15+ years in engineering here. 10+ in leadership.

Code formatting hasn’t been an issue since the early '10s. Tabs or spaces? Who cares. Your editor can make it look like whatever you want and it won’t effect the code.

As for other asshole-ish behavior or gatekeeping, I open it up to a vote. Let the team determine best practices. Don’t like what your team decides? Find another team to shitlord over.

If your team is only focused on tabs/spaces or soapboxing during code reviews, you have bigger issues to take care of.

Spreading knowledge and context sharing are exactly why I like code reviews. It should also be something done by more than one person so that information is better disseminated throughout the team.

I find most bad codebases exist because of a culture that isn’t focused on quality, and I’m not talking about bug counts or code coverage. Clean codebases stay clean by being proactive about keeping them clean. This should include meticulous peer reviews, establishing design patterns, enforcing best practices, and taking initiative to leave things better than you found them (we used to call that boy scouting).

If your teams PR comments only contain LGTM, and the average time spent reviewing them is 5 minutes, your team isn’t focused on quality. If a PR contains more files than an average person can keep in their mental context window, it won’t get the attention it needs to be properly reviewed. If there is no accountability to keep a clean codebase, you’ll end up with 2 hours of work taking 5 days to complete.

I am also enjoying this beer. Hang in there. Yours will come.

I have been been actively interviewing for software engineering leadership roles. A few years ago, the process would have involved submitting a resume, maybe a technical round, a chat with the CTO, and a vibe-check with another employee. It has now become a gauntlet of 5+ STAR format behavioral rounds, presentations, take home tests, systems design whiteboard sessions, and the beloved technical review where you share your screen and someone watches you fumble through some stupid leetcode challenge.

I have been finding it difficult to control my anxiety as I progress through each round of interviews. The steaks are higher after each round to make it to the next.

It sucks getting rejected after round 3-4+ rounds. Sometimes I won’t hear back at all, other times I might get the canned rejection email from the ATS. I take feedback and criticism very personally, which makes personalized rejections even more painful.

I wish I didn’t love software engineering so much. I wish I had another skill to fall back to that made as much money.

How do you all deal with the social, executive, and operational rigors of finding jobs and interviewing?

Title. Basic duties. Salary. Upload resume.

My team of engineers and I were laid off on January 2, after spending a year replatforming a medical SaaS product. We were told the company was heading in another direction in order to to go to market faster.

That direction is the Product Designer and Claude Code, rebuilding everything from scratch.

Professional, industry-standard applications running natively on any major distro.

I use Adobe and Ableton products every day. I simply cannot use Linux as my main OS until these products can run in a real Linux environment, no matter how much I want to.

Argue all you want about Linux alternatives being just as good. The point is, they’re simply not what what the majority of professionals use.

Some CalDav servers also do notes. As others have noted, Joplin has a self-hosted option. If you’re willing to go with a service, Obsidian is .md based and multiplatform.

I cannot recommend soma enough. They have a channel for everyone.

This is my niche comfort genre. If you’re interested in newer artists who share that BoC aural flavor, you should check out PBS73, Midday Static, Cylan, and Ghostwerk.

Not that it’s Linux fault, but access to and compatibility with popular creative tools like Ableton or Adobe products.

Sure, it’s feasible to use Wine to run these products, but not in any professionally usable manner.

Yes, I am aware there are Linux-friendly alternatives, but they lack the plugins, compatibility, features, and quality of their industry~standard counterparts.

The ol’ Hug of Death has brought the site to a crawl. Dark Lord willing, someone will produce a torrent and link to said torrent.

I have two:

The City of Lost Children (French)

Pan’s Labyrinth (Spanish)

This is me. I have made some very expensive fuck-ups at work and lost my job several times because of my forgetfulness or missing details. Thankfully I’m medicated now, but the fear and anxiety is still deeply ingrained in me. I am the livelihood of my family. I pay our bills, the mortgage, car payments and insurance. Any mistake could mean my family and I will need to start hunting for the nicest bridge to live under.

In the mid 10s, I worked as the engineering director for a consultancy. My boss would openly brag about being able to hire women for a fraction of the cost of a man. I was so offended by this that I created a partnership with a coding academy for at-risk and underrepresented individuals just a few blocks away from our office. I made it my mission to hire as many women junior engineers as I could, just so that I could train them up and find them better paying jobs elsewhere.

Women engineers are out there, and I hope I’ve made the dating pool just a little bigger for you.

Not unless they also mention racism, transphobia and homophobia as the other line items.

The feeling of isolation is something that I have experienced throughout life. I can only attribute it to the norm that men should not talk about their woes, lest they be seen as weak.

My upbringing was a bit different, as my brother and I never had male role models growing up and we were never encouraged to confirm to those norms.

For me personally, the feeling of isolation occured and eventually compounded after the birth of our son. I did not cope well with the lack of sleep and the immediate loss of personal space and time. I felt like my feelings and experiences could never compare to what my wife was going through, and I had no right to complain. This led me to nearly a decade of depression, to the detriment of my wife and son both.

What has helped me over time, is the acknowledgement that my feelings and experiences are valid, and I don’t need to compare them to others.