Returning home from the office, I found myself sitting on the train in a state of stupor, as one is wont to be while commuting home at 6:53pm in full dark. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, I did not consider injecting cocaine to be a good solution, so was just staring off into middle-distance, instead. As ever¹, I had music playing on my headphones — and yet I could not, for the life of me, tell you what was playing. It was some medley of same-y tracks that Spotify had decided I should listen to that day, all mushing together with no intentionality or progression.

Burnout comes not from working hard, or even working hard without reward — but from being worked hard without hope of improvement.
These conditions do not come about by accident — they are a product of company culture, planning, and management techniques.

So, if I were a manager with an employee I wanted to quit, here's what I would do:

There is currently much hullabaloo in the software-producing¹ domain about whether LLMs (or AGI generally) will soon™ replace us all (or indeed, all white collar jobs).

Until it BSODed while opening my photo editor earlier today¹, my home PC had over two months of uptime — pretty alright for a Windows 10² box! This is not atypical for me: while browsers are pretty good at keeping my tabs indefinitely these days, my text editors persist unsaved changes automatically, and seemingly every other application autosaves every keystroke³, I generally prefer to just put my computer to sleep at the end of the day and have it resume to the exact place I had left off.
Saving (or losing) work isn't even the main issue here; it's primarily persistence of mental state — like a CPU lifting a frame off the stack to reveal a previous one, resuming the computer also allows me to resume the frame of mind I was in when I last used it, catapulting me into the flow of wherever I was up to before.

The Problem:#

I ran into an interesting problem today when trying to handle a particularly hellish scenario¹. The situation is thus:

• I'm spinning up a new API service (using ASP.NET)
• We are re-using a bunch of existing infrastructure, including:
  • Our business-modelling graph database (we use Memgraph), and
  • Some C# libraries that define our interface with that DB, and a bunch of API helper services
• For primarily historical reasons², said graph database models most entities that are accessible via the API as nodes that have two IDs.
  • One is an internal ID (arbitrary, auto-assigned by various databases over time)
  • The other is a publicly-shared UUID³ (that we give customers and is used in our API's I/O)
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Like many of us¹, I partake in the social ritual of daily puzzle games. Some of my favourites of these are lesser known gems such as The Daily Spell², Clues by Sam, and Bracket City³, but my first love was NYT's Connections (sorry Wordle fans⁴).

Now, Connections is a flawed game⁵, and yet I find myself inexorably drawn back to it each day (even if only as one item in the sequence of other puzzles in the binge). Perhaps it's the thrill of cracking Purple first, or perhaps it's telling myself that I should just do it to try and do something potentially edifying with my last few minutes of the day, or perhaps it's just to spite whatever outlandish and/or unguessable groups it no doubt has to present that day