I once asked ChatGPT to generate some random numerical passwords as I was curious about its capabilities to generate random data. It told me that it couldn’t. I asked why it couldn’t (I knew why it was resisting but I wanted to see its response) and it promptly gave me a bunch of random numerical passwords.

Myth: software engineers replicate value similar to a factory worker making the same item over and over

Truth: software engineers are closer to artists than factory workers IMO. We find and create new value, not replicate existing value

I have over a dozen years of experience as a software engineer and I started learning Scala and monads recently for a new job. I’ve come to the conclusion that monads are terrible and make things more difficult despite the on-paper description. Don’t worry about it, you’re much more competent than you think.

I just recently updated a database call to return the last 7 days of data instead of all data from all time. It went from taking 30+seconds to around 2-4 seconds. Still a long way to go to make it “good” but at least it’s not timing out now.

If you think it’s slow, first prove it with a benchmark

So many crimes against maintainability are committed in the name of performance. Optimisation tears down abstractions, exposes internals, and couples tightly. If you’re choosing to shoulder that cost, ensure it is done for good reason.