New Graduate Advice

Every now and then a student or relatively junior person will email me asking for advice. I see responding to these sorts of things as a service I can do the community, much in the same way that I see running the Compiler Jobs page.

Sometime during the pandemic I wrote the following… unfortunately, I have also some how lost track of the original recipient (if this is you, reach out! I’d love to hear what happened to you). Nevertheless, I append this to most advice I send out to new-grads as I think it has generally held up over time.

It’s been sent out one-on-one enough that it’s time for me to just put a blog post version of it out. Gently edited here is my New Grad Advice:

A few things I'd suggest:

1. Cultivate your personal network, and I don't mean in the LinkedIn way: You will meet great colleagues and collaborators throughout your career: Make a concerted effort to keep in touch with them. Correspond with them, write them letters; when COVID is over and if you're in the same city, go out for coffee/beer/dinner/lunch as appropriate and time allows. This work will not pay dividends for years. However, by keeping in touch with people who respect and know you, and you in turn respect, you will know where interesting work is happening (and sometimes, where it's not!)

2. If you have the opportunity, as soon as you are able to, start mentoring: If you're an intern, but you've been there for 8 months, then mentor the interns who have been there for 1; if you're full time, make yourself a go-to person for interns.

There's two major reasons to do this: 1) you can demonstrate (and discover your own aptitude/interest in) leadership early; this is a skill that takes time to learn, but opportunities are few and far between. 2) You'd be surprised at what happens by paying attention to interns and junior employees: You're forced constantly to skill up your own understanding: You know best what you can teach. As well, you start to identify pain points that appear repeatedly (these often are organizational pain points that get forgotten after 2 months work): These can become projects that you can own that make everyone's work better.

3) Open Source work is good, but to turn it into something career building can be a prohibitive expense; but if you can find jobs working in open source, it is a bit of a career aid, as you're able to point directly at projects, commits and bugs you're particularly proud of.

This isn't to say don't contribute to open source projects in your spare time if you'd like: But a few small PRs contributed to a few big name projects isn't necessarily going to build your career. Instead, more sustained contribution can unlock mentorship opportunities which can in turn unlock career opportunities.

4) Find mentorship: Find the people you work with who are willing to take time to explain things, and nurture those relationships. Having someone at your work be invested in you is important -- and ultimately the key to building a stronger career. You can't and won't do it all alone: so find the people who are in positions to help. Sometimes mentorship is a formal relationship; more often than not it's simply feedback you get from someone you respect, on a regular basis.

5) Be kind: Finding mentorship is easier if you're kind; if/when you have the opportunity to choose your own work (or. perhaps do some of it anyhow), choose problems that unblock others, lower the team's frustration level, and generally improve things. It's fun to build the cool new feature: It's better for you to fix the 1/100 crashing bug that's preventing everyone's builds from being green.

Hopefully this helps.

A Voyager Update, 8 Months in

I’ve been thinking about writing an update on my ZSA Voyager keyboard for a while. Finally have decided to carve some time out to get a few blog posts written, so here we are.

The Hardware

So the ZSA Hardware remains really good. A few times I’ve played with changing switches here and there, trying for differnt things. Overall, I’ve largely landed on Sunset switches everywhere, but I keep feel like I wish I had a distinction of sort between thumb and finger keys.

The Layout

So at this point I’ve been changing my layout at a relatively low pace.

There are some things I like:

  • One hit TODO button, on a key that I had heatmap evidence was literally never getting used
  • Big ass Command Key under thumb
  • I’m a left-thumb space bar user

As a programmer, I’ve gone through a bunch of programming issues and am... only about 80% happy with my current setup.

  • A pair of brace columns on the left hand. Biggest issue being right now they’re on layer one, which is accessed via left thumb: To provide easier alternation need really to move this to another layer.
  • Escape and tilde current share a key. This is sub-optimal, but I’m not sure where I want to move tilde really.
  • -,| and \ are all on the same key... again, don’t love this, not sure where to redistribute this. The correct answer I think is actually to move the top row of numbers to another layer and use that for symbols, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I really do have tonnes of room to distribute things though. Layer 1 is quite free!

