I have grown so far from the society, that much of the constructs no longer work on me. In real life seeing our CEO has been so stressful to me, and then I found myself in his direct chat going to write something that was from a close friend when I understood I have no place to say it. My system no longer registers this.
I should name my lab "Working Dynamics"
I think I love my field because it is as awesome as Physics. Trying to find the right medium is like the search for the unified theory. Only physicist have found the right tools and have became celebrities. We are still in the chemist phase. Yet I see the day that we are as awesome.
If we assume media theory to be alchemy, maybe my contribution has to make it the physics... A way to measure mediums?
I don't know how many years it has been since I've been obsessed with the scrollbar of the Leopard, but all of these years I have been trying to figure it out, and after the past year where I worked way more intensely with shaders and learned all these graphic techniques, I finally set it up and tried to make it, and I did it! This is one of the most satisfying achievements of my entire life. I'm over the roof in terms of excitement! (1/2)
Finally Reverse Engineering Mac OS X Leopard's Scrollbar (2/2)
More work on the 1285 🞶 Mailing List User Manual (1/1)
I also tell everyone that I like compilers (I even made my Twitter name “Rona likes compilers”, which got me an interview) because if they later hear about someone hiring for that role, they might think of me.
At interviews for the Compiler Engineer position, when asked about Programming Languages, I Never got anything too deep (nothing about formal verification, for example) but was definitely asked “What is your favorite programming language and why” in multiple interviews. Turns out, if you say brainfuck, you will not get the job. Oops.
In October last year I wrote “will developers care about frameworks in the future?” predicting that LLMs would abstract away framework choice. I was wrong—or at least, wrong about the timeline.
The reality is more interesting and more permanent: React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform. And if you’re building a new framework, library or browser feature today, you need to understand that you’re not just competing with React—you’re competing against a self-reinforcing feedback loop between LLM training data, system prompts, and developer output that makes displacing React functionally impossible.
As part of my prep, I read several books, like Engineering a Compiler by Keith D. Cooper and Linda Torczon and the famous Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools). They were engaging, but they provided high-level overviews that I already knew, so weren’t that helpful for someone who had already taken the classes mentioned above.