I think they've lost track of the meaning of IO and its keynotes for users. They should rather have a separate Gemini event like they had a separate Android one last week.

They're collectively losing track of their product verticals because they're too focused on shoving AI down everything. Google Home is a cluster-f, basic things keep failing, and every other announcement from the Google Home VP is about Gemini. It took them years to reduce the frequency at which devices go offline.

Even their sessions seem underwhelming. It's a mixture of "what's new in X" and "AI" this and that.

Woah hang on, I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what engineers do.

FWIW I was trained as a classical engineer (mechanical), but pretty much just write code these days. But I did have a past life as a not-SWE.

Most classical engineering fields deal with probabilistic system components all of the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say that inability to deal with probabilistic components is disqualifying from many engineering endeavors.

Process engineers for example have to account for human error rates. On a given production line with humans in a loop, the operators will sometimes screw up. Designing systems to detect these errors (which are highly probabilistic!), mitigate them, and reduce the occurrence rates of such errors is a huge part of the job.

Likewise even for regular mechanical engineers, there are probabilistic variances in manufacturing tolerances. Your specs are always given with confidence intervals (this metal sheet is 1mm thick +- 0.05mm) because of this. All of the designs you work on specifically account for this (hence safety margins!). The ways in which these probabilities combine and interact is a serious field of study.

Software engineering is unlike traditional engineering disciplines in that for most of its lifetime it's had the luxury of purely deterministic expectations. This is not true in nearly every other type of engineering.

If anything the advent of ML has introduced this element to software, and the ability to actually work with probabilistic outcomes is what separates those who are serious about this stuff vs. demoware hot air blowers.

I used to root for the D programming language but it seems to have got stuck and never gained a good ecosystem. I've disliked Rust from the first time I saw it and have never warmed up to it's particular trade offs. C feels unergonomic these days and C++ is overfull with complexity. Zig feels like a nice pragmatic middle ground.

I actually think Rust is probably perfectly suited to a number of tasks, but I feel I would default to choosing Zig unless I was certain beyond doubt that I needed specific Rust safety features.

There was really no reason to do so at all - it's an ordinary company building an ordinary application. But some CTO or dev lead years ago thought it important to use whatever the fancy tech of the day was to build a fairly ordinary business application.

But now they have trouble hiring people because there's a tiny pool of people who know that language. And it is years down the track and all their technology is built with whatever that language/framework is - too expensive to easily bail out, but probably necessary anyway.

In 2023 you've got to have really good reasons for not using C#, or Java, or Python, or TypeScript for building your web project. Maybe Golang - it's getting some good traction in the DevOps space.

If you make decisions about technologies and this latest thing appeals to you - maybe use it for your personal projects. The CEO has employed you to make responsible decisions not play toys.

COVID was what triggered me writing this book. At the beginning of the year, I was in the middle of writing a book on growing as a software engineer. However, as COVID started and the tech the layoffs followed in April and May, I found myself wanting to help people impacted. I’ve been a hiring manager for a few years, so I offered to do resume reviews for those laid off or applying for positions[2]. I had more than 300 developers take me up on this offer in a few days.

I did in-depth reviews for the first few dozen people, then copied-and-pasted common observations for the next batch, and finally sent over a 15-page PDF with the most common advice, with a few pointers for the bulk of the people. Here’s an early version of this PDF[3] - which also was the basis of this book.

I wasn’t that happy with how little backup I had for the advice in that guide, so I started to reach out to tech recruiters and hiring managers for more feedback. I also asked people to share back how their improved resumes worked out, applying the suggestions, and started adding this into a growing guide.

Four months and 55,000 words later, the book is ready. I tried to give level-headed, but practical advice, with lots of examples from actual resumes (that are all anonymized). Happy to answer any questions here.

[1] https://thetechresume.com/complimentary-copy

[2] https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1263855589861580800

[3] https://thetechresume.com/A_Good_Tech_Resume.pdf

Something medical texts tend to not spell out:

Lymph is more or less blood, minus certain blood parts (like red blood cells). And when it gets into the tissues it gets called interstitial fluid.

This is all the same fluid circulating through the body, with different elements added or removed in different contexts. It's really quite elegant and you can think of it sort of like the water cycle. (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle-kids-adv.html)

Interstitial fluid would be sort of like groundwater. And like groundwater, it gets into the tissues via seepage.

The circulatory system would be kind of like rivers and streams.

So part of this fluid cycle is controlled by the pump action of the heart. When it is in your blood vessels (and I think also when it is in the lymphatic system), the heart pumps it, driving the circulation.

When it is out in the tissues, it is beyond the reach of the heart. And this is where things get really fascinating.

It is driven back to the circulatory system via two different methods, depending on where it is. The brain has a separate system from the rest of the body.

In the brain, the glymphatic system flushes fluids from the tissues while you sleep. This is a primary function of sleep and flushing these fluids out is how the body "takes out the trash," which is likely why sleep deprivation is increasingly shown as associated with both the build-up of certain proteins in the brain and, ultimately, certain brain disorders.

In other tissues, muscle action drives the fluid back to the circulatory system. (Remember, the heart is just a big muscle. So this makes perfect sense.) So exercise dramatically increases the rate at which interstitial fluid gets returned to the circulatory system.

This means that one of the functions of exercise is "taking out the trash." And this is likely a huge and overlooked factor in why exercise is so beneficial to your health.

Different sources cite different rates, but exercise may increase the outflow by as much as eight times the normal speed of outflow via seepage. It's really a big difference.

If you have any health issues, understanding this human internal "water cycle" is something I highly recommend as enormously helpful. I sometimes take a walk to help myself feel better and I know that at least part of why that sometimes helps is it clears waste products from my tissues by pumping up the volume -- literally -- on the body taking out the trash.

I think that's everything I wanted to say.

For me, as a junior, remote work has pretty much been devastating on the learning side of things as well as being invisible to management when it comes to career prospects. Sure, it benefited the seniors as they could more easily dodge some of the annoying responsibility of tutoring the juniors and leave early when their work was done and they had enough time to rub shoulders with management before the pandemic to have guaranteed career prospects.

So, to whit, I'm wonder if the teachers also enjoyed remote teaching more to the detriment of the kids?

Out in the real world there is so much nuance. There are actually black people who don't agree with BLM. There are intellectual people who don't think they need the vaccine. There are Democrats who are pro-life. There are Republicans who support gay marriage. There are bunch of undecided people on a bunch of topics.

We are not all on one side or the other. There is so much middle ground. I still believe most people are in the vast expanse of middle ground.

It just doesn't look that way on the Internet.