Adam Vartanian @flooey@mastodon.flooey.org
- https://twitter.com/flooey
- blog
- https://flooey.org
Software engineering manager at Cord. Counterculture-adjacent. Strong opinions, rarely tooted. (he/him)
Joined Nov 2022
I wrote up a blog post for how we’re taking advantage of TypeScript to make developing our APIs easier and less error-prone, check it out!
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
In truth, it’s more complicated than that, since I also wrongly think that Bret Victor did the wat talk, so the thing I actually think is, “They put the wat guy on the OpenAI board?”
I can’t remember the difference between Bret Victor and Bret Taylor, which leads to a lot of, “wait, they put the programming paradigms guy on the OpenAI board? I guess that makes some weird kind of sense.”
Adam Vartanian
boosted
BRITISH TEA TRANSLATION GUIDE
"Cup of tea?" = A valued friend has arrived. Let's welcome them in.
"Spot of tea?" = A foreign guest has arrived. Hyper-English Mary Poppins mode activated.
"Pot of tea?" = The in-laws have arrived. I would very much like to impress them.
"...tea?" = I find this situation awkward. Let's do literally anything else.
"Cuppa?" = I don't know you. This is a veiled threat.
"Fancy a cuppa?" = You are smokin hot. Would you care for some intercourse?
"I'll make some tea." = There has been a death in the family or national tragedy.
Speaking of which, I need to pick a language to learn for Advent of Code this year!
Every year, I do all the problems in a language I've never used before. Last year was Crystal, the year before was Common Lisp.
Anyone have any favorites that I should consider?
This is my favorite time of the year. Diwali, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Advent of Code. The darkness hasn't yet become crushing, and the lights are still sparkly.
Adam Vartanian
boosted
The @gbhnews podcast series on Boston's Big Dig finished today. Even if you think you know the story of the Big Dig, this podcast tells it in a level of detail I haven't seen before, with a focus on the human stories behind its construction. It's well worth a listen, especially if you're interested in how #infrastructure is built in the US.
https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMQKK3_a14M3A-SQdVVWhOfOw8xRUuueJ
Parenting sometimes seems like sorcery. We got Ms. 4 a new winter coat, she picked it out herself, a nice pink one.
She’s refused to put it on for the past week.
This morning, after I made her put it on because it was cold, I said that she looked like a “big pink cutie”, and that incantation was enough to transmute it into a beloved object. She’ll wear it every day now.
Adam Vartanian
boosted
Experiments aren't expressions of customer desire:
https://www.billjings.com/posts/title/experiments-aren't-expressions-of-customer-desire/
Not so technical, but... I have seen this opinion expressed a lot, and I think it's incredibly harmful.
It's in the nature of the work we do that we get to decide more about what our customers get to do than they do. But it's important not to lie to ourselves about when we are and aren't doing this.
Just walked past a house in a coastal Italian town with an “Obama ‘08” sticker on the door
Adam Vartanian
boosted
My daughter: "Everyone's so amazed that every snowflake's different, but no one cares that every potato is different."
Adam Vartanian
boosted
Just once, I want the opportunity to dramatically swipe everything off a table to make room for a giant map that I'll use to explain the plan
One advantage of being an involved dad is at the end of swimming lessons the kids and I have the men’s changing room all to ourselves.
It’s hard to wrap your head around it, but a company like Google is really like 200 different groups that share HR and tech and such but can have wildly different workloads and cultures.
Some teams spend 6 months adding a button. I once spent 6 months making BoringSSL’s TLS 1.3 impl available to a billion+ Android users.
On the other hand, that button might generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, depending on what button it is.
https://x.com/altimor/status/1695543062444015733?s=46&t=4fqJdY2teB4tKNDkoWtHIg
We have two children. Mr. 7’s hair always hangs straight down from the top of his head, no matter how you attempt to style it. Ms. 4’s hair is instantly tousled, seconds after having brushed it.
I just had to reboot my keyboard because it was causing input lag. The future is really dumb sometimes.
I’ve recently realized that the number one reason I don’t post very much is that I don’t like typing with a virtual keyboard, and I keep my social media only on my phone. I’m not sure it’s worth moving it, but it’s interesting to consider.
- https://twitter.com/flooey
- blog
- https://flooey.org
Software engineering manager at Cord. Counterculture-adjacent. Strong opinions, rarely tooted. (he/him)
Joined Nov 2022
