And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.

I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Also, a lot of logos are simply not "artistic" enough to be eligible for copyright. So in general, logos are more likely to be the subject of trademark litigation than copyright litigation.

Trademark law: In order to claim a trademark you must have used the mark in commerce. So a catalogue of logos not used in commerce is of no real value from a trademark perspective.

When I was coming up to speed on the BEAM this was such an amazing resource. The fact that it's free is bananas. In addition to the load management stuff, he also talked about some observability details that are really helpful (like how to more accurately understand CPU load on the BEAM). Highly recommend.

Sure there are times that a need for performance calls for mutable data. But for me those times are pretty rare, and when they happen it's usually easy enough to quarantine the mutation.

Something interesting about the legal profession is that it is self-regulating. The state bars are typically not government organizations. Attorneys know that confidence in their profession is extremely important and they strike the balance between preserving that confidence and, you know, destroying someone's livelihood because they don't understand how LLMs work.

I think my proxy for work-life balance is days of PTO. I'm typically going to take ~20 a year. That's what I need to recharge and avoid burnout. In a interview with a manager I would ask:

"So, in the job description it says you have Flexible PTO, what does that actually look like here?"

Usually they'll give me some sort of range or average.

A way to cut down on the chances of working for shitty leadership is to ensure you work with high performers. (not foolproof, but helpful) High performers don't like working for shitty leadership. I borrow my proxy for high performance here from the excellent book, Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, and Kim), and look for the engineering org to implement CI/CD as well as IAC (Infrastructure As Code). I'll ask about these during question time of the technical interview, as well as other things I care about (testing philosophy, etc). I'm sure there are really great organizations that don't do CI/CD or IAC, but I would have to know _for sure_ that they were great, to work for them.

These are obviously super high level proxies for organizational health from the perspective of an engineer. But reading up on organizational health more broadly can help you identify some red flags these proxies don't cover. Check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It's a fantastic book on organizational health.

Lastly, networking can be very challenging but also very helpful here. It's not something that comes easy to me, but it has helped tremendously in figuring out which companies in my community I do and do not want to work for. This could be less relevant now that almost everyone is cool with remote work. But even my most recent job post-covid, was something I found because of my network. Go to meetups. Go to conferences. Get coffee with people who do similar things. It can really pay off.

But I'd also suggest that it's possible to find companies that align with your values, both around work/life balance and around the way the work gets done. That's certainly a skill that I've had to work to develop. And I've had some major misses along the way. But it's probably also the most important skill I've developed.

Owning your company's problems, at least a subset of them, is that fastest (only?) way to move up in a company. If you want to climb the ladder at all, you'll have to own some problems. The key is to do that for a company that recognizes and rewards that ownership. And as soon as they don't, then you become the merc and find a new thing.

According to a quick google search, the entirety of the US tax code is over 1M words. I wonder which number GPT will support a prompt that large.