The Great News

  • I can almost seamlessly move between laptop and Voyager these days. Which is nice when working on the deck, though that season appears to be past here.

The Me Problems

I’d be lying if I said this keyboard was entirely perfect for me. The problems though are mostly ‘me’ problems, not the fault of the Voyager. I have some ideas about how to fix some of them, but others I’m still not sure what to do about:

  • Something, either preexisting injury, RSI from keyboarding + guitar, or the new use of my thumbs as major input surfaces means that I have medium frequency pain in the metacarpophalangeal joint of the left thumb.

    I’m suspicious that I’m just overly forceful on the thumb clusters sometimes, and that it’s not doing me any favours. I’ve tried briefly putting some Kailh Silvers in the thumb slots, but I didn’t perhaps give that experiment long enough: Having tactile switches under the fingers and linear under the thumb was super weird.

    I also however find that the Voyager’s thumb cluster feels just a touch wide. It’s better when I twist the halves more, but nevertheless, it’s just a touch on the wide end.

    Also... I just use the damn left thumb too much. Look at this heat map from a few months ago. At some point I may just need to retrain my hands.

Some of this is QWERTY, some of this is me.

  • I’ve still not nailed a tenting angle I’m happy with. Initially I started with a 3d-print of this lovely tenting bar. It was ncie, but nowhere near tall enough. Still, having this I was sort of loath to just toss it, so I edited the model to make a “stackable” version. My first time ever 3d editing, and I definitely goofed it, but it’s been good enough for now, that I’ve kept using them. It feels like with the two of these, I’ve hit like 70% of the tent that I want. At some point though I’m going to have to solve this better though.

  • Trackpad in the middle is great but has always felt a touch clunky. I realized reading this recent ZSA blog post that a huge part of the problem is that the trackpad is so low compared to the tented halves. Need to get a lift for that!

  • I still find that the halves migrate a bit in ways that can feel counter productive. The previously linked ZSA blog post has a real sturdy solution that may be overkill, but something to provide a bit more steady relative position might be nice.

I would love to experiment for a month or so with a Moonlander. I really do wonder if the adjustable thumb clusters, built in tenting, and big travel switches might actually ultimately be better for me, despite my initial desires for low profile keys.

Random

Mine's in there, left as an exercise for the reader to find.

Double Feature

A few months ago I watched a pair of movies on a plane: “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” & “But I’m a Cheerleader”, impulsively doing an LGBTQ double feature.

I watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” as discovered Natasha Lyonne via Russian Doll and then Poker Face, and I wondered what she was like in her early movies. “But I’m a Cheerleader” is weird time-capsule film, bringing us back to the late 90s. It’s a really odd movie that seems to want to be camp, but can’t help but let the seriousness of the subject matter leak in around the edges. In my opinion, it’s good, but not entirely successful. It’s wild to see Ru Paul in that movie —

“To Wong Foo” is sort of the opposite: It is camp fantasy, and refuses in many ways to let reality in through the window. As a result it feels like it says less, but is smoother an more Hollywood. Seemingly every actor in that movie is giving it their all.

I was reminded to write this blog post though by me reading the wikipedia page on the movie, and they pointed to this quote from Variety:

““To Wong Foo” safely distinguishes among hard-core transvestites, transsexuals and its own heroes, “harmless” gay men whose only deviation is dressing in drag and having fun. In the big farewell scene, when the socially reawakened Carol Ann tells Vida, “You’re not a man, you’re not a woman, you’re an angel,” she sums up the film’s cautious manifesto. Ultimately, the comedy comes across as a celebration of openness, alternative lifestyles and bonding, all life-affirming values that in the 1990s are beyond reproach — or real controversy.”
— Emanuel Levy

With the recent hate thrown at drag queen, and deteriorating respect for trans and LGBTQ people, I find the idea of a reviewer saying that “Too Wong Foo” is without controversy cultural whiplash.

