Posts tagged: catalytic

It’s that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes.

Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM’s do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on.

Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I’ve met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don’t need their hot takes, don’t care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with.

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Jake Bolam principal engineer at Meta, has some of the best career advice for those looking to become principal or just be better at their craft. This video was such a banger I had to bring it in as a full post, and not just a thought. It was a random YouTube auto play, something that I probably wouldn’t have clicked on given title an thumbnail, but turned out to be very impactful. Jake is such a smart guy with a lot of great insights, and I can tell he thinks really quick on his feet, he just pulled all of these things out of his head on the fly.

Jake had a super long period of on boarding at meta, he came in as a seasoned leader yet took many months to get going. This was a phase during or near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and his team was so swamped they were unable to give him time to help him. He felt his on boarding was taking longer than he wanted, and found backend work at Instagram. Moving to Instagram he jumped in and starting making impact quick and found his way moving up the ladder serving as tech lead for several teams.

I grabbed a ton of clips from this video, but did not for this section as it was kinda long.

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Perfect is a made up word that humans use to describe something that is above average, or works really well for them. The idea of perfection is fleeting, as you think more deeply about something, you can continue to chase the idea of perfection to unimaginable senses. Sometimes perfect simply means good enough. Could there be something better, Always, but at what cost. If I spent 10 more minutes on this post would it be better, maybe, but I might fuck it up. If I spent my lifetime studying how humans read and think, sole focused on how it pertains to this post, ya it would get better. When I use this word perfect it’s not meant in the most literal sense of the word, but perfect to me, maybe good enough given the constraints I have, its the best thing I’ve got.

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

When you say “just,” you’re skipping over all the invisible complexity. You’re assuming the problem is simple, and that the person asking for help hasn’t already considered the obvious.

You’re not seeing the constraints:

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Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert on Shop Talk show, and it made sense. LLMs and AI is slowly killing the internet as we know it.

I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results nearly one year apart. Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago. I’m getting less impressions and even less clicks.

May 2023

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In 2024 I built my own reader after years of being bitter about google killing reader more than a decade prior.

I built it on top of my own static site generator markata, feedparser (🐍 Parsing RSS feeds with Python), some jinja templating, and tailwind.

After putting all the work I have into markata, it makes projects like this fairly easy to build out with just a custom loader to load new posts in.