Mostly Software

    • Remember closures are scope. setTimeout and such, with a function def within, need let in outer scope (not var) if you want access in the inner.
    • Got a massage.
    • Great football day, solid niners win. The seahawks lost. The patriots lost. 3/5 sbsc. Both ff leagues are in playoffs, I am not.
    • TechLead has some decent youtube videos.
      • He currently has ~600k followers and makes about that much annually from it.
      • I’ve been playing with that idea for a while. Started making a list of topics.
    • Silicon Valley season finale.
    • Interview examples on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg/videos.
    • Bucks and Lakers at the tops of the conferences, by decent margins.
    • Bought a new protein (Naked Pea). It’s 37g per dollar, compared to Anthony’s 48, but comes in a 5lb plastic tub instead of the pouch.
      • The standard 5lb tub of optimum nutrition whey protein is 31g per dollar, for comparison.
    • Applied to multiple positions at BMW, senior software and test automation, as well as a few gov jobs. UFC.
    • Replied to Amazon reachouts, replied to the GitLab recruiter.
    • UFC. Lots of college football conf championships.
      • Was reached out to by citadel (via njf), a hedge fund. They have offices all over the world, including LA and SF. Scheduled a phone call for Monday.
      • Listen to griz most of today. Could listen to horns and other wind instruments with drops all day.
      • Lots of newsletters today.
      • UTM info should not be in url params. It’s annoying. It makes the link bloated when copying. It is information the user does not care about. It’s only for the service. There should be a place in metadata. I don’t care if it’s a field in the http headers or elsewhere, but it should not be in the full url.
      • Didn’t read it, but a good summary of cryptography: https://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html.
      • The most recent version of unicode is 12.1. It has 137,994 characters.
        • Remember the utf-8 and utf-16 encodings are variable-width. utf-8 can use 1-4 bytes (each 8 bits) to represent a char. utf-16 can use 1 or 2.
      • Good list of db lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXja7K1hjZ01UTVDnGQdx5v5U.
      • Ordered much better heat gloves for the smoker.
      • Watched a couple “day in the life” videos from devs at larger companies to get the internal feel.
        • Instead of having employees recollect their opinions once a year for reviews (and company survey), amazon asks a daily question instead. Do you find your work important? What can be improved? etc. Some will repeat to get multiple data points. This is much better.
      • Sean Lee’s video is always a good one. It’s geared toward college/entrylevel, but he still speaks impressively.
      • The basic sorts (dumb ones like bubble) are bad in time complexity (quadratic) but good in space (constant).
      • Mergesort. Divide into smaller pieces, sort those, then reassemble by iteratively comparing the first elements of the pieces.
      • Heapsort is pretty great. A little slower than quicksort, but better worst case. Is not stable. It’s in-place, so constant space complexity.
      • Created a gdoc to summarize the structure of the ds&a interview, and to prepare.
      • Smoked 8lbs of curry/mesquite beef ribs.
      • I don’t think GitLab is very likely. All of their vacancies are explicit about ruby/rails experience as a hard requirement. Gonna hound the people who have emailed me, since this is a top choice.
      • Made 2lbs of roasted pecan butter and 2lbs of roasted hazelnut butter.
        • Burned a hole through the bottom of the food processor because I transferred the nuts straight from broil.
        • The hole (gash) was maybe 2x2x30mm. I didn’t collect any of the butter from the bottom to be safe. This is a small amount of plastic. The body will just pass plastic in about a day because it’s not digestible. The worry is the chemical (pthalates), which can be cancer causing. The amount in the batch is small, and the batch is about 1-2 months worth, so I’m not too worried about the ingestion.
        • I did throw the food processor away. It’s old and I needed a new one anyway.
      • Downloaded pdfs of Cracking the Coding Interview and Programming Interviews Exposed.
      • Reviewed some old notes on complexity theory. P vs NP. Easy to solve, easy to verify, hard to solve, hard to verify.
        • Cryptography (and other one-way functions, and jigsaw puzzles) are implicated by NP (hard to solve, easy to verify).
        • Np-hard and np-complete. While most in np are verifiable in polynomial time, some aren’t. These are the most difficult problems in np.
        • Exptime = hard to solve, hard to verify.
      • Paul asked for help with some web development stuff.
      • Tensorflow = most ML. PyTorch = computer vision and language processing. Keras = deep learning and neural nets.
      • Caveat emptor = buyer beware.
      • My top artist of the past year on spotify was erra.
      • Reddit’s userbase is 430m, which is bigger than twitter.
      • Pip is getting 400k in funding to improve next year.
      • Django released its next major version, 3.0. Biggest improvement is ASGI (async).
      • Watched velvet buzzsaw. Thought it was horrible, personally.
      • Updated linkedin, finally.
        • Certifications: CLAD.
        • Added finish date to spacex, vacated current position.
        • Awards: capstone 1st, smallsat 2nd. Moved things around.
        • Added organizations like calsol, pts, citris, ssdl.
        • Removed clarity consultants and citris from work exp. Just pumpkin spacex self.
        • Adjusted all skills.
        • Added GRE scores.
        • Added gitlab and blog links.
        • Accepted all requests (there were hundreds), looked at all messages.
      • Practice questions.
        • Looked through interviewbit. Also looked through hiredintech. Lot of basic info on both.
        • Moved on to careercup. Great repository of practice questions.
        • DP = dynamic programming. Type of problem usually works well with some classical recursion. Solve the subproblem, store it, and assemble them together to get the final solution.
        • Did a TON more videos on youtube.
      • Watched a few videos of candidates detailing their 2019 interview processes at the big ones, google/amazon/etc. It’s disappointing how much weight is still given to datastructures/algorithms questions, especially in non entry level roles.
