Weeknotes 2025 W27: A ivitam
Quick bits:
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For the first time in forever, I am publishing my weeknotes in the afternoon. I usually get up much earlier and publish them around 10 AM. But hey, I lost my job and I deserve to take it easy for a bit.1
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I sortakinda forgot that I wanted to plan a birthday picnic. It’s been about a month and a half since my birthday now. Oops.
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I added a “Free Palestine” banner to the Nanoc web site.
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The Infection continues. On my red-inflamed skin, there is one specific patch that is unaffected, and it is roughly heart-shaped. Very romantic. 🖤
This week, I’ve had a billion conversations with potential future employers. The job market is definitely more in favor of job seekers now. There is at least one quite exciting prospect in the pipeline.
Something I keep wondering about: do I have too many short-term stints on my CV? There are quite a few, but mostly not on purpose (especially not my last employment, where I got laid off). It would be nice to have a longer-term employment — maybe 3+ years would be nice.
This week has been hot, hot, hot. Wednesday went up to 37 °C (99 °F) which is exceptional. Nonetheless, I found it to be surprisingly bearable even without AC.
My MacBook Air, however, was quite struggling, which I am attributing to thermal throttling. The amount of multi-tasking it could do was limited: video calls would stutter while performing backups, for instance. This has never been an issue before. Sometimes, even the cursor would lag and stutter noticeably.
I have given my portfolio a makeover, making it much more visual.
This works well for work that have a visual aspect, like conference/meetup talks, web sites, and games. Not so for command-line tools and software libraries, obviously. This new portfolio design makes me want to shift focus towards more visual work.
Also, now that I have everything laid out, it is clear how many things did not make the cut. I have so many projects that never saw the light of day: stuff that I gave up on, lost the motivation for, projects that accidentally went a wholly different direction and off track, and projects far too big in scope.
I also feel that having everything laid out makes me think that I haven’t achieved as much as I could have. I am capable of more. I’m driven to create more. And despite having a dedicated portfolio page with a considerable amount of stuff on it, there is an icky voice in the back of my head that tells me that I am not doing enough. Eurgh.
This week’s AI nonsense is this bit from Google Gemini:
I’ve initiated a basic Google search to uncover Denis Defreyne’s work history. My next step involves probing the initial results for specific companies and roles. I’ll utilize queries such as “Denis Defreyne A ivitam” and “Denis Defreyne E fficy” to gather more targeted data.
A ivitam?
E fficy?
What in the world is Gemini even doing here?!
An interesting question has come up in multiple job interviews in the last two weeks: how do I measure success?
I find it tiring to provide metrics for success for everything I do as a software engineer. So many things in software engineering are hard to measure.
What metric is improved by refactoring? By adding more tests? By removing old/brittle tests? When I implement a feature explicitly requested by a product manager, yet no customer ends up using that feature, have I succeeded? How would I quantify success here? If I literally do nothing and product usage rises exponentially and revenue goes through the roof, should that reflect in my “success” metric at all?
In my 15-year career of being a software engineer, I don’t think I have ever seen a metric that captures the meaning of “success” in a software development project.
There is no correlation between “success” and the amount of tests I write, the amount of customer usage the thing I developed gets, the amount of time it took for me to write it, or the number of lines of code I added. There probably is a correlation to runtime performance, but only if its acceptable range was defined ahead of time (which is remarkably difficult to do). There likely is a correlation to the number of bugs too, but that also is remarkably difficult to quantify.
If anyone has any remotely relevant ideas for how to measure “success” as a software developer, let me know. I’ve been drawing a blank for forever.
Entertainment:
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I have made my way entirely through Twin Peaks2 season 2. The last few episodes of season 2 are night and day difference in quality when compared to the uninspired mid-season episodes. On this watch, the scenes at the Twin Peaks Savings and Loan stood out to me specifically.
I am now well through Twin Peaks: The Return.3 Two episodes are left. This whole season is breathtaking.
As before, I have been continuing my Mastodon shitposting about the series (1, 2, 3, 4). Perhaps one day I will archive these (under-appreciated) shitposts on my web site.
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Outer Wilds4 is a weird game. Unsettling at times. I don’t really know what I am doing. What is up with the Q—— M——? The E——? What is the A—— T—— P——? How do I get to the S—— S——? Mysteries wrapped in enigmas.
Links:
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You’re Not Addicted to Content, You’re Starving for Information (Hank Green, vlogbrothers): This is an excellent metaphor.
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How to Fix the Harry Potter Books: The Chamber of Secrets (My Little Thought Tree)
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Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases: Ooh, love this.
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The Missing 11th of the Month (David R Hagen): Whoa.
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OpenMW 0.49.0 Released!: I had entirely forgotten that I bought Morrowind. I still haven’t played it (assuming that “spending hours configuring the mods” is not playing).
Tech links:
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Why I’m Dialing Back My LLM Usage (Alberto Fortin, Zed)
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You MUST listen to RFC 2119 (Eric W. Bailey)
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Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin (Simon Willison)
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Frankly, these are my weeknotes and I can do with them whatever I please. Publish them in the evening? I might do that, actually. Maybe someday. Maybe out of spite. ↩︎
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Twin Peaks, written by David Lynch and Mark Frost (Lynch/Frost Productions, Propaganda Films, Spelling Entertainment, 1990). ↩︎
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Twin Peaks: The Return, written by David Lynch and Mark Frost (Showtime Networks, Rancho Rosa Partnership, Twin Peaks Productions, 2017). ↩︎
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Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), published by Annapurna Interactive. ↩︎