly I don’t have answers but here’s a few ways I’ve found cool people:

- via “slow-grow” communities like lobste.rs

- if someone writes a good comment or tweet or whatever, check out if they have a blog

- Sometimes I subscribe to a bunch of things that seem promising, and then follow a “three strikes and they’re out” policy to extend the reach

- start reading papers from conferences. It’s a heavier format than blogs, but it’s reviewed and novel, at least if you pick good conferences.

A beautiful book, written in the "The Little..." series' question and answer format. A challenging topic but just about as accessible as I can think anyone can make it. Warmly recommended if you want to know what dependent types are all about.

I have an MSc in CS so biased, but I think on balance it's worth it, if only because you'll be confronted with subjects outside your comfort zone. Even if you don't "like" them they'll broaden your perspective, and who knows you may learn about something you wouldn't have heard of before, and really interests you.

Definitely depends on the curriculum though - my advice would be to look for timeless subjects, so "Algorithms and Data Structures" over "Game Programming with Unity", with a lot of variety.

This is all from the perspective of you being interested in learning new stuff regardless of monetary gain. If you're thinking of this more transactionally, i.e. "will I be able to get more money/better paying job" then I think it depends a lot on where you live. In some areas formal education is valued more than in others. Also a good part of it will probably not be immediately applicable to the day job - at least not obviously so - but it should give you a decent perspective on the field as a whole.

With your very limited runway I'd get another offer with another employer first. That immediately strengthens your negotiation position with your current employer, even if you have zero intention of taking the offer.

Basically start doing some interviews now. You'll probably have to brush up for those as well, and practice.

> I feel stuck and bored > Working 9-5/Mon-Fri is really draining

These two statements are contradictory imo. Figure out whether you want to stay in your comfort zone, or take a step in another direction.

"We have a time every morning when the team gets together and reviews all of the code and designs that were developed the previous day."

That seems much better than the mandatory code reviews that are pervasive nowadays. Most of my annoyance with those is the mandatory part - I think it increases the threshold to make small improvements sufficiently that they either don't happen, or happen together with unrelated changes, which is then a reason for the resident purist to scold you. I also think doing them asynchronously, as a form of email, rather than in-person or video introduces friction unnecessarily.

It’s getting harder and harder in practice because of the huge mountain of accidental complexity programming needs dealing with.

I remember writing a very small single user OS for a course in uni over maybe 6 months. When it booted for the first time it felt amazing. That was like an “I have made fire!” moment.

Now I’m supposed to feel like I’ve achieved something because I can center a div on a webpage.

What is cool is helping non-programmers with automating some of their tasks, like rearranging a spreadsheet or scraping some data. I mean they think it’s some amazing feat but it’s actually very simple. Lots of low hanging fruit still, esp for every day users. Again mostly due to the horrible accidental complexities and buggy mess software has become, so I feel mostly apologetic about it. “Yeah sorry copy-pasting this data should really just work but I’ve written this script which applies a few workarounds”.

Two things stood out to me:

1. So many caveats and excuses before raising some valid criticisms! People in the cryptocurrency space sure seem easily offended.

2. Most of the article deals with how cryptocurrencies have no real applications. I would add that in the areas where applications do exist, they’re way better solvable by non-crypto solutions.

I quit and am pursuing my own interests with the nest egg I’ve built up over the years (am also mid 40s). It’s been incredibly invigorating to finally be able to think for myself again, and have time to explore.

Just my experience, don’t underestimate how much working a job limits you and your creativity.

Unfortunately this will get me further from the line rather than closer (unless I somehow strike gold) but I figure the only thing I can’t make again is time.

I didn't, but plenty of friends and family did in the hype cycle. Initially I was just kinda too lazy, then started to see some red flags.

Unsuccessfully trying to convince friends to stay away from crypto did give me loads of empathy for people like climate scientists - you spend your whole life trying to measure the average surface temperature accurately, and some random dude goes "but what about the summer of 76". It's just too easy to quickly dismiss relatively complicated arguments or explanations.