What ever I feel like. I quit my job without a plan, Friday was my last day, because I was super burnt out and clearly unappreciated. Right now my only plan is to not plan things, relax, and recover from being burnt out.
Honestly started to look at jobs outside of software. I’m over all the strange egos, the odd bits and bobs, and the rat race in general. A local (free) paper is hiring someone to basically stack newspaper bundles at 6AM for delivery … maybe even work the press. It feels like I’d meet honest folks and actually have a fulfilling day. Maybe I’m just engaging in utter fantasy, but perhaps it’s worth a shot for happiness?
Happiness is always worth a shot… Although it does sound a little bit like you might be romanticising people who don’t know how to program. Some of those are arseholes, too :P
Having work in different fields and type of work, you will just meet different people and have to deal with a different type of management. It may fit or not what you want or need.
Remember just that most of the comportement and excesses come also from the company culture. Shitty culture will give you a shitty workplace.
It is fantasy but worth a shot to see if you can find a place where you feel good.
I’m writing sqlite stuff for $WORK and have been looking under the hood (sqlite c codebase) a lot so for $FREE time I decided to rewrite-it-in-Rust and- ok I’m joking, no RiiR. But I am writing a database binary format parser in Rust:
Finally putting the new version of the frontend at work that I’ve been working on for about 3 months into production! It’s an exciting and also scary week, everything seems to work fine in staging but fingers crossed.
I’ve been intermittently working on a process-based compartmentalisation runtime for Verona that should let Verona programs load C++ libraries in a safely sandboxed region. It’s now past the ‘make it work’ stage, where all of the obvious security vulnerabilities are fixed, and is now at the ‘make it correct’ step, which has involved handing it over to a colleague in the Microsoft Security Response Center to do some red teaming and tell me what less-obvious things I missed. He’ll almost certainly find some things - the current implementation is very much ‘research-quality code’ - but this is the first step in making it something I’d be happy to depend on. We can then move onto ‘make it fast’.
For testing there’s also a C++ API that makes it fairly easy to expose a C++ library’s functions for cross-domain calls, so this may also be useful outside of the Verona context.
Work, homework, and continuing to work on shell scripts for my desktop. Most of my weekend was blocked out by homework, so the beginning of this week I’m going to knock out school work so I don’t have it overflow into this upcoming weekend like last weekend.
I’ve been looking into whether I can find a tolerable way to granularly single-source a few different kinds of documentation that I would like to DRY up.
While doing so, a yak we’ll call “just write your own ~language” has been flirting with me. So, uh, yeah.
We’re doubling the engineering team in the next month which is obviously very exciting, but daunting. Trying to strike a balance of giving relevant info (tech stack resources, business overview, code layout etc) but not being overwhelming.
Building on-call rotation for alerts
Avenue’s (the company I work for) main product is an alerting tool, and we’re building in tagging to an “on-call”, so I’m starting to think about how to model that internally. Calendaring (or things that are calendar-adjacent) seem to start out so benign and always get complex. Hoping to start with a decent foundation, so my time should be split on data modeling and coding this out.
More interviews!
Being an introvert, this is always a slog, but hey! It’s an exciting time overall.
— Bonus —
If I have time I may redo my personal site a bit – Add a blog section, pare back the design to be more minimal etc.
If I’m being hopeful: Implementing a query API to pull arbitrary data from an application database with knowledge about the layout of the data that lets me translate the queries into highly performant SQL.
If I’m being cynical: Reinventing GraphQL.
If I’m being selfish: Taking the opportunity to build something substantial with jOOQ’s new multiset operator which seems pretty nifty so far.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a feature at ${DAYJOB} we call “RetroIDS.” The 4U version of our next-gen security appliance can hold up to 3PB all-flash. We developed custom application to store enriched packet captures in a proprietary format so that we can index every single packet at line-rate speeds. So I’m putting the finishing touches on our forked Suricata to teach it how to iterate through these packet captures (hence the “Retro” part of RetroIDS).
