TRAVEL
Headed to Kentucky and Long Beach for tournaments. Depart October for a Taiwan visit, which is half tournament and of course half not; this year I’m spending all my discretionary time in the southern half of the island, which I neglected before. I tend to like secondary areas better than capitals, though I did enjoy Taipei last time around.
And then I will be flying the improbable route of Taipei/Taoyuan to Des Moines for a staff retreat gathering. I don’t mind Des Moines, though some part of me wonders how long it’ll be until we lose critical mass of staff located there and can have a retreat somewhere else? It’s already just a plurality, not a majority, who call Iowa home.
TABROOM
Tabroom has been more rewrite than not of late. I’m wrestling with design, in both senses. Tabroom will get a refreshed visual layout without it looking too different from what’s there now; hopefully that’ll mean no loss of muscle memory but a nice visual look. But that also means a lot of nitpicky back and forth about “Okay how does that look? Awful. What if I made the color lighter? Oh that’s worse. Maybe if it was darker….Ugh. OK try green?”
And that, kids, is why I took creative writing for my arts requirement in high school.
I’m also wrestling with design in the technical sense. A lot of any web app looks the same as all the other parts — pull data out of someplace, format it in some familiar way, shove it to the user. That’s all I’m working on now. There are eight hundred ways of doing it, but only a few of doing it properly so you minimize what we call anti-patterns in tech. You don’t want to write code that is repetitive and dull; it’s bad if the way you draw a menubar, say, is in 800 different files. Then you can’t change your menubar system without changing those 800 different files. But if you go down the road of never repeating code too much, you end up with every page requiring eighteen pages that define what’s on it. The table is set here, the header is set there, the sidebar is set over that place, and in order to change something you need fifteen tabs open in your editor. I hate that.
I sometimes think that modern software developers are paid by the source file because they go very heavily in this direction. The religion has a name: logical separation of layers. I admit I’m an idiosyncratic, self-taught programmer, but it never struck me as very logical to have the command to pull the data, the processing of that data, and the formatting of that data all live in three difference places. How often will you really work on one part of that and not need to see the others? How often will any element of that really be re-used by some other part of your site?
Not much. So I do tend to default into “all the things you need in one place.” But since most developers are adherents to the religion of Separation, frameworks and tools fight you if you go too hard down that road. So I basically negotiate, and find a way that the tooling won’t hate, and neither will I. It doesn’t always happen. Some frameworks are “opinionated,” which means they enforce standards of formatting and cleanliness that the language itself does not. If an opinionated framework lines up with your opinions, then it’s great! If they don’t, it’s pure hell.
PALMER THE HIRING MANAGER
Strange times afoot; we’ve posted a job description for a junior developer to work with me. It’s been a ride so far. Hiring for a tech job in 2025 means wading through 200+ resumes which are utterly non specific to the job as posted, in either the tech details. I’m pretty sure 90% of these are AI agent submissions where the person in question never read the job at all. AI resumes are ‘tailored’ to the job in hilarious ways — some claim to have used Tabroom to manage tournaments at their current job of BigBank, Inc. A few were specific to speech & debate — but not programmers.
But now we’re onto the talking-to-humans stage of things, which means we can be more certain the answers come from people, but it’s also much more time consuming. Such fun, at the start of the season! But it takes about six months to really settle into a tech job — there’s so much domain specific knowledge to learn even when the languages and techs are all familiar, and they’re never all familiar.
And then comes the hardest part; I’ll no longer be able to manage my priorities and wishes and designs in a corner of my own brain. Time to grow up, at last. Let’s hope the pains aren’t as bad as when I added a foot of height in a year back in 8th grade.