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’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.
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.
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.
