I'm a few years behind you. I got started on my uncle's handed down vic 20 in the late 80s.

The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find organizations like that.

Looks good to me! The status bar did something weird on my codebase in which 2% was really 100% so it looked like it was gonna take hours but only took a minute or so.

I'll try hooking it into my refactor/cleanup workflow with copilot and see how it works as grounding.

Thanks for trying it out! For the progress bar bug, would you mind opening a GitHub issue with details? That'll help us track it down.

Great idea using it as grounding for AI-assisted refactoring! Let us know how that workflow goes.

Yes. Earlier in careers, passion can lead to more time and energy towards growth, which is a strong contributor to becoming a great engineer.

For more experienced engineers, I think about it as skill vs motivation. In theory one doesn't need motivation to do great work. In practice, I haven't seen great work from folks with high skill but low motivation.

A couple fun ones I remember taking:

- Recently: Given some basic intermediate output from LLM system, build out evaluation/quality tools, especially for dealing with hallucination - ~8 years ago: Given a database table of restaurants, identify near-duplicates to merge

On the hiring manager side of things, my candidates generally enjoyed doing a take-home to build a ML model for the Li & Roth question classification dataset. That involved a bit more creativity and it was very role-related.

After being on both sides of the interview process, my current feeling is that take-homes are a decent fit for junior roles but take-homes are not a good use of time (on either side) for senior roles.

I worked on a hackathon project to update readmes based on PRs, and it feels very doable. The developer experience is the hardest part... we did a Github Action that would open a PR for README changes, but it's a little slow to edit the PR if any changes are needed and it feels uncomfortable to put API keys into a Github Action.

If you're curious, I've been updating it a little since the hackathon: https://github.com/ktrnka/update-your-readme The readme was mostly generated by the tool itself as we did PRs to build it.

I like to research companies that I'm interviewing with and I've been automating my process lately. It's also been a good opportunity to explore many of the challenges in LLM/RAG applications like user trust, dealing with bias in the information sources, and static vs dynamic graphs.

I was partly motivated by seeing so many good people go through layoffs :( Here's the work in progress if it'd help anyone: https://ktrnka.github.io/company-detective/

Please do! That sounds super interesting

Looks good so far! If it helps, some of the challenges I had with take-homes as a hiring manager were: - We'd suggest to spend an afternoon on it, no more than 4 hours, but many candidates would go far beyond that - Senior candidates tend to have less free time to do take-home assignments. Some would decline to do them and others would have to delay their interview pipeline for weeks (and by then, many candidates had lost interest or progressed with other employers)

That said, take-home assignments were very helpful for junior candidates who didn't have much experience on their resume.

Ah, great point about junior devs.

Textgrad mainly optimizes the prompt but does not inject few shot examples. Dspy mainly optimizes the few shot examples.

At least that's my understanding from reading the textgrad paper recently.

I'm wrapping up my current sabbatical, and I took one before.

In the first sabbatical, I left my job to work on a startup idea with friends, and I learned a ton from it, both technical and non technical. I did lots of side projects I'd wanted to do for a while when that flopped, which led me to learn some more technical skills I later used. I also hiked a lot more which was great. After maybe a year and a half I returned to the workforce because I missed working with people and my savings were dwindling.

In the current one, I left my job without much of a plan. I spent more time with friends and family, traveled a bit, mentored a bit, did some side projects, read more, and learned more. This time around I found I missed working with people sooner.

In both cases it was expensive but worth it. The most valuable parts were being more myself, spending time with people, and learning things I wouldn't normally.