Weeknotes 2025 W29: Punched in the head

Quick bits:

• It occurred to me earlier this week that I technically have more years of experience with JavaScript (29 years) than with English (26 years).

• The autocorrection continues to go wrong. I noticed that “Autechre” in my last week­notes was autocorrected to Etcher. Why?! How?!

• I restarted my effort to give away and/or sell some of the things I own. I own too much. The extra cash will help me, a little bit, to get through unemployment.

• I am quite happy with the robo vac/mop. It is that extra bit of help that really makes a difference.¹¹1 I purchased this device in anticipation of getting a new role soon. In hindsight, not the smartest financial decision I have made, but long-term probably worth it. 

• The exhaustion has reached its zenith this week. Oof.

• It’s that time of the year where the rivers and canals get quite stinky. This makes my walks rather unpleasant, and likely also explain why I’ve got mosquitos in my apartment (which generally is quite rare, despite living close to water).

Last night, as I was walking home, I got punched in the head by a stranger. A dude on a scooter drove past me from behind, and punched me in the back of the head before driving off.

I went to the emergency room because that’s the only reasonable thing to do when you’ve been punched in the head and feel nauseous and dizzy and have a headache. Diagnosis: mild cranial contusion. Nothing serious, luckily.

I did not make a police report as I don’t remember much of the incident. I suppose that getting punched in the head is not conducive to remembering things.

But truly: what the actual fuck? What kind of degenerate asshole punches strangers on the street?!

I’ve had enough traffic related incidents lately that I’ve developed a distinct psychological trauma response. Being punched in the head by a stranger did not help.

On the way home from the ER, as I was crossing the street (green light for pedestrians, i.e. me) a cyclist barrelled through the red light, coming right at me, not braking, not slowing down, only narrowly avoiding me in the end. As if I’m supposed to get out of the way? Am I invisible? Are people deliberately trying to run me over?

I’ve developed the instinctive reaction to freeze in place when there is danger — like a cyclist or a motorcyclist coming straight at me through a red light. In an urban environment, it is distinctly counterproductive to stay still in the path of an ongoing vehicle. It is as if my lizard brain attempts to blend in to the environment to prevent detection by predators (like cyclists and drivers). But that’s not how this works at all. I’ve been in collisions because of this exact freeze response.

The job search continues. Help me out: Get me a job in 2025.

For the first time, I’ve gotten a rejection based on lacking structuring and technical skill, while the communication and business aspect shone through. How odd — usually it’s the other way around.

I’ve been re-focusing myself: I am now searching solely for roles as a staff backend engineer with a focus on large-scale, highly available distributed systems. Those are the roles I find most interesting, and the roles I already have significant experience for.

The majority of the companies that I have worked for in the past have been too small-scale. I have not found a truly interesting challenge there. I have consistently been inside my comfort zone, and often I’ve been the most senior person in the room. This is not an area for growth. I am capable of more.

It would be great to work at a place with the scale that SoundCloud had in the mid 2010s. That scale created unique and interesting problems to solve.

The drawback of marketing myself as a backend-focused staff engineer is that the number of jobs is significantly lower. That’s something I am willing to deal with for the time being. Rather than jumping into a new role right away, I need to take the time to find a role that fits me longer-term.

Help me out: share my Get me a job in 2025 with your network! Get me those referrals!

Entertainment:

• I rewatched Naked Lunch²²2 Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, written by William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg (Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Téléfilm Canada, Ontario Film Development Corporation, 1992).  and fell asleep about halfway through. This movie — the first half of it, at least — is even weirder than I remembered.

• Finally finished Outer Wilds.³³3 Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), published by Annapurna Interactive.  What a trippy and beautiful ending.

Links:

• All The Ghosts You Will Be (Vsauce)

• Minimak: I might give this approach a try — or come up with my own keyboard layout, perhaps?

• The Physics Of Dissonance (minutephysics): Excellent stuff! A surprisingly long video for minutephysics. (Also see: Week­notes 2024 W17: Irrational.)

Tech links:

• Strategies for very fast Lexers: Neat! (Though in my experience, the lexer is generally the fastest part of a compiler pipeline, so not super worth optimizing.)

• Naming Things: A good addition to my own Naming principles.

• Bedrock (Ben Bridle): This is cool. I don’t know what I would use it for just yet, though.

• WinBox - HTML5 window manager: I also have no use for this but it’s cool!

• A distributed systems reliability glossary: This is dense.

• The sound of inevitability (Tom Renner)

• Two Simple Rules to Fix Code Reviews (Sergey Tselovalnikov): I really like the idea of not writing any code if there is code to be reviewed.