Job Search Day 1

Stumbling out of the mind-scrambling pressure cooker of combined full-time-work and full-time-school and into a very complicated job market.

Today’s very minor goal was to update my personal website and implement this blog. I built this page with Astro last year, and then immediately began to enthusiastically neglect it.

Reasonably and logically, I know computers, networks, apps, devices, etc. are so massively, thoroughly integrated into our daily lives, that even if it’s a particularly difficult moment to break into the industry, there’s always going to be a need for software engineers. That said, it’s no secret that much of the grunt work that used to be the domain of the Junior Engineer can now be handled by AI. This is, for me, financially inconvenient.

A Computer Thought:

Is it normal to get a wall-eyed sense of juvenile satisfaction from hitting brew upgrade? Watching all the crap you’ve installed over the years update all at once? Am I easily entertained by lights and colors? Empty-brained, drooling, watching the numbers tick up, I did briefly wonder how safe any of this is.

I grew up using Windows, and as I understood it, if you wanted to install software, you had to navigate to a webpage, download a definitely-legit .exe file, allow it to do its dark and mysterious business, and hopefully wind up with a totally different .exe file that will run the software, taking advantage of all the unknowable changes that you just made to your dad’s computer. The security risks here are, initially, unambiguous.

When I started using Linux and MacOS, I was surprised by the simplicity of package managers. Where are these packages coming from, and why do we trust them?

Is there anyone making sure all these packages are safe?

SOMETIMES (For apt on linux, YES. For homebrew, YES but less rigorously. For pip and npm, NOT AT ALL.)

If I make a typo, can I accidentally install something dangerous?

YES (On pip and npm, definitely.)

If it was safe to begin with, is it still safe?

NO

Song of The Day:

Real dorky stuff. King Crimson at the beginning of their 80s rebirth. Adrian Belew, freshly poached from the Talking Heads, hopping around like a lunatic, resplendent in his floppy pink suit. Increasingly menacing polyrhythms.