“It’s so great! It automatically writes the [wrong] answers to everything for you!”

Yesterday my toddler comes up to me and says, “daddy, build block tower?” So I tell her to go get her blocks, which she does. We built a block tower, knocked it down (which makes her giggle), built it again, etc.

A decade ago I was in a horribly toxic marriage and honestly didn’t think I would ever have kids. Today, I have an awesome wife and three kids. I love all of them and I enjoy getting to spend time with them. I never would have imagined myself being where I am today and I am reminded often that I am a very lucky man.

Here’s my experience. I make $180,000/yr. Family of five. Wife stays home and has a consulting gig she does when she wants to. We live in Northwest Arkansas. Far from the most expensive place in the country but experiencing massive growth and becoming increasingly expensive. Our only debt is our mortgage and a loan on our minivan. We own our other vehicle outright.

We live reasonably comfortably. Definitely not extravagant. We’re also tightwads and I stay in top of our finances. We paid $345k for a fixer-upper home. Average home price in our area for similar homes is probably closer to $450k. It’s liveable but ultimately needs a full remodel. I figure it will take about 5 years doing most of it myself. If I had to pay contractors to do all of it, it would not be feasible. Most of them are so busy they don’t even give you the time of day anyways.

Material costs are insane. I mean absolutely bonkers. I would guess I’m spending double what I did for the same materials I used for my last remodel project on our previous house, four years ago. The five year plan is partly because we can’t afford to go any faster.

If I made $100k/yr, we would never have bought a house. Wouldn’t have even been able to save enough for the down payment. I also seriously doubt we would have had our last two kids.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m pretty fortunate. I have things I worry about but money isn’t one of them. I know where my next paycheck is coming from and if it doesn’t come, we have enough money in the bank to get by for a while.

The same cannot be said for the vast majority of Americans, even ones making $100k/yr, which is not nearly as good a salary as it used to be.

When every restaurant and bar you went into reeked of stale cigarette smoke. Yuck.

Some guy from the Super Bowl 38 halftime show.

Reviewing large PR’s is hard. Breaking apart large PR’s that are all related changes into smaller PR’s is also hard.

If I submit a big one, I usually leave notes in the description explaining where the “core” changes are and what they are trying to accomplish. The goal being to give the reviewers a good starting point.

I also like to unit test the shit out of my code which helps a lot. The main issue there is getting management to embrace unit tests. Unit tests often double the effort up front but save tons of time in the long run. We’re going to spend the time one way or the other. Better to do it up front when it’s “cheaper” because charging it to the tech debt credit card racks up lots of expensive interest.

What happens when the stupid person is in charge of hiring?

Ah, I see you’ve met the product owner.

A Mose is a Mose.
A rose is a rose.
A toes is a toes.
Whoop-dee-doo-dee-doo-doo!

Fancy title for the developer that gets yelled at when the CI pipeline is broken. Also a good chance they are the one that broke it.

“Can we get a show show of hands just to confirm we’re ready to move forward?”

Me Everyone, who wasn’t listening and doesn’t have a clue what they were just talking about: ✋

You gotta remember that some of these people are the same ones who complained that their Southern Baptist pastors were preaching “liberal talking points” (aka, things Jesus said). If teachers actually started reading the Bible in class, these same people would probably start calling it “liberal propaganda” and trying to ban it.

I’m just saying, the irony is so thick that you’d need a rock drill and some dynamite to cut it in half.

If I was a Boeing shareholder, I would be mad as a wet hen right about now. Amid a string of phenomenally bad business decisions that culminated in the flying [sorta] tin can that is the 737 MAX, Boeing is handed an aerospace companies PR wet dream: transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. They then proceeded to drop that softball so hard that the thud could probably be heard from Mars.

Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?

They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.

And the persistent tiredness.

What kind of bullshit numbers are these? I live Arkansas. If you make $40,928 and live here, you are poor. Not even close to “middle class.”

I had a client years ago who was in his late 80’s. He grew up on a farm in Indiana and I remember him telling me a story about threshing grain. He was just a kid in the 1920’s, shoveling coal into the firebox on a big Case steam engine that they took from farm to farm. He said they would try to stay near a creek whenever they could so they had a water source for the engine. It was hard, hot work. He said there was a “big German fella” who worked on their crew who never drank anything but hot black coffee, something which fascinated him as kid.

It was an interesting story to listen to. Such a mundane activity but the fact that it’s no longer a thing and only existed in the memory of someone who remembered doing it made it kind of fascinating

I have a recording of interviews I did with all my living grandparents for a school project when I was a kid. One thing that stood out was the level of abject poverty they experienced. They were teenagers during the great depression and it definitely had a major impact on all of them.

Just an expensive timer.