On HardenedBSD’s side, I’m going to continue down the llvm rabbit hole, learning llvm’s internals. I’ve never, ever done compiler development before, so I have a very long road ahead of me. The end goal is to be able to support Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD.
I tried taking my dog to Patapsco State Park in Maryland, USA, but it appears he may have an ear infection. During the twenty-minute drive there, he dry heaved three times. I ended up pulling over and setting GPS for home. So I plan to take him to the vet either later today or sometime this week. We already have medicated ear flushing solution, which we started last night. It really sucks to see an animal in pain/discomfort. And, he smells like fish, so it’s not all that pleasant for me, either.
Experimenting/learning about type inference algorithms. Previous week I’ve implemented Algorithm W for Hindley Milner type inference.
Now I’m working on HM(X)-inspired algorithm (separates constraints generation from constraint solving) + adding type classes & polymorphic records to it.
After quite a rough couple of weeks, finally getting back into a routine. Those past few weeks do have me seriously considering switching jobs. I had some interesting projects at the start, but lately the projects can’t seem to motivate me to invest time into them and finish them up. I think I need a job with more variety since this is becoming a recurring trend in my career.
So this week:
Dust of some old side projects that have been idle
Get back into routine: cooking, sports, social life, work, …
Send out some probes to some of the companies that interest me to work for
I’m reading “The Mysteries of Udolpho”, by Ann Radcliffe, generally considered to be the archetype of the Gothic novel. I make it a tradition to read, or re-read, a classic Gothic novel every October. It’s unlikely I’ll finish it before the month ends, given its length.
Nothing I do at $DAYJOB is likely to be of interest to anyone other than my customers.
I, too, am working on a Halloween costume this week. I’m going the “large robot made out of cardboard” route like I did when I was about 10, this time with more sound-reactive blinkenlights. (Assuming I can get any of that working in time.)
Helping to negotiate governing coalition program. We want an IT minister, but our partners would prefer to keep the current situation where every ministry keeps their favorite suppliers and ignores any and all integration attempts.
We fucked up the election and let our coalition partner advertise for preferential votes, even though it was explicitly forbidden in our agreement. We fell from 22 to just 4 seats in the Parliament due to just 7% of our common voters favoring our partner very strongly while our voters respected the ordering from the primaries. Sigh.
They don’t have enough competent people, though, so we are going to land couple ministries anyway. Probably. World is weird.
I am also impatiently waiting to learn whether I got reelected for the head of the party IT department. It has been 2 years already! Wow.
I have just finished Trimester 2 of the Linguistics degree I foolishly decided to pursue while working full time, so now I’ve got some extra brain space to work on a knowledge-generation side project.
At work, I’m fighting with AWS Amplify to get a fully tested static site to … exist … And writing two talks.
I’ve just started work on refactoring the frontend to my registrar API. I remember running into issues with SvelteKit a couple months ago but I conveniently realized I needed to do a refactor to my registry API.
It’s fun to figure out the most optimal way of creating something technical and useful but I thoroughly enjoy scratching that design itch.
What ever I feel like. I quit my job without a plan, Friday was my last day, because I was super burnt out and clearly unappreciated. Right now my only plan is to not plan things, relax, and recover from being burnt out.
Enjoy!
Thanks! I very much will.
It feels really weird to be saying Get Well Soon, but fuck it: GET WELL SOON!
(Seriously. I know these things can take a while to recover from and impact everything in your life. I hope it goes swimmingly)
Sorry you were put out, glad you have the opportunity to get out.
Sailing in Greece.
Woo we’re going to be geographically close :) (I’m in Athens). Have a nice time!
Honestly started to look at jobs outside of software. I’m over all the strange egos, the odd bits and bobs, and the rat race in general. A local (free) paper is hiring someone to basically stack newspaper bundles at 6AM for delivery … maybe even work the press. It feels like I’d meet honest folks and actually have a fulfilling day. Maybe I’m just engaging in utter fantasy, but perhaps it’s worth a shot for happiness?
