Weekly Dev Update July 14th, 2025

Had a baby, attending conferences & meetups, interviews & C Game-Dev

Hello, World!

My wife and I brought our second child into the world, marking a major life event. It’s incredibly different having a second in large part, because it’s just a lot harder to get a 1 month old, and a toddler, than it ever was one or the other. A crazy amount of coordination is involved, and I’m barely holding onto the vain hope that it will get better in short order, else, as is, I’m noticing the idea of leaving the house is just too much to handle for me. Or I should say, it’s something that requires such a high investment, I don’t know if we’ll be leaving the house multiple times a day, doing several different chores all together as a family as we have. It simply may be vastly more practical for one parent to take one kid, the other parent to take another.

Cloud Nirvana, Take3

This was probably the roughest conference I’ve been to. Cloud Nirvana is known for their C-Suite level conferences. Few people attend these events at my skill level. As a programmer, I’m always interested in looking at my eventual career paths, and seeing if I like where they go. Thus, I attend conferences like this, normally, a few times a year.

This one, however, was rather jarring. It mostly featured a split between presenters & panelists from the corporate tech world, contrasting against the startup world. In practice, the corporate types I always got the impression are more cutthroat. As their industry often revolves more and more around layoffs, and just a more blindly evil kind of monstrosity. Whereas, I always enjoyed the passion & excitement from the startup community. However, this event sort of turned me off even from the startup community.

To no one’s surprise, the conference focused on how AI is transforming the projected futures of these industries. It was the corporate speakers who saw the future as one where people are enhanced by AI tools. Whereas the startup community was very, transhuman, to put it charitably. Where AI tools will supercharge the great developers, and those who are not currently great developers have no hope of ever competing with them. It was a fairly bizarre way to put things, but no matter how many different topics, the startup presenters kept returning to the idea that current-senior devs are in the best position to 10x their productivity via AI, and there are no downsides, and also, who cares about the youth & young devs, because that’s not their problem right now… I realized maybe startup culture enforces just looking around at things right here and now, and ignoring the future, something I really didn’t enjoy seeing in them.

All in all, I don’t know when I’ll be back to Cloud Nirvana. I’m a little worried that I’m becoming embittered with the whole industry, and that the best thing to do is just do your own thing. I can’t help but feel that the concept of ‘work’ is broken in our nation.

Interviewing

I’ve been doing a lot of tech interviews. My studying plummeted, and I really want to do more data struct & algos. It’s just something I crave to understand and learn, how do people ace these facebook/meta interviews? I mean, the knowledge has to have some utility, right?

But aside from that, the interviews have been going well. I’ve gotten really close to getting something more than once, and I’ve been trying more and more to negotiate higher pay. Which appears to be working quite well. However, if I’ve gotten an offer, the money, or the kind of work (front-end / tech stack issues), or the in-office requirements have been off. Now more than ever, I’m leaning into the need to work much more remotely. I don’t mind being at an office, I just don’t want to drive far for work, which cuts massively into my ability to have lunch with family, and spend time with kids after work, if I’m stuck doing errands after work until I finally come home, and the kids are in bed.

C Game

Just finally put some code into ‘Dust to Dust’, a roguelike with procedural generated story elements. I was largely inspired by games like Dwarf Fortress & Caves of Qud. I also really want to do things with C, and it’s a good chance to play around with Raylib, learn to do another step up from the Golang game projects I’ve made. However, I’m also, somewhat, considering removing Raylib, and instead debating if I want to learn my NixOS system really well, and learn how to program everything ‘from scratch’, as I think it may make me a much better programmer. Only time will tell if I decide to go that far. I’ve done something somewhat similar, with ascii, and avoiding Raylib altogether, however, I’m not making a window, or anything like that… yet. Possibly something to get excited about, and really give me the experience of making something from the ground up like that.

More lately, I’ve gravitated towards game development because its so diverse in the skillset. You never know what you’ll be doing, and something like that is actually pretty exciting.

Currently, this is just supposed to be a little pit stop of a programming side project idea. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel today, but perhaps if I do get a job, and things solidify, I’d consider that kind of after-work project to be quite a bit of fun.