      • Started the brine for a new round of beef ribs. These ones are kinda old, and were frozen/thawed.
      • Python reminder. Mutable = (dict, list, set). Immutable = (str, int, float, tuple, bool).
      • Magnus Carlsen is the greatest chess player of all time. He’s 29. Garry Kasparov is #2. He’s the legend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_players_by_peak_FIDE_rating.
      • Supercontest.
        • The pick id is almost at 9000. It will increment with every pick, and users can repick as much as they want until lockdown. I won’t need to reindex this for a long time, it’s not horribly sparse.
        • Looked forward to week 16 where there is no TNF, but 3 games on saturday instead. The app should handle these just like the 3 thanksgiving games, and the regular thursday games. Pick until kickoff. Updated the help text to explain this.
        • Week 17 is all sunday games. It should handle that fine too.
        • Made the face collage repeat-x.
        • Committed lines. Submitted picks.
      • Zyme can move as quickly as 1% in 4min, as seen today. Shot up a bit. Made $275 on the day.
      • Post Malone was the most streamed artist of 2019. Drake was the most streamed artist of the 2010s. The most streamed song of the 2010s was Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-12-03/the-top-songs-artists-playlists-and-podcasts-of-2019-and-the-last-decade/.
      • Made all gitlab projects public again. I flip on this so much. At the end of the day, I want to support open-source tech across the board. Who cares if it comes from me or someone else. Let’s just improve.
      • GitLab has pretty impressive culture. They’re fully remote, and here’s why: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/. They even have specific rationales for stuff like burnout, anxiety, etc: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/mental-health/.
        • Their application made this clear. It was very accommodating. It asks for your pronouns.
      • Connected lumin to gdrive in incognito.
      • Winner of each division advances, 1, 2, 3, 4 for each conference. The next 2 best records play in the wildcards against 3 and 4. Then everything is as expected after that. Each conference with 4 remaining teams.
      • This is cool:
      • Apps.
        • Played with printing PDFs from the resumes. Thought about where to host them. You could just do public shareable links from google drive. Google docs has a “publish to the web” option. You can do it straight from a word doc, don’t need a pdf. It will update with the gdrive source. I did that.
        • Finalized resume for sendoff. Whittled it down to an abridged resume as well.
        • Looked at disney. Not much.
        • Intuit’s interface was kinda weird. Didn’t search much.
        • Looked at spotify. No software eng positions in LA/SF.
        • Robinhood, menlo park: https://careers.robinhood.com/openings?gh_jid=1946247.
        • 23andMe, sunnyvale: https://www.23andme.com/careers/4338566002/.
        • Renaissance, new york: https://www.rentec.com/Careers.action?computerProgrammer=true.
        • Netflix, los gatos: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/865957.
        • GitLab: https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4247953002.
        • Pornhub is based in montreal.
        • Probably not gonna apply to amazon. Can always followup with recruiters later.
        • Replied to Rosie from Google (via olivia, friend in X/moonshot), who had reached out 15 months ago. Replied to Tara as well, another recruiter who reached out. She responded, and we have a call scheduled for monday.
        • Submissions today: gitlab, netflix, renaissance, 23andme, robinhood, google.
        • The longest one was gitlab, with actual questions. The others were basically just a simple resume upload, with explicit fields for contact, and gender/race/veteran/disability declarations.
        • Created doc to track all details (team, title, locations, salary, etc).
      • Some great sports voice cracks:
      • Looked through a bit of ruby/rails documentation to familiarize to my expertise in python/flask.
        • Lot more builtins than python, it seems. Esp for webdev specific stuff. Gems. Templates.
        • .rb file extension. erb is the templating system, .erb files.
        • Checked some template services too: https://github.com/mattbrictson/rails-template.
        • Paid rent and talked to sherisse about moveout.
        • Sundar Pichai taking over for Larry Page as CEO of alphabet.
        • dip = density-independent pixel. Use this, instead of px, so that it adjusts by viewport size. Use multiples of 8 so that it can scale evenly.
        • Bought my holiday flights home. 14k miles and $11. I still have 125k miles to burn from my old delta amex.
        • Settled more briley finances. Now we just halve my utils and his internet since march (2019).
        • Updated banner for the week. Deployed.
          • Remaining banners: franky 15, petty 16. Only one available left.
          • Something I’ve been doing lately so both the height and width autoadjust: `background-size: contain; max-height: 250px; height: {100*height/width}vw;`
            • Right click your collage and check the properties. Divide height/width, multiple by 100 to make it a percentage, then round down to the nearest percent.
        • After a year of experimentation and 50 smoke sessions, I think I like the flavor of hickory and apple a bit more than mesquite and pecan. I’ll continue to isolate.
        • PNG is better. It uses a lossless compression, whereas jpg is lossy.
        • The price of the christmas tree has doubled in the past decade.
        • Picked up beef ribs, pecans, and honey from costco. Bought ghost pepper chips and beet from riteaid.
        • Cleaned the entire smoker (a deeper scrub than usual).
        • Smoked 18lbs of short rib. Hand pressed tortillas. Bchan in town with the hot sauce.
        • 2c masa harina, 1.5c water, 1tsp salt. Mix. Flatten. Griddle at 7. 10s one second, 2m other, 2m back.
        • Ordered new wood chunks. A 4lb bag of hickory, cherry, apply, mesquite, pecan, each $7.
        • Cool article on machine learning for horse race betting: https://teddykoker.com/2019/12/beating-the-odds-machine-learning-for-horse-racing/.
        • Tabulate is a python package that’s much better at pretty-printing the output report than my custom method. https://github.com/astanin/python-tabulate.
        • Dry knives right away. They can mold, oxidize, rust.