Happiness is always worth a shot… Although it does sound a little bit like you might be romanticising people who don’t know how to program. Some of those are arseholes, too :P
There is something to a hard day’s labor, those who spend their time using their brain as much as the rest of their body, instead of more.
Having work in different fields and type of work, you will just meet different people and have to deal with a different type of management. It may fit or not what you want or need.
Remember just that most of the comportement and excesses come also from the company culture. Shitty culture will give you a shitty workplace.
It is fantasy but worth a shot to see if you can find a place where you feel good.
I’m writing sqlite stuff for $WORK and have been looking under the hood (sqlite c codebase) a lot so for $FREE time I decided to rewrite-it-in-Rust and- ok I’m joking, no RiiR. But I am writing a database binary format parser in Rust:
https://paste.debian.net/1215870/
Slap some SQL parsing, query planner (codegen), a virtual machine and baby you got a rust sqlite3 goin!
Finally putting the new version of the frontend at work that I’ve been working on for about 3 months into production! It’s an exciting and also scary week, everything seems to work fine in staging but fingers crossed.
Whew, good luck!
I’ve been intermittently working on a process-based compartmentalisation runtime for Verona that should let Verona programs load C++ libraries in a safely sandboxed region. It’s now past the ‘make it work’ stage, where all of the obvious security vulnerabilities are fixed, and is now at the ‘make it correct’ step, which has involved handing it over to a colleague in the Microsoft Security Response Center to do some red teaming and tell me what less-obvious things I missed. He’ll almost certainly find some things - the current implementation is very much ‘research-quality code’ - but this is the first step in making it something I’d be happy to depend on. We can then move onto ‘make it fast’.
For testing there’s also a C++ API that makes it fairly easy to expose a C++ library’s functions for cross-domain calls, so this may also be useful outside of the Verona context.
Work, homework, and continuing to work on shell scripts for my desktop. Most of my weekend was blocked out by homework, so the beginning of this week I’m going to knock out school work so I don’t have it overflow into this upcoming weekend like last weekend.
Aside from normal work stuff:
I’ve been looking into whether I can find a tolerable way to granularly single-source a few different kinds of documentation that I would like to DRY up.
While doing so, a yak we’ll call “just write your own ~language” has been flirting with me. So, uh, yeah.
Few things!
We’re doubling the engineering team in the next month which is obviously very exciting, but daunting. Trying to strike a balance of giving relevant info (tech stack resources, business overview, code layout etc) but not being overwhelming.
Avenue’s (the company I work for) main product is an alerting tool, and we’re building in tagging to an “on-call”, so I’m starting to think about how to model that internally. Calendaring (or things that are calendar-adjacent) seem to start out so benign and always get complex. Hoping to start with a decent foundation, so my time should be split on data modeling and coding this out.
Being an introvert, this is always a slog, but hey! It’s an exciting time overall.
— Bonus —
If I have time I may redo my personal site a bit – Add a blog section, pare back the design to be more minimal etc.
As an SRE, this looks awesome. Congrats on your seed round! Do you have a careers page that I can look at (if you’re still hiring, that is)?
I think that link needs a
https://; turns into a relative URL otherwise.If I’m being hopeful: Implementing a query API to pull arbitrary data from an application database with knowledge about the layout of the data that lets me translate the queries into highly performant SQL.
If I’m being cynical: Reinventing GraphQL.
If I’m being selfish: Taking the opportunity to build something substantial with jOOQ’s new multiset operator which seems pretty nifty so far.
Home:
School:
Going to be trying to hack on the Rust compiler to implement a suggestion. Keyword being try, as I’ve never done something like this before.
Besides the normal stuff, I’m going to try to work out why clang-format can end up using very large amounts of memory and CPU.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a feature at ${DAYJOB} we call “RetroIDS.” The 4U version of our next-gen security appliance can hold up to 3PB all-flash. We developed custom application to store enriched packet captures in a proprietary format so that we can index every single packet at line-rate speeds. So I’m putting the finishing touches on our forked Suricata to teach it how to iterate through these packet captures (hence the “Retro” part of RetroIDS).
