This resonates with me to a surprising extent. My perceived threshold for expressing an opinion is very high, and I also find that I don't really have any particularly _strong_ opinions to begin with.
The "hedge my answers extensively" bit is spot-on, as is the isolating nature of this "trait", unfortunately.
Interesting. I wonder if that choice would lead to a noticeable impact on perceived latency (from the perspective of a human end-user) under some high-load/pathological scenario.
The justification for using LIFO (vs FIFO) queues for requests is interesting: at no/low load it makes no difference, while at high load the requests least likely to time out get serviced first.
Is that a common architectural decision in reverse proxies or queuing systems in general?
Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.
Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.
Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.
Over the years, how has your perspective on the stack + the type of work you're doing changed? I feel like due to my age I don't have the context to make a decision based on factors that will actually matter in the long term.
Interesting how "Knowledge of algorithms and data structures" is the third most important thing developers think should be prioritized when recruiting (3.77/5), following communication skills and track record.
As a soon-to-be engineering graduate, I am very thankful for Octave. I've used it (instead of MATLAB) for projects involving numerical methods, control systems, image processing, and all kinds of data manipulation. While it may not be as powerful as MATLAB for certain use cases, it is an amazing piece of software.
Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): https://danco.substack.com/
The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/
The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): https://diff.substack.com/
Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): https://kneelingbus.substack.com/