Hacker News: dondraper36

New comment by dondraper36 in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

dondraper36 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:31:30 +0000

I am not suicidal and I am lucky to have loving people who I also love around. That said, with all the rapid changes in the software engineering industry and in life in general, I sometimes wonder what I am doing with my life and why.

It's like plenty of things are happening by inertia, but none of them bring any joy or make lots of sense. In such moments, I really envy people who have the courage to work on something they truly believe in. I have quite a few people to take care of, which requires financial resources, so I am not there yet.

Jev means structured output is interesting again

dondraper36 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:35:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/jev-means-structured-output-is-interesting-again/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723185

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What changed in your life when you started meditating (and how)?

dondraper36 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:24:22 +0000

It's my N-th attempt at learning to meditate.

At some point, I realized that even lifting weights, sleeping and eating well aren't enough if you can't tame your thoughts and control your stress level.

This time, I have started with the introductory course on the Waking Up mobile app.

It's frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind.

I think it would be very motivating to hear the stories of how other people incorporated the practice of meditaton into their lives and what the results are.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012902

Points: 32

# Comments: 26

New comment by dondraper36 in "Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering"

dondraper36 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:44:09 +0000

The idea sounds related to the distinction between essential and accidental complexity.

https://ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html

I really like the article above in that complexity does have to live somewhere. If you have a hard problem to solve, there is a minimum level of complexity (essential complexity) that can't be further reduced, only moved from one place to another.

And yet we often add accidental complexity by making bad choices (thinking of you, microservices). If your choice is bad enough, you get all the disadvantages (challenges with distributed systems, complicated debugging), but without any of its advantages (a distributed monolith doesn't get you any deployment or team independence).

Telling one from the other, well, is something I'd like to learn and that seems to require both experience and some sort of intuition.

Notes on Incidents

dondraper36 — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:57:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/notes-on-incidents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072547

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dondraper36 in "Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy"

dondraper36 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:06:10 +0000

If I understood correctly, the queue implementation in the blog post holds a transaction while an operation is in progress.

I see the advice to make it as short as possible, but why can’t we update the status column to, say, “processing” and avoid potentially long transactions at all?

New comment by dondraper36 in "Job Isn't Programming"

dondraper36 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:57:16 +0000

Not a novel idea, but it always resonates with me when I hear that the goal of every software engineer is to manage complexity.

That said, I still find it hard to formulate for myself how to tell the difference between accidental and essential complexity.

Job Isn't Programming

dondraper36 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:54:44 +0000

Article URL: https://codeandcake.dev/posts/2025-12-12-your-job-isnt-programming

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592585

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons from Tech Lead to CTO

dondraper36 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:08:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/articles/scaling-a-monolith-to-1m-loc-113-pragmatic-lessons-from-tech-lead-to-cto

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553487

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code

dondraper36 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:32:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/simple-work-gets-rewarded/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535343

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

The Essence of Software by Daniel Jackson

dondraper36 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:44:42 +0000

Article URL: https://essenceofsoftware.com/posts/distillation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534148

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dondraper36 in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

dondraper36 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:02:58 +0000

It’s a fantastic performance booster for a lot of mundane tasks like writing and revising design docs, tests, debugging (using it like a super smart and active rubber duck), and system design discussions.

I also use it as a final check on all my manually written code before sending it for code review.

With all that said, I have this weird feeling that my ability to quickly understand and write code is no longer noticeable, nor necessary.

Everyone now ships tons of code and even if I do the same without any LLM, the default perception will be that it has been generated.

I am not depressed about it yet, but it will surely take a while to embrace the new reality in its entirety

New comment by dondraper36 in "Doing the thing is doing the thing"

dondraper36 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:57:03 +0000

As a person with ADHD, I feel personally attacked.

Becoming Unblockable

dondraper36 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 21:10:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/unblockable/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153119

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Thinking Clearly about Software

dondraper36 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:29:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/thinking-clearly/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865836

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dondraper36 in "[dead]"

dondraper36 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:05:32 +0000

As Martin recently posted, now the production should take about 4 more months until we can buy the paperback version.

That said, if you have an O'Reilly subscription, you can already enjoy the new edition.

Acing the Design Interview

dondraper36 — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:27:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/acing-the-design-interview/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45633257

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Zalando RESTful API Guidelines

dondraper36 — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 19:38:14 +0000

Article URL: https://opensource.zalando.com/restful-api-guidelines/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45629854

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dondraper36 in "Skills I Was Missing as a MongoDB User"

dondraper36 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:38:40 +0000

I'd also like to understand whether there are still any cases when MongoDB is the right choice

New comment by dondraper36 in "N8n added native persistent storage with DataTables"

dondraper36 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:16:20 +0000

Also, take a look at windmill.dev. It’s a beast