On HardenedBSD’s side, I’m going to continue down the llvm rabbit hole, learning llvm’s internals. I’ve never, ever done compiler development before, so I have a very long road ahead of me. The end goal is to be able to support Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD.
I tried taking my dog to Patapsco State Park in Maryland, USA, but it appears he may have an ear infection. During the twenty-minute drive there, he dry heaved three times. I ended up pulling over and setting GPS for home. So I plan to take him to the vet either later today or sometime this week. We already have medicated ear flushing solution, which we started last night. It really sucks to see an animal in pain/discomfort. And, he smells like fish, so it’s not all that pleasant for me, either.
Being transitioned out of management, figuring out everything that goes with that.
Trying to find a good auto remediation engine for alerts that I can run in house that doesn’t need SaaS connectivity.
Adding monitoring to like 12000 servers that desperately need a lot more of it.
Experimenting/learning about type inference algorithms. Previous week I’ve implemented Algorithm W for Hindley Milner type inference.
Now I’m working on HM(X)-inspired algorithm (separates constraints generation from constraint solving) + adding type classes & polymorphic records to it.
After quite a rough couple of weeks, finally getting back into a routine. Those past few weeks do have me seriously considering switching jobs. I had some interesting projects at the start, but lately the projects can’t seem to motivate me to invest time into them and finish them up. I think I need a job with more variety since this is becoming a recurring trend in my career.
So this week:
Keeping along at work.
Building an entry in the Autumn Lisp Game Jam. I think I’ll be working on either a menu or Player movement next.
Apart from work I am trying to get better at typed languages. Have some rust tutorials I would like to follow and learn from.
I’m reading “The Mysteries of Udolpho”, by Ann Radcliffe, generally considered to be the archetype of the Gothic novel. I make it a tradition to read, or re-read, a classic Gothic novel every October. It’s unlikely I’ll finish it before the month ends, given its length.
Nothing I do at $DAYJOB is likely to be of interest to anyone other than my customers.
Work stuff aside, I’m finishing my Halloween costume. (Half fursuit, half costume. Should be fun to unveil.)
I, too, am working on a Halloween costume this week. I’m going the “large robot made out of cardboard” route like I did when I was about 10, this time with more sound-reactive blinkenlights. (Assuming I can get any of that working in time.)
Helping to negotiate governing coalition program. We want an IT minister, but our partners would prefer to keep the current situation where every ministry keeps their favorite suppliers and ignores any and all integration attempts.
We fucked up the election and let our coalition partner advertise for preferential votes, even though it was explicitly forbidden in our agreement. We fell from 22 to just 4 seats in the Parliament due to just 7% of our common voters favoring our partner very strongly while our voters respected the ordering from the primaries. Sigh.
They don’t have enough competent people, though, so we are going to land couple ministries anyway. Probably. World is weird.
I am also impatiently waiting to learn whether I got reelected for the head of the party IT department. It has been 2 years already! Wow.
New job, onboarding
I have just finished Trimester 2 of the Linguistics degree I foolishly decided to pursue while working full time, so now I’ve got some extra brain space to work on a knowledge-generation side project.
At work, I’m fighting with AWS Amplify to get a fully tested static site to … exist … And writing two talks.
Work:
I’m counting the seconds until I’m done with on-call; my last call was at 2am this morning for spurious reasons.
Personal:
I’m hacking on an old BFTP implementation.
Turns out SPLASH is in Chicago this week woot woot
Work, and struggling my way into progress in the Lisp Game Jam. Ten days is too long, it’s long enough for me to procrastinate.
finishing the last piece of a lock-free concurrent GC for an MVCC database
I’ve just started work on refactoring the frontend to my registrar API. I remember running into issues with SvelteKit a couple months ago but I conveniently realized I needed to do a refactor to my registry API.
It’s fun to figure out the most optimal way of creating something technical and useful but I thoroughly enjoy scratching that design itch.