Weeknotes 2024 W24: Wallet returned

Quick bits:

• I picked up my lost wallet from the zentrales Fundbüro.¹¹¹ Central lost-and-found office.  Everything was still in it, including the cash. Honest finders exist! Thank you, stranger.

• Earlier this week, a handful of people that looked comically like secret service agents showed up on my street. Most likely, they really were secret service of sorts, present for Zelenskyy’s visit to Berlin.

• I replaced my aging iPhone case. The new one is sturdier, and will hopefully last me for a long time.

• This week, I found out that an Überweisungsschein²²² Physician referral form.  is only valid in the quarter it is given in. I have an appointment for which I need such an Überweisungsschein on July 2nd, which is the start of a new quarter, and so the only time I can get one is on July 1st. What an annoying situation.

• While walking on a pedestrian path, a cyclist came at full speed at me, slammed the brakes shut in front of me, and then called me an Affe.³³³ German for “ape” or “monkey,” and definitely used as an insult in this context, similar to insults like “idiot” or “moron.”  For being in his way, presumably — on a pedestrian path. Yikes! This interaction is quite possibly a new low in traffic aggression in Berlin. Car drivers can be assholes, but cyclists can be absolutely awful too.

• On my grocery list, I started abbreviating “breakfast” as “bf,” which has led to some confusion as the local grocery does not — and this is true — sell boyfriends.

• The Apple Weather app is utterly unreliable. On Friday, it told me there was a zero percent chance of rain, yet just as I was about to head out on my bike, there was a downpour that would have soaked me in under a minute. The RegenRadar is the only thing I put any trust in.

• It’s always a bit freaky to drive through the abandoned Französische Straße underground (U-Bahn) station. Spooky!

The job search is crawling along. More calls with recruiters, and more interviews.

The market seems to have been opening up in the last month or two, with plenty more recruiter calls than previously. This is good news for me, and for any other software engineer looking for a job!

Still, the job search is slow. One reason is that I’ve become better at figuring out whether a company is a place I could see myself working at long-term. I would love to have an employer I could comfortable stay at for a year or two. For most companies that I interview for, I can’t see myself being engaged for nearly that long.⁴⁴⁴ I’ve written before about the bad luck I’ve had in recent employment. I’m trying hard to avoid bad-luck employers going forward. 

My patience with technical challenges has grown thin,⁵⁵⁵ I wrote about my dislike for technical challenges in Week­notes 2024 W20: Birthday.  and quite a few job interview processes have ended at the tech challenge stage — mostly because I broke off the process at that point. The way I see it: if the ROI of working through a challenge is too low (in other words: if the effort is too high and the chance of passing is too low) then there’s no point in starting work on the challenge in the first place.

The most recent coding challenge I received was to write a production-ready full-stack web application. This is far, far too large of a task for a coding challenge.⁶⁶⁶ I was also expected to program the backend in a language I had never used for backend development before, and did not know any frameworks to help me.  On top of that, I was required to do it in a programming language that I was not familiar with — something I was clear about at the very start of the process — and so I had no choice but to abandon the interview process at this company. What a waste of time.

Finding remote jobs in Germany tends to be overly complicated because of (as I understand it) Scheinselbständigkeit.⁷⁷⁷ False self-employment.  In Germany, the legislation around this is particularly strict. In practice, this means that plenty of employers without a legal presence in Germany don’t want to risk hiring people from German. That is often even true, for reasons I do not understand, if they use employers-of-record with presence in Germany, like Deel or Remote.

My fiction writing continues to be blocked.⁸⁸⁸ Same as last week. 

My biggest challenge is creating properly fleshed out protagonists for my stories. A good protagonist is active, brave, and has the ability to grow over the course of a story. None of the characters I come up with are quite like that.

The way I start my stories is with an idea of a setting or an event, and then figure out what characters are needed to bring that story to life. This approach doesn’t quite work well, because characters are, by necessity, secondary.

I’ve been tinkering with game development again.

This time, I’m returning to LÖVE, which is a framework that I keep being fond of. It is lower level than other frameworks like Godot, but that is what I enjoy about it, too: it is not opinionated and so it’s straightforward to just get something written.

I’ve been browsing the source code of many LÖVE games, including Balatro,⁹⁹⁹ Balatro (LocalThunk, 2023), published by Playstack.  which I bought in large part because I wanted to see how it’s built.¹⁰¹⁰¹⁰ To view the source code of a LÖVE game on macOS, right-click on the game, choose the “Show Package Contents” menu item, navigate to the Contents/Resources/ directory, find the file with the .love extension, change its extension to .zip, and extract its contents.  I downloaded a whole bunch of LÖVE games off itch.io too. Even though the source code of games is often very much not pretty to look at, I am learning a great deal from them.

I believe the main challenge for game development is shifting towards game design, figuring out good ideas and fleshing them out, so that I have something that people could quite enjoy playing.

So far, I have nothing to show. Maybe that’ll change. Maybe not! I am still doing this purely for fun, rather than any sort of end result.

Entertainment:

• I might’ve dropped all the games I was playing. Completing things is not for me, apparently.

• I picked up Balatro,¹¹¹¹¹¹ Balatro (LocalThunk, 2023), published by Playstack.  which is fun but hard.

• I booted up my ancient copy of Batman: Arkham Origins¹²¹²¹² Batman: Arkham Origins (WB Games Montréal, 2013), published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.  and played a little through it. It’s fun, but ultimately repetitive and not very satisfying. Chance that I’ll have dropped it by next week: 99%.

Links:

• SHODAN is back! System Shock 2 leads Children of Doom: 1999!: New Children of Doom!!!

• Why Nobody Knows What 彁 Means (Half as Interesting)

• Juice it or lose it (Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho): An oldie! This talk is the perfect demonstration of how important game polish is.