Helsinki

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune and pleasure of being able to visit Helsinki. I was there for the 102nd meeting of TC39, which was co-hosted by Mozilla this time. As someone interested in standards and potentially increasing the amount of standardization work I do, I thought this would be a particularly good meeting to dip my toes into.

Helsinki on kaunis kaupunki.

Helsinki is a beautiful city. Visiting in June, I was blessed with long daylight hours and much less rain than I had expected.

Suomi on iloinen maa

Finland is a happy country... according to the World Happiest Report, apparently the happiest country for the last 6 years. Exploring Helsinki I could totally see it. While it's extremely hard to extrapolate from a city to a whole country, I found Helsinki seemed to feel like a place where life would be comfortable in many ways. What I experienced was a city dense with public transit, filled with apartments and parks, and active recreation routes throughout. You saw Finns taking their children places in cargo bikes, people commuting by bike or public transport, and enjoying the many small shops throughout.

I got the vibe (and this is distinctly a vibes-based piece) that Finland due to its unique language has been invaded just a bit less than other countries by international giants... though I definitely saw a few Burger Kings.

Suomalainen Sauna on todella hyvä

Finnish Sauna is really good. I was really lucky; one of our Finnish Mozillian colleagues took a number of us from TC39 to Lonna, an adorable island a brief ferry ride away from Helsinki's market square. There we enjoyed for a couple of hours a wood fired Finnish sauna. I even managed to swim in the Baltic Sea at Lonna... twice!

Sauna is a huge part of Finnish culture -- it's included on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Experiencing it on Lonna was wonderful, and I'm very glad that was my first experience. Emboldened by Lonna, a couple of days later I tried the sauna in my hotel, and the experience was starkly different. Where Lonna was hot, but felt like a warm embrace... the hotel sauna felt much more like being in an oven. I couldn't take the heat in the hotel sauna at all.

I took a little time and explored Suomenlinna while I was in Helsinki. It is an inhabited set of islands that were fortified into a defensive fortress by the Swedish and Russians. It was a fascinating outing — I gently regret not taking a guided tour of some sort. It was here where I was attacked or harried by so many birds. So many angry hungry birds.

Suomalainen on kaunis kieli

My wife has been learning German casually through Duolingo for a while. I think we both acknowledge that it's not going to teach you a language, but you get to sample the language in small chunks -- and you do pick things up, just not detail or grammar or culture. Nevertheless, the day I booked my flight to Finland I joined her on Duolingo, but for Finnish.

Finnish has a bit of a reputation for being challenging; it's not a relative of many languages (Wikipedia tells me that the three largest Finno-Ugric languages are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian). I found learning Finnish to be a very mind-opening experience. While there's lots about Finnish that is hard (and I have barely scratched the surface: search for 'istahtaisinkohankaan' on the Wikipedia for Finnish to see the derivation of how that word means "I wonder if I should sit down for a while after all"), there's also lots about it that feels very regular, which as an English speaker is deeply unfamiliar. For example, pronunciation is quite regular, a huge change from English.

I didn't have high hopes for using my very weak Finnish skills in Finland, and I was largely correct there. I never spoke it to anyone. Still, it was neat to be able to decipher the signage; some time just reverse engineering some of the signage based on what I did know.

I told myself when I got back I'd likely move on to something else. I really enjoyed the brain expansion I got from ~70 days of Finnish, and figured that when I got back I'd try something else... I was thinking perhaps learning enough Hangul to sound out a food menu. But I have found myself returning to Finnish. It's still enjoyable to practice and learn. Who knows how long I will continue, of whether I will ever use it... but I am enjoying it now, so why wouldn't I keep at it.

Hyvä Suomi

Bravo Finland. I had a great time visiting, and you've made me want to return. Thanks for the wonderful time -- Apparently compliments are challenging, but truly, Thanks.

Living Through History

“ Men are apt to turn their eyes upon the past, as holding all that is worthy of contemplation, while they fail to take note of history “in the making,” or to grasp the importance of the transactions of their own day.”
— EVELYN S. SHUCKBURGH

(from here)