RobRivera (u/RobRivera)

RobRivera commented on How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method yacinemahdid.com/p/how-to... · Posted by u/research_pie

jebarker · 3 days ago

This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get to them. I stopped feeling lost when I gave up trying to plan my life out and gave up setting goals. Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now. This keeps me living more contentedly in the present and I still get things done.

Having said all that, I came to this realization only after ticking a whole bunch of societal and cultural expectation boxes which means I can afford to take my foot off the gas. Trusting your instincts is a much scarier proposition earlier in life, but I still think it's probably the right thing to do.

RobRivera · 3 days ago

I personally resonate with this take, being a high achiever student in early life and ambitious career seeker into adulthood. While I had my own 'meta' for how to mine certain decades for value (skill buffing, exploration, etc) it is still both scary and liberating to take a step off the planned path knowing deep in your bones it is for the better.

RobRivera commented on 9 Years of "Learning to Code" and I Still Couldn't Build a To-Do App offpeaklog.bearblog.dev/l... · Posted by u/speckx

pontifier · 4 days ago

Consistency is key. I need it too. With 1000 things pulling me this way and that, I get the most done when I just open my IDE and do it. It's so hard though. I feel like an agoraphobic trying to leave the house. What's the big deal? Just open the IDE and start doing stuff... but it's almost physically painful to even think about... I gotta get help.

RobRivera · 3 days ago

I get this aversion to action from time to time. I'm a big fan of slapping the earbuds in and just cranking up an album I know by heart. Gets the groove goin

RobRivera commented on 9 Years of "Learning to Code" and I Still Couldn't Build a To-Do App offpeaklog.bearblog.dev/l... · Posted by u/speckx

cookiengineer · 4 days ago

> You learn by breaking, not by watching.

I can't stress enough how important that statement is. I learned to code by refactoring and revising my old ideas. When I learned a new tech stack, a new library, a new pattern or a new methodology, I ended up refactoring old projects with the new mindset.

I always jokingly say that every codebase looks like crap after 2 months, because it is true. You see your own mistakes after what you've learned _through implementing it_.

Good engineers and architects know how to break down a large problem into small enough portions to be able to guesstimate whether it's possible. Then they build little prototypes for those unknown unknowns to come back with a better estimation. And those small prototypes / portions are something like a knowledge library, where you gain confidence over time when you solved and successfully implemented those already.

Bad engineers on the other hand always chase the new hype, instead of learning from their own mistakes they just rebuild the same crap all over again, assuming it will be better by using fancy new libraries. Unsuccessfully.

RobRivera · 3 days ago

> I always jokingly say that every codebase looks like crap after 2 months, because it is true. You see your own mistakes after what you've learned _through implementing it_

I am on the tail end of making a game from scratch, and while I am quite proud of the feature/performance set, every 2 weeks I stop pulling from the feature queue and just enter 'editor-in-chief' mode where I find any new ways of doing the same thing and extend it to the rest of the code base. Often its leveraging templating, or other generalizing techniques that reduce code-bloat.

RobRivera commented on Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014) bbc.com/news/health-26888... · Posted by u/colinprince

RobRivera · 7 days ago

The opposite of something with a large spectrum...

I just can't sorry

RobRivera commented on A gentle introduction to anchor positioning webkit.org/blog/17240/a-g... · Posted by u/feross

RobRivera · 11 days ago

Anchor post

RobRivera commented on Hire People Who Care (2020) alexw.substack.com/p/hire... · Posted by u/suchintan

throwmeaway222 · 13 days ago

Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.

RobRivera · 13 days ago

I missed this clause in

checks notes

Literally my entire career.

RobRivera commented on Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/anarbadalov

neilv · 15 days ago

I used Tor for surveillance. But an appropriate kind, IMHO.

I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply chain integrity startup. I built a fancy scraper/crawler to discreetly monitor a major international marketplace (mainstream, not darknet), including selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site, to try to ensure that we were seeing the same site content that people from those regions were seeing.

Tor somehow worked perfectly for those needs. So my only big concern was making sure everyone in the startup knew not to go bragging about this unusually good data we had. Since we were one C&D letter away from not being able to get the data at all.

(Unfortunately, this had to be a little adversarial with the marketplace, not done as a data-sharing partnership, since the marketplace benefited from a cut of all the counterfeit and graymarket sales that we were trying to fight. But I made sure the scraper was gentle yet effective, both to not be a jerk, and also to not attract attention.)

(I can talk about it now, since the startup ran out of runway during Covid investor skittishness.)

RobRivera · 15 days ago

HEH

I'm letting my imagination fill in the color on the specifics here and I'm working up a little grin.

A hat tip to you

RobRivera commented on Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths quantamagazine.org/new-me... · Posted by u/baruchel

8n4vidtmkvmk · 17 days ago

Isn't that just it though? The problem very well could be that some part of the game is running too slow so they just start solving it. No time to read and write academic papers.

RobRivera · 17 days ago

That's what I have found to be the case: time is in short supply

RobRivera commented on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/... · Posted by u/tobr

Karrot_Kream · 17 days ago

When I used to lead a Maven project I'd take dependency-upgrade tickets that would just be me bumping up a package version then whack-a-moling overrides and editing callsites to make dependency resolution not pull up conflicting packages until it worked. Probably lost a few days a quarter that way. I even remember the playlists I used to listen to when I was doing that work (:

Lockfiles are great.

RobRivera · 17 days ago

> I even remember the playlists I used to listen to when I was doing that work (:

Im a big fan of anything Aphex Twin for these type of sessions.

RobRivera commented on Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single-source shortest paths quantamagazine.org/new-me... · Posted by u/baruchel

polytely · 17 days ago

> But curiously, none of the pieces use fancy mathematics.

> “This thing might as well have been discovered 50 years ago, but it wasn’t,” Thorup said. “That makes it that much more impressive.”

this is so cool to me, it feel like a solution you could* have stumbled upon while doing game development or something

*probably wouldn't but still

RobRivera · 17 days ago

Gamedevs -I find at least- are so obsessively deep at SOLVING their problem at hand that their headspace is indexed on shipping the game, the project, deadlines, and what to eat for the next meal (probably pizza).

Rather than the academia.

Just a hunch tho