Cratermaker

A house back in 2017. I really had no business buying a house, financially speaking, but I was getting fed up with renting land under a trailer I owned. They kept raising the price significantly every single year. Turned out to be a great decision since I was able to get a good interest rate and a good price. Of course there are downsides, like when the water heater flooded my bottom floor. Still worth it though.

Radiohead, especially In Rainbows. They have amazing melancholy music that also has a groove to it.

Yeah but like, what new features do apps have which weren't available in those times? Embedded videos maybe? Doesn't justify the bloat.

It sucks that you have to do that, but I know people who manage projects just want progress to come in on a steady drip feed. Hopefully some day you'll get a decent manager who can understand your work style and roll with it though, or maybe get to the point of setting your own destiny!

One hobby turned into a career (software engineering), which hopefully means I'm decent at it. I also play the bass guitar, which I okay at, but eagerly trying to reach a high level. I have a million other hobbies that I do fine at. But grading yourself is only useful as a way to keep from stagnating and to create healthy goals. The internet is really dangerous in this regard, because you'll always find someone who's way better than you. At the end of the day I just want to keep my brain stimulated and have fun with the time I have.

I used to think C# was like Java but with fresh ideas. I still do, but Kotlin gives it a run for its money. The type system is pretty great. For example, you can use the Elvis operator to return early if something is null, allowing you to use a non-null type afterwards. In C#, nullable annotations feel more "grafted on", and there are some weird quirks and footguns that Kotlin avoids by being a little smarter about it.

How do you type letters like 'a' and 'L'?

I dunno, I made an ipod clone app in Android for myself recently and it has both acceleration and a db progress indicator. These were not tough features to implement...

You might enjoy learning vanilla js and making a site with as few deps as you can get away with. Or a lightweight framework like svelte or preact. The browser stack is definitely some weird shit but it's still somewhat approachable if you dig under the abstractions that most web devs never venture beyond. It definitely helped me cut through all the manufactured noise.

What software have you made? Sometimes people make me feel crazy when I tell them it's bad to have deeply nested dependencies. Often I'll dismiss a library if it depends on other things. I think the software world is rife with the idea that "if it works now, then my job is done".

Good riddance, I say. Web dev is infested with layers upon layers of tools that attempt to abstract what is already fairly simple and straightforward to work with. We're beyond the days of needing to build buttons out of small image fragments, and JS is (slowly) becoming more livable in its raw form. I welcome anything that keeps the toolchain as simple as possible.

Spineless tech tips