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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It can really speed up a senior dev working in an unfamiliar ecosystem. Concepts often apply across tech but syntax and implementations are different. Especially for the “declarative” things where, in my experience, the syntax is fiddly and it’s not always easy to see where you went wrong. Speeds me up with Terraform, or a recent example was configuring some OpenSearch indices and queries. I’ve never worked with that before but it was able to help me get some boilerplate going that let me start iterating, much more quickly. I get more done when I’m outside my wheelhouse.

    But one of the downsides of course is it occasionally sends me down a hallucinatory rabbit hole for something that doesn’t exist, lmao.










  • Ah interesting, I think for some reason I assumed it’d be more of an administrative career path offshoot for someone working in chemistry, but architecture does make more sense. And I know how you feel, I started my career in industrial controls because the idea of working at the interface between invisible electrical black magic and moving valves, motors, and other machinery seemed real cool.

    Quickly learned that in that world, creativity and innovation are treated more like liabilities than anything else lol, and rightly so. There’s a few great, proven ways to do most things, and rarely is it wise or fruitful to develop novel approaches over one of the proven solutions. I wouldn’t want to be a chemist in a lab toting multiple new designs, lol.

    I found it stifling, but could’ve tolerated it a lot better if the majority were WFH like yours!



  • A lab planner! That’s one of those cool (sounding at least) jobs that are obvious when you think about it but I’ve just never thought about it.

    Definitely piqued my curiosity though. How much of your work is designing new labs vs retrofitting existing ones, how much travel is involved / how much area do you cover (the question there is really about how many labs exist needing such services), and what are any weird or surprising elements of your job?!





  • I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with a vendor like this, it’s awful. In my case the vendor was supposed to be a fast moving tech startup - the only thing that moved fast there was the revolving door of engineering talent coming and going.

    Even worse, my boss had been convinced by their founder that he had all this pull with the company, and since the company was super cool, that made him super cool, and I dunno if you’ve ever tried to criticize something that has made a middle aged nerd feel cool for the first time in his life, but let’s just say it was not a fruitful endeavor.

    The number of things I effectively fixed for them via email, the abominations I had to construct to work around the things they refused or failed to fix…bad times.



  • I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I’d like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.

    How does a communist society as you’ve described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you’ll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?