I took the last week and a half off work. I've been reading a great book - "Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz.
After six years at the same company, I started realizing I might be ready for a move, but I'm not interview-ready, so I started brushing up on system design, python/leetcode stuff, and other stuff.
It's been interesting to use claude to generate study guides, and even "books" related to technical topics, and send them to my kindle for reading while out for a nice long walk.
Walking at a regular pace helps slow my brain down so that I can think more effectively. My favorite hobby right now is hour-long walks with my kindle (I walk in places where there are very long uninterrupted stretches).
When I read at home, I fall asleep in 2 pages. I have to be moving around. I have a bunch of "flashcard" like stuff on my kindle related to coding, interview prep, etc. The only chance I have is doing this while walking.
I've created a number of apps for myself using just html or, simple node+sqlite running locally. Great for learning apps, personalized todo/priority tracking, etc.
This last week was one of my most challenging weeks in my ~20 year work life. I work in big tech, but am a relative latecomer to it (6 years). I'm a manager, and someone who was a very senior IC, a mentor, and work friend of mine, became my manager 6 months ago. It was a "boiling frog" situation that blew up spectacularly last week. I had to talk to my skip-level manager about it and the only viable solution was me leaving my team behind to go manage another team. I'm still bummed about it and taking some time off before starting the new role.
Do I want to be fired? No, because the job market sucks, I make good money, and I live in a HCOL area with a mortgage, a wife and a young kid. I need to sustain (and grow) this for another 10+ years minimum before having any kind of financial independence.
Good. it will fail in much more pedestrian manner, Spectacular is the less likely fail mode. Bust robots and one back in 10,000 trashed? Sure. But ask yourself what the error rate in badly managed bag handling is in any economy. Japan might be on the low side, people still take pride in doing their job, but accidents happen.
Instagram has something like this where it shows you "least interacted with". It seems broken to me though, as it showed me people who I do interact with.
You don't have to use the most recent bleeding edge model to succeed. A local FOSS coding agent coupled with a reasonably priced LLM could yield the optimal ROI.
I've had excellent luck using Claude Code to generate "mermaid diagrams" for me, and convert them to .png format headlessly using mmdc/puppeteer. Really helped me out with an engineering proposal I just finished. In past years I would have fumbled around with Visio forever and the result would have been worse.
I find Mermaid diagram rendering is quite ugly by default. I've gotten much better-looking results by asking it to just generate SVGs. As a bonus it can do animations too. e.g. see slide 3 here, which I first tried with Mermaid and then switched to SVG when I couldn't get the rendering to look good: https://talks.mk.gg/2026/atmosphereconf/
I now often have CC make technical/architecture diagrams with tikz, the results look much better than mermaid but still requires multiple iterations to fix bad arrows, bad layouts etc.
Diagrams are still far from solved. We need a good non-gameable diagrams benchmark.
Well, mermaid diagrams are "just" a list of nodes and their relations. You'd expect any llm capable of generating code to be able to generate them
Writing an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle without being able to see the result and iterate based on that is incredibly difficult by comparison. I'm sure some humans could do it, but I sure can't. That's part of the beauty of it: it's very difficult to do but a toddler could judge the results
Writing an SVG of a diagram by hand would be somewhere on the middle ground. Or depending on the number of nodes might be even harder than the pelican. Layouting diagrams can get tricky very quickly. It's also one of Mermaid's biggest weaknesses
Just wait if they go public. Claude 5.4 fails the Pelican test stock sheds 20% of value pf news. Wall street wonders if the lack of front wheel means there is something seriously wrong with the stocks underlying value
Agreed. Unless this really helps people somehow make better trading decisions than existing tools, the vast majority of them are probably still better off index investing.
That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to.
And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.
source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.
Yeah, it’s not a great name. But it originates from the government. When somebody without a security clearance needs to go to a secure area, they must be escorted by somebody.
When the blog post mentioned Hegseth and “digital escort” in the same sentence, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t about his OnlyFans habit at his work desktop.
Yes but this misses the underlying point: this is the same software. It suffers from the same defects. If your management stack keeps crashing and leaking VMs you are seeing a reduction in the operational capacity of the fleet. If you are still there just tour Azure Watson and tell me if you’d want the military to rely on that system in wartime? Don’t forget things like IVAS and God knows what else that are used during operations while Azure node agents happily crash and restart on the hosts. The system should be no-touch and run like an appliance, which is predicated on zero crashes or 100% crash resiliency. In Windows Core we pursued a single Watson bucket with a single hit until it was fixed. Different standards.
I'm only commenting on parent comment's understanding of what digital escort process is specifically. Escort is used by all kinds of teams that are just doing day-to-day crap for various resource providers across azure. I've never worked anywhere close to Azure Core so I don't know about these more low-level concerns. Overall I agree and sympathize with your assessment of the engineering culture.
You also make it sound like getting a JIT approved is getting keys to the kingdom. It's not -- every team has it's own JIT policies for their resources. Should there be far less manual touches? Ideally. But JIT is better than persistent access at least, and JIT policies should be scoped according to principle of least privilege. If that is not happening, it's a failure at the level of that specific org.
After six years at the same company, I started realizing I might be ready for a move, but I'm not interview-ready, so I started brushing up on system design, python/leetcode stuff, and other stuff.
It's been interesting to use claude to generate study guides, and even "books" related to technical topics, and send them to my kindle for reading while out for a nice long walk.
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