Professional software developer and all-around geek in Seattle.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What a dumb article. Sounds like an old C graybeard who’s never understood the point of proper type safety or readable code. None of the performance gains the author talks about actually matter, whereas the entire point of clean code is to make it easier to read and maintain by other programmers. Let’s also not forget this important quote from Donald Knuth: “premature optimization is the root of all evil”.

    Simply put, unless you’re working in extremely resource-constrained systems, or have some code snippet being run an incredibly large number of times over a humongous amount of data, these kinds of performance optimizations simply don’t matter and you get more benefit from writing the code in a way that reduces bugs and is easier to read. Heck, most of the time compiler optimizations make this entire argument moot anyway.




  • Try chatgpt 4 premium. I have heard it automatically auto correct itself with code.

    I regularly use gpt-4 for coding since it’s the backend behind github copilot, and my company has approved use of copilot (and I have copilot plugins installed for vscode and vs2022). It’s useful for autocompleting boilerplate code, but gets things wrong all the time about anything more complicated.




  • ChatGPT and Bard?

    Doubtful, considering ChatGPT has only been public since late last year, and Bard’s even newer. I also really hope those aren’t a large factor, since most coding examples I’ve seen from ChatGPT only deal with questions of a really rudimentary nature and have given useless or wrong information about anything more nuanced or complicated.


  • Just saw your edit and comments to others and something really doesn’t make sense. “East Seattle near I-90” is basically either Mount Baker or Leschi. Both of those are primarily neighborhoods without much in the way of businesses and mostly comprised of houses rather than apartments. It’s also a rather expensive area, since it’s in central-Seattle and right on the lakefront. I have a hard time believing that there’s a company in that part of town that’s big enough to relocate a candidate. Did you perhaps mean the Eastside instead? That’s a very different thing. The Eastside is everything east of Lake Washington and is outside of the Seattle city limits. The Eastside near I-90 would be south-central Bellevue (Factoria and Eastgate area) and Issaquah. There are large companies and quite a lot of places to live near there. Recommendations for where to rent on the Eastside near I-90 will be very different than recommendations for where to rent in Central (or East) Seattle. The Seattle metro area is split in two by Lake Washington, and while it’s possible to bike across the I-90 floating bridge (I have a coworker who does), it’s probably not going to be done in less than 45 minutes and is probably going to be rather unpleasant for part of the year.

    It really would be helpful if you gave us a better idea of where you’ll be commuting to (like, the cross-streets, or the name of the neighborhood, or a nearby landmark, or the name of the company if you’re willing to reveal that info – lots of us in this area have worked for the major tech companies or have friends who have, and know where all their campus buildings are), as well as what your budget is. Budget is really crucial since rent varies a lot based on location. For instance, doing a quick search it looks like average rent in Factoria is about $1800 per month. Average rent in Lake Union (where Amazon is) is almost double that at about $3200 per month. And if you think even $1800/mo is expensive then I’ve got some bad news for you about your desire to not commute by car for longer than 1.5 hours.





  • It’s a matter of personal independence and speed. If I’m at a gas station to fill up then I’m not making progress in getting where I want to be going. I know what grade of gas I want put in my car, I know how the pumps operate, and I can generally fuel my car faster than going through the back-and-forth process of dealing with an attendant. Of course, I’ve also only lived in places where self-service was the norm, so I’m very used to pumping my own gas. Whenever I drive down to visit my sister in Portland I always try to fill up across the river in Washington just so I don’t have to deal with the mandatory full-service in Oregon.