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I've been working with Claude Code daily for a month or so. It is quite excellent and better than the other agents I have used (Cursor, Q). This article has some good tips that echo some of the things I have learned.

Some additional thoughts:

- I like to start with an ideation session with Claude in the web console. I explain the goals of the project, work through high level domain modeling, and break the project down into milestones with a target releasable goal in mind. For a small project, this might be a couple hours of back and forth. The output of this is the first version of CLAUDE.md.

- Then I start the project with Claude Code, have it read my global CLAUDE.md and the project CLAUDE.md and start going. Each session begins this way.

- I have Claude Code update the project CLAUDE.md as it goes. I have it mark its progress through the plan as it goes. Usually, at the end of the session, I will have it rewrite a special section that contains its summary of the project, how it works, and how to navigate the code. I treat this like Claude's long term memory basically. I have found it helps a lot.

- Even with good guidelines, Claude seems to have a tendency to get ahead of itself. I like to keep it focused and build little increments as I would myself if it is something I care about. If its just some one off or prototype, I let it go crazy and churn whatever works.

The article resonates. AI coding assistants are cool and fun to use, but they just help solve a solved problem faster. The really exciting thing is exploring the new problems we can solve with this tool. It has really reignited my passion for building.

In my experience, companies seem to want to pay the cloud provider tax in order to avoid capacity planning. Sometimes it makes sense because it is hard to predict when something is going to take off. I have also worked at companies with very predictable growth paying insane amounts. I didn’t understand the logic, but they still were profitable and paid well so whatever.

Just open the network tab and refresh a page in Jira and you will understand. It isn’t too noticeable on a LAN. Stick the internet in there and it is painful. The worst I have seen is self hosted and accessed over Netskope ZTNA. Truly an abomination.

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing!

What a nostalgia trip. Reminds me of sitting in the computer lab in the library in my elementary school in 1990. Some days, I'd give anything to go back.

JPEG is fascinating and quite complex. Here is a really excellent high level explanation of how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0me3guauqOU

An approach that has worked for me is to hash partition the table and have each worker look for work in one partition at a time. There are a number of strategies depending on how you manage workers. This allows you to only consider 1/Nth of the dead tuples, where N is the number of partitions, when looking for work. It does come at the cost of strict ordering, but there are many use cases where strict ordering is not required. The largest scale implementation of this strategy that I have done had 128 partitions with a worker per partition pumping through ~100 million tasks per day.

I also found LISTEN/NOTIFY to not work well at this scale and used a polling based approach with a back off when no work was found.

Quite an interesting problem and a bit challenging to get right at scale.

This is not the worst interview question I have seen, but it sure could use some improvement.

The naming of things is pretty confusing. Async queue, send once, and send many all threw me off and aren't good descriptions for what we are trying to do. I hope this isn't reflective of the company's actual code base. A bit of a red flag.

It also is framed as not a JS question but then the interviewer wants an answer that only makes sense in JS. It also isn't even modern JS. A couple more red flags there.

I dislike questions like this in general, but I've done interviews where they facilitated a decent conversation. It really depends.

It is also just a blog post so hard to infer a lot about the author's actual interview style. Maybe it is great and collaborative. It does remind me of some of the worst engineers I have ever worked with and their interview style though...

I assume this is like a pilot in WW1 reporting how finicky and hard to use bi-planes were. No doubt a bunch of weapons manufacturers have seen this and the special operations Ukraine did in Russia and Israel did in Iran and the wheels of progress are turning and the result will be terrifying.

In some ways MCP is like the next evolution of API over HTTP.

We've exposed our APIs as SOAP endpoints. These were not well suited to web based clients, leading to the development of "RESTful" JSON endpoints. As web clients became more complex, GraphQL arose as a solution to some of the problems encountered. Maybe MCP is the next step.

I don't mean that MCP will supersede these protocols. My company exposes our endpoints as SOAP, REST, and GraphQL still as they fit different use cases and customer bases. We are piloting an MCP version to see how that goes now.

It is fun to work on something new and play with agents to see how they consume our endpoints in this form. I think there is a lot of potential.

I think its a control vs safety trade off. Zig forces explicit control over memory with some tools for safety. Rust forces safety with some tools for control. I only have hobbyist level experience with these languages. I find both enjoyable and I hope Zig continues to mature.

A much better source on Zig vs Rust would be Alex Kladov [0], one of the authors of TigerBeetle [1], which is one of the best Zig code bases I have seen.

[0] https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/26/zig-and-rust.html

[1] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

Nice write up. I did something similar at a company recently. The ransomware use case was the primary driver. AWS Backup felt kind of half baked. It also took a lot of work to ensure we could bring the apps up in the recovery account smoothly. Trying to retrofit this into existing stacks was kind of a pain.

There is a YC company called Arpio [0] that does this sort of thing as a service. It can replicate a ton of stuff beyond what Backup does (it also uses Backup for certain things from what I remember). It works as advertised and for most companies is probably worth it vs doing this yourself. I am not affiliated, just worked with it at a customer.

[0] https://arpio.io/

Very cool. I also really enjoyed your Terraria wiring computer and the wiring mod you made. Keep it up!

In early 2000, I cobbled together a gaming PC from used parts that I bought or traded for. It had a K6-2, a Voodoo 2, and 192 MB of RAM. It was amazing and such an upgrade over my family’s Celeron. The big games were TFC, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and StarCraft. We LAN’d every weekend. It was heaven.

Right. I took the article to mean they were extinct before then. I did not know that they had ever lived there.

I had no idea beavers were extinct in the UK. I hope they thrive.

We have a family of beavers on some property in the US. It is fascinating to watch their effect on the landscape over time. Ours cycle between an upstream and downstream habitat every few years. They allow one to regrow while they harvest the other. The area they manage is a favorite spot for many other animals including deer, various birds, coyotes, foxes, etc.

Very cool.

The first web site I ever made was for my CS clan. I hosted it on the Linux server in my university dorm room that also hosted our CS server. I don't remember what I did for DNS back then. I learned so much that I still use to this day.

I also think its neat, guessing based on your ISP, that you had such similar experiences at the same time half a world away from me (in the US).

I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online.

It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.

It really felt like a golden age back then.

My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.

About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.

That is similar to the premise of the TV show Jericho [0]. Not a great show, but its worth a watch if you like that sort of thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series)

I am working on dealing with burnout for the first time. I’ve read about it here and thought I understood it, but experiencing it first hand has been difficult. It destroys everything good about life: relationships, hobbies, sleep, and health. I know I am not the only one here going through this and knowing that helps a little.

The impact of going from a non-X3D to X3D CPU is incredible in that game. I could be off on the details, but I recall benchmarks showing that just switching to an X3D has a much larger impact than jumping multiple generations of GPU. I get like 120 FPS with a 5600X and RTX 3080. I've been dreaming of a 9800X3D based build when it comes out, but realistically don't have the time to actually play.

I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. The weather weapon conspiracy isn't even new. I remember hearing "they" were controlling the weather to create storms using HAARP [0] like 20 years go.

Back then you had to seek this stuff out though. It was on obscure internet forums, fringe websites, and late night talk radio.

I am not sure what to make of the current situation. Its concerning. I think there are a lot of factors at play though with a big one being we gave everyone a megaphone and then monetized the result regardless of any negative consequences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_...

I've read this a few times over the years. Always amusing to experience the shift from totally believable to totally absurd as the second view is presented.

Sadly, yes. I lose track of time and allow work to consume all my waking hours. Having to travel a little helps. I still fall into it if I need to work in the evening after I get home.

I don't have the discipline to stop working when I work from home. Being able to go into the office every day is a nice perk for me to help structure my day. If it was a longer drive, I'd probably feel differently.

Alcohol causes me anxiety. It has gotten worse as I have gotten older. The side effects of one drink are mild enough that I can still drink socially once in while if I am careful. If I have more, it is 24+ hours of unpleasantness. Luckily I don’t have trouble stopping. My life would be hell if I did.

I keep it simple: VT (tax advantaged) VTI+VXUS (regular brokerage) BND (a bit)

Not sure if this is the whole thing: https://youtu.be/dj25HO48Gxw

Edit: I think this is it but have not watched https://youtu.be/ZVahys8MWLo

The shorter clip is the one I was thinking about and my mind went right to it when I saw this article.

Read the Bogleheads Wiki [0] for a simple broad foundation on basic personal finance and wealth accumulation.

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Congratulations!

Finances are a common source of strife in marriages. Getting and staying on the same page is critical. Communicate about finances openly and often. Budget together. Review the budget together regularly. It sounds like you are already starting this. That is a good sign. Never stop.

As far as your specific question: I'd recommend joint for day to day and emergency fund. While its simpler, the main reason is mental: its not my money and your money, its our money. We do keep investments separate, but its still "ours".

That is just a recommendation though. Its more important that you both talk about and agree on your approach.