Friday at Work

Harold Combs
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“You know, you could take some time off”

“Yeah, but I know myself well enough to know I won’t.”

I awoke this morning knowing I had to make it to work for a 9:30 meeting…in a former life that’d be laughably late, but now it’s early. Maybe I’ve finally become institutionalized to Austin’s “10am at the earliest” culture, or maybe it’s the 45 to 60-minute drive, or just simple burnout. Since we returned to office 5 days per week this year, it’s just been a grind. Having the flexibility to work-from-home even 1 day a week helped. Now: This is life.

In any case, sitting in the dark at 6:45 I noticed myself scratching and saw hives from my index finger up to my elbow. Apparently grief + stress = hives now. Fun.

Oh, and about 10 minutes later, apropos of nothing, I just shouted “FUCK!” into the aether. So add Tourettes, I suppose.

The Rabbit Done Died

So as noted, Joe passed away this week. We buried him on our property the same evening, as the sun set. He picked a good day…it has me thinking what the day will be like when I die? Cold? Rainy? Snowy? Sunny?

In the end, the day is appointed, and I’m headed that way. Mom’s passing really hammered that point home.

Kirk’s death

On the same day, September 10th, Political commemtator Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Orem, Utah, at Utah Valley University. As of today, the 12th, they’ve apprehended a suspect.

I really have no commentary on the matter, other than: It’s 1968 again. Strap in. We seem to be silencing people with guns, now.

ACTUAL WORK STUFF

So I’m a manager again. I have been since March. I haven’t bothered updating my linkedin because I find the LinkedIn performative thing exhausting.

I love my team. They all joined me from other teams and wanted to work on the mission we have. They’re motivated, skilled, and honestly I have trouble keeping up with them. That’s always a good thing®.

So today, I sit writing documents, trying out our new internal GenAI tools for doing that and typing this on a new editor: Zed. For the past 5+ years I’ve been using these editors:

  1. vim: I need to edit a file in under a minute. I know what to change. Vim is basically a fancier version sed for my usecase, and you’ll pry it from my cold dead hands. This is my F-22 Raptor, a stone-cold killer. Can’t imagine doing production code in vim anymore though. there are better tools
  2. IntelliJ/Android Studio: this is the Antonov 225. Massive, bloated and can absolutely get the job done. For Java, Kotlin, or (ofc) Android, these Jetbrains behemoths with enough processor behind them are the best way. As Work buys us licenses for the pro version, and also M3+ Macbook Pros, an obvious choice. Much of our tooling assumes you’re using one of these tools.
  3. VS Code: Everything else. I write/wrote this blog in VSCode, did most of our GenAI experiements there (tooling support is easy), and did any edits of JavaScript/TypeScript/Python there. There’s always been a “tweener” market between a full IDE and an Editor and this was the natural successor to SlickEdit -> Sublime Text -> etc. Thing is I really fundamentally hate it. As an Electron app it’s basically a big webapp running inside a Chromium engine, and it eats resources. From the Middle 2010’s until now, it feels like every “app” is just a webapp running in a big, memory-hogging frame.

So, fixing Slot #3 I’m giving VS Code a whirl. Purportedly it integrates with our GenAI goodies, and as a manager I dont’ code as much anymore.