The thing about a two-week cadence on the internet is that contemporaneous material comes and goes, and by the time you’re ready to write again, all the takes have been taken. So I won’t be saying much about Basecamp, DogeCoin, Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live, or Chinese rocket detritus. Instead I’ll have to write about mundane, quotidian stuff, like what I’ve been working on.
I am less on the fence than I was a couple months ago about whether I should carry on the ordinary tree-shaking with my existing repertoire, plough some hours into a post-pandemic service portfolio, or whether I should aim instead for a jay-oh-bee. Then a couple things happened. One was that the company that I was pretty sure was wasting my time with their elaborate and terribly contrived coding test was indeed wasting my time, and a lot of it. The silver lining there, I suppose, is that I scraped a decade’s worth of barnacles off of my Python skills: something I needed to do anyway, though in pretty much any other context I could have gotten paid for that.
What I sent this prospect was testing them as much as they were testing me. I wrote before—and even told them—that I had apprehensions about spending real effort on a fake product, so I had a little fun with it—after I had met their requirements. Anybody but the most joyless misanthrope would have at least wanted to chat about it. What I got in response instead—after keeping me waiting for two weeks—was some gaslighting, Frankfurtian bullshit. These people literally complained about the formatting. Of Python. The most eminently automatically-formattable programming language in existence, with automated formatters out the ying, which I ran. Talk about out-of-whack priorities. Guess I dodged a bullet, huh?
(If I get the motivation later on I might just put this thing on GitHub and let you in the audience pick it apart. It’s not like they paid for it, and nobody asked me not to.)
Method acting a prospective tech employee also gave me a good gut feeling for what is an appropriate order-of-magnitude effort considering the risk involved, which I’d say is maybe around ten or twelve hours per company, including the initial scouting. Any more than that is a freelance gig.
The main influence steering my current direction is the fact that over the last year and change, I have identified two projects: one for a product and another for a tool to help deliver a service. These are both indefinite as to when they will be “done enough” to be merchantable. They are, to refresh our memories: