samelawrence

I'm working on two main things. For work, I'm using test automation to generate detailed documentation about products, including screenshots and screen recordings. Basically trying to make a portable tool that can be plugged into any repo and either write new tests or look at existing ones to spit back a pretty-good version of documentation.

Outside of work, I'm making a glorified kanban board that an agent can talk to over MCP, and I've found that it's given me a much more reliable, repeatable dev process, and allows me to rapidly prototype ideas in my backlog and work through them without losing work or having to repeat myself much.

Death cults be like...

Europeans are members of the reality-based community.

Bandcamp + iTunes Match is the sauce for folks in the Apple ecosystem.

Teaching myself React for the first time. It's not easy to learn WebDev in today's complexity environment, but at least I have Chat GPT as a tutor.

- 2024 will see the rise of job-keeping as a core skill set for everyone except the most technical or most soft-skilled persons. Individuals will need to prove to their employer organizations that they provide more value than a bot, and you'll see an accompanying wave of "career maintenance" influencers and consultants. It'll be comparable to "win the interview" culture, so not a huge thing, but definitely a thing. This ties in with what others have said about the rise of individual competence proving as a trend.

- People will be so sick of online dating that "singles culture" will make a come-back, primarily for millennials who are 35+ and freaking out about life priorities (kids, partner, etc.) I expect to see lots of "speed dating" and stuff like that appear out of nowhere as everyone become more sexually open-minded but also wants human connection.

- The US government will begin to talk about 10 year + plans for the first time in over a centry. Biden will do a bragging tour on the infrastructure bill leading into the election and "long termism" will become a meme.

- Cannabis will be re-scheduled to Schedule III and will become basically legal for all Americans.

- Bitcoin will be strong, all other cryptos will flounder. Ethereum will stay alive, and NFTs will make a bit of a come-back, but not like the first wave.

- People will make serious efforts to stop owning cars and demand more transit options from their cities and townships. These plans will be very glamourous and take 10 years to complete (or get started). Some may stop owning phones.

- Alcohol will take on a "weird" place in culture in response to growing cannabis and psychedelics usage. Some people will become very proud of their drinking and others will judge them very harshly. It will probably end up a culture war issue.

- We will see extraordinary acts of public violence in American streets, with responsibility probably shared between citizens, gangs, and the police.

This is a bit out-there, and might come off as server recruitment... but if anyone is lonely and wants to talk about weird bass music, dubstep, DnB, Garage, etc. - here's a Discord server I run and spend all day in. discord.gg/cbw7gej

More and more, I'm finding myself using Notion to track "life data stuff". I realize this is a very imperfect choice, but it offers the best tooling I've found so far for this sort of thing. I may migrate to some self-hosted open-source Notion clone at some point (there are a few).

I manage a team of SDETs, and I've written a formal 90-day onboarding plan with 12 weekly sections that include checklists at the end of each week. We store this in Notion, so for a new hire, I just clone the entire page, hand it off to them as their own instance, and let them treat it as a worksheet.

Obviously, we also meet for 1:1s and do lots of hand-holding for new hires, but having that template really helps make our onboarding more brainless (for us, not the hire) and seamless (for both parties).

Can you name some of the innovation happening in ICE vehicles? Just some terms I can search for would be appreciated. Thanks!

This anxiety is very common. In the best, most blameless organizational cultures, team members are allowed to say "I didn't get much done yesterday" on an occasional basis and are forgiven for it - but I realize that reality isn't often like that.

In reality, sometimes you have to just BS things, as others have suggested, by holding some work back from your big flow-state pushes, or by dithering around with words like "I looked into...". It sounds like your standups are more about making management feel better than they are about engineers removing obstacles from each other. That's a hard problem to solve and probably outside the scope of what you can affect. Just do the best you can to survive and be successful in the situation you're in.

If I had any advice to give, it's to learn from how harmful and toxic this pattern is, and as you move up into seniority and management, make efforts to not repeat this mistake. Standup should be a time to discuss how the TEAM is making progress on delivering value to customers, not a time to compare individual efforts against each other. Managers should be involved enough in the lives of their teams to be able to make disciplinary or promotional calls for individual contributors without standup being where they receive that signal.

I visit the HN site very rarely. I mostly see HN links via the Panda browser plugin. I open stories I'm interested in, which then leads to tab hell, but that is at least a defined list I can work through vs. the infinite scroll problem. YMMV.