With what other role / direction would you be satisfied instead of being SE? Going up in the IC ladder (lead, staff, etc.) or management? What disadvantages do you see settling at SE?
Staff is the natural progression for people who want to take the next step but don’t want direct reports. Each company has its own definition of a staff engineer's responsibilities. I’ve seen people move back to SE after burning out from all the meetings. In some places, staff engineers rarely code and are essentially glorified team leads.
But there are definitely companies where Staff engineers get to do some awesome work and there's a proper delineation between a Staff and a TL. I'm yet to work in a company like that yet.
> We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge differenc.
+1. Car-centric design stands 99.9% for US. In contrast, many cities in EU have grown organically over decades both with walkability, accessibility in mind and quite decent public transport. With business offices often still being pretty centric.
I've been moving around EU, working in different big cities and had a luck of renting flats within walkable 30-45 mins from the workplaces / client offices. If the weather sucks, I can count on public transport. It's always a bit of extra budget stretch to rent something more centric, but it's really worth it imho.
A morning walk to the workplace, while grabbing a coffee / breakfast on the way or a walk back home while disconnecting from the virtual world is a routine that can highly recommend. It gives also more motivation for either passing by the office or marking the work/leisure boundary when working in hybrid/remote mode. No need to live in a constant hustle mode.
Can you recommend any good article / comparison of uv vs poetry vs conda?
We've used different combinations of pipx+lockfiles or poetry, which has been so far OK'ish. But recently discovered uv and are wondering about existing experience so far across the industry.
From my experience, uv is way better and it's also PEP compliant in terms of pyproject.toml. Which means in cas uv isn't a big player in the future, migrating away isn't too difficult.
At the same time, poetry still uses a custom format and is pretty slow.
> At a very (very!) abstract level AI is compression and compression is AI.
There's actually a pretty nice read from one of the key figures in data compression field - Matt Mahoney: "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence" [1]. Some interesting reads are also on his personal website, though a bit outdated now: https://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html
