Seconded, though from a different angle. In my experience, it's surprisingly hard to live frugally when you don't have a job; my spending actually went up at first because I had all of this free time for activities I didn't have before. Started doing more hobbies, going for trips around town, generally participated in the economy more than I could when 8 hours of my day were spoken for. What I thought was a year of runway was probably closer to 3-6 months.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.
I’m wrapping up a 4 month stint at a fancy hotel working as a valet attendant. My job responsibilities as written were parking cars and helping with bags, but the unspoken expectation was that I also greet everyone who passed by my desk. These conversations are all low stakes but make such a difference in my day, and I think the article hits it on the head when they say it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to be beneficial. The hard part is going to be continuing the habit when I’m not getting paid for it.
I worked at a family-owned bike shop, at a fancy hotel as a valet/porter, and picked up a few shifts at breweries/events. I’ll be jumping back into software in a few months but it’s been a refreshing year of doing something different.
I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. A step further than that is to realize that all the value we extract at the software level comes from value produced in the real world at some stage.
What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.
True, though road bikes (even the new 12 speed ones) still use a 2x system on the front. TT/triathlon bikes sometimes use a single chainring as well since they don’t need to climb
I hadn’t considered that! Since I’m using canvas, I’d have to roll my own selection code since what’s displayed is just a bitmap. But I may fall down that rabbit hole someday :)
I rolled my own easing function (taking the square root of the progress, which is a number between 0 and 1) because I was missing the vocabulary to search for a proper one. Thanks for the link!
Thanks for the feedback! I disabled the text animation for the time being.
There is a note about the star nut if you click on the headset top cap and then explode the headset, and I also mentioned QR vs thru axle briefly when talking about the fork. BB is definitely missing and I should add it. I was also thinking it would be fun to make the wheel explodable too, which would give me a place to talk more about hubs, spokes, rim standards, etc.
I disabled the text animation for now since I can see how it would be frustrating. Maybe later I’ll go back to a line-by-line reveal since I still like the aesthetic!
Content-wise, some of this stuff I’m still learning about and hope to fix/correct, and some of it just won’t fit into a page, nor do I really want to force too much content into it and risk it not being accessible to noobs like me. Like you said, you have to draw the line somewhere and there was always something more I could have added.
Thanks for the feedback! I think the text speed might be an issue with my implementation: it adds a single character on each animation frame with a WPM speed limit, but this would cause problems if a device isn't able to animate very quickly. A better approach would probably be to use the wall clock time to figure out how many characters to add on each animation frame.
As for SVG, I've used that in other projects but since I was working with pixelated drawings instead of vectors, I chose canvas instead. The downside is having to do a lot more of the work on animations yourself (but this ended up being an upside for me since it was a lot of fun :) )
Your last point is a good one. I started in math and had to take a few CS courses (which I ended up switching into), but I had almost no exposure to subjects outside those two. At least here in Canada, it feels like electives are de-emphasized and there's little opportunity to explore other subjects. I'm happy with the way things turned out but wish I could have taken a broader course load.
I know what you mean about the distracting animations! I tried to set it up so that the animations would pause if they weren't in focus. Having an option to manually trigger the animations would be a good next step.
I definitely appreciate the feedback! I'm hoping to write similar articles in the future so this is definitely helpful.
When I referred to knights as weird, I was thinking more of how their movement patterns are incongruous with rooks/bishops/queens that move in a straight line but are blocked by pieces in the way. Their weirdness is what makes them useful (uniqueness may have been a better word).
I liked the way another commenter described it below: knights can move to the closest squares other pieces can't move to.
My solution was getting a part-time job (non tech) but also had to significantly change my spending habits which was not easy.