Cal Irvine

Cal Irvine

@calirvine.com

Software developer, parent to two humans, and two dogs. Work at Shopify. Code, climbing, photography, making things, cooking things, and the great outdoors. Location: Toronto 🇨🇦

426 followers305 following744 posts

Does anyone know anywhere hiring early career folks? I’ve got someone who worked a couple of years before being laid off in 2022 tech reductions, he stopped looking when he couldn’t get any traction back then. He’s hoping to rejoin the industry now and I’m helping him train back up.

A couple of months back I turned off all AI autocomplete features in my IDE, and TBH I feel like my brain has completely healed. I still leverage AI heavily, but always as a conscious choice. Goodbye “LLM pause” when my brain was waiting to see what the AI thought before thinking on its own.

My current AI take (constantly evolving) 1) if you fundamentally understand the problem to be solved and the green path, AI is pure accelerant 2) if you need to stray from the green path then it’s actually not that helpful at all 3) if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s doing more harm than good.

I love when I try to write a tricky TS type and I’m having trouble so I ask AI and it tries the same 8 things then says “maybe it’s impossible? IDK 🤷🏻‍♂️”

Cal Irvine reposted

Put their names on a plaque.

TOBikeShareBot@toronto.raccoon.bike

Yesterday there were approximately 500 Toronto Bikeshare bikeshare trips Most used station: Bleecker St / St James Ave (19 trips) Least used station: Brimorton Dr / Orton Park Rd and 733 others (0 trips) Active stations: 1007 #bikeTO

I find the Taipei 101 climb event to be like 90% uninteresting. Generally free soloing does not excite me that much, but even in that world I’d much rather see people climbing actual cliffs. Like surely soloing El Cap (way taller than this building) was both harder and more interesting.

Lmao it converted my db from PG to MySQL when I wasn’t looking?

Cal Irvine@calirvine.com

K, this Ralph thing is actually really good. Still not a silver bullet, but with a good focused plan it’s really surprisingly effective.

K, this Ralph thing is actually really good. Still not a silver bullet, but with a good focused plan it’s really surprisingly effective.

OAuth in a phone call was not something I ever thought I would have to figure out, but here we are. Been a hell of a year so far.

The thing that’s never made sense to me is that the “we must own guns to protect ourselves from tyranny” people and the “it’s ok when law enforcement murders people” people are the same people.

Finally finished this sweater (for my 3yo daughter). Body and one sleeve took me 3 weeks, sleeve two took my 3 months. Finishing things is always harder than starting 💀

I love how during the election so many Americans told people with opinions to “mind their own business” Unfortunately America, as much as we wish it weren’t the case, your business is our business.

Not in a “instant classic” or “award winner” sense of the word, but it legitimately made me laugh several times and it never takes itself remotely seriously. It know what it is and leans in which prevents it from being overly cringey.

So someone asked me to make a change on a PR. It’s a good shout, and I’m going to do it. HOWEVER I copied the code in question from him. Should I also fix his usage in the same PR, or is that too passive aggressive? 💀

Kind of feels like AI tools are speeding up the burnout cycle for me. I’ve always used straightforward easy to crank out tasks as a sort of break from the hard and slow problems, let my brain get the dopamine hit of rapid shipping.

AI nails those tasks though, meaning I’m spending more time on hard problems. From a business perspective this is obviously good, you want people focusing their time on the hard problems. But on a personal level, it’s kind of exhausting.

“When you reach the end of your life, you will die. And you won’t be able to wear your glasses. And it will be in 99 hours” - my 3yo Wednesday’s going to be a big day for me.

Tricked my colleagues into going for momos in Parkdale for a team dinner 😅 one review was “this is actually the best thing I’ve ever had in Toronto”