Slightly off-topic, but are there any resources for common UI designs/patterns especially for mobile/webapps? e.g. hamburger menus, toast notifications, etc. I've been looking for a site that's organized, comprehensive and with visual examples.

I expected it to be an analysis of AI-generated writing styles. Not full of them.

;)

For personal projects, I've been in both camps:

For scripts and one-offs, always #1. Same for prototypes where I'm usually focused on understanding the domain and the shape of the product. I happily trade code quality for time when it's simple, throwaway, or not important.

But for developing a product to release, you want to be able to jump back in even if it's years later.

That said, I'm struggling with this with my newest product. Wavering between the two camps. Enforcing quality takes time that can be spent on more features...

I spent most of my 9th grade making a stick figure clone of Street Fighter, using TI-BASIC and graphing functions.

Eventually I switched to coding with pencil and paper because the calculator screen can only show you 8 lines at a time. No idea how I made something that could support 2 players playing on the same calculator, all with GOTOs and LABELs.

My favorite optimization of all time was turning their heads into hexagons instead of circles since drawing 6 lines was so much faster.

I hope to see more bots on there (and not here)

[0] https://clackernews.com/

> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.

So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?

Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing

> AI-driven domestic mass surveillance

And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance

A real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War

So many underlying problems from this one line (why...), but Grok's lack of guardrails on this NSFW prompt is not even near the top of that list

I have a script to scan files from my camera and add a compressed copy to a folder. This folder was supposed to work with the iCloud for windows (10) program, but one day it just stopped working.

I spent much of that year on personal projects and family before I could seriously commit myself. Then covid happened.

It took 2.5yr before I worked again, in FAANG. There were many moments of feeling down and alone.

I'm unemployed again, 3 months now, this time after being laid off. I wish I could just concentrate my efforts on developing products and monetizing them. But since I have a family to support, I decided to spend time on these projects only to reward myself for grinding leetcode & system design.

Throughout 30 years of wearing glasses, I’ve questioned many times whether the glasses are right for me. I may resist for a month or two but I always end up “adapting” to the new pair. When is this acceptable and how do I know when to speak up?

After verifying in the server logs that the users never really validated data (always clicking “submit” after a second or two), I discussed this idea with our business analyst and got the go-ahead, and spent another couple of weeks to automate everything.

Long story short, it was a mess. There was actually one piece of the puzzle that they owned that I couldn’t automate away (essentially clicking a button). So when presenting it all to them (via email), the team lied and told us it “wasn’t working” and CC’d our managers and one level up the chain as well. This manual business process stayed with them. They kept the web app tho.

My advice is to make sure this kind of thing is known to management, and to make sure you can prove to them that this entire process can be automated without problems. Or let it go if you don’t think you can handle the backlash.

But after 5 years of failing to get a job offer, I finally caved. Putting in the effort to deeply understand DS/algos and grind away leetcode led me to getting offers I liked and IMO has made me a better engineer.

I now have a “gold star” on my resume and am confident I can still answer most leetcode questions. I consider that time spent as a great time investment, since landing my next job will be much easier.

Money wasn’t my original goal when I got into CS, but it eventually became my driving force. I regret taking so long to notice this, and letting my feelings get in my way (of how it “should be”) / resisting leetcode for so long.

My secrets:

Set a time and place beforehand. Somewhere you know it’ll be quiet and you’LL have time and focus. Consistency is key also. For me, I do when I poop or when I commute. (Unsuccessful: with other people around, at night when tired, during workout)

Also I have a physical notebook that I bring with me most places. I prefer this over a phone. Separation of concerns. Jotting down quick thoughts to journal about later helps with externalization (a useful keyword I learned when reading about our condition). And I can’t mysteriously start browsing the Internet from pulling out my notebook.

Also, experiment. Find out what works for you or things you want to try. Habit tracker. Phone reminders. Recently I tried coupling journaling after meditation, another habit I’m picking up (my mind was blank but I still want to try that again)

I’d even force myself to watch videos I didn’t like if the subject was highly interesting me and I wasn’t getting enough of that type of content. Using TikTok in this way frequently inspires me to be better

The type of content I receive with this account is extremely different than another that I use when I’m on “autopilot.”

Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on each task, one at a time.

If it’s not critical, let go of control and be okay failure, both from yourself and others.

Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well, what didn’t go well, what could have improved) and use those to come up with action items.

Or, if that’s too much, my original advice for you was “just do it.”

For many of the games, I ended up assigning one player to be “me” and different personalities to “the other players,” who each had different styles. I also tried my best to stop “myself” from cheating by forgetting what cards “everyone else” had. After all, games are not fun when someone is cheating.

Thankfully, my days of playing board games by myself is long over. However, I still have a tendency to take a long time to calculate my next move since I’m always trying to factor in what everyone else is doing.

I “found my way out” when I created a project that I really cared about. It scratched multiple itches and I was constantly finding new ways to improve the application. It got the the point where I had to create a backlog for improvements I wanted to see.

My mind started to wander and I started thinking about my newfound organizational skills. I started the high-level design for a tool to organize my scatterbrain. Thankfully, I decided to just keep it in my backlog and continue on what I was working on.

td;dr: 1. Add projects to backlog 2. Weigh benefits of each, rank them 3. Work on #1 project 4. (Optional) Set a deadline to re-evaluate priorities 5. When new ideas pop up, add to backlog. Fill in as much detail as possible. The goal is to do a braindump and get back to what you were previously working on.

At the same time, I can't help but feel that way more people will look for an answer and just give up on their question if the immediate answer is not clear enough or not immediately available. With attention spans being as short as they are already, I can see it discouraging many people from performing the acts of reading and trying to understand what they read. And that kind of culture worries me a lot these days.

My quick thoughts: Beautiful language. There's quite a bit of a learning curve for some of the more advanced features, but a large portion of the language is very readable and succinct Additionally, I love how the language has helped me become a better developer. Far fewer bug, and none of them are null-related After my former lead left, I've had difficulty introducing new teammates to the language. It's hard to convince C# devs to try it out I've been looking around for a long time, but there seem to be very few teams that are hiring F#. It doesn't help that many aggregate job posting sites fail to show useful results when searching for "F#" Negatives aside, I really enjoy programming in F# and if you were on the fence, I'd say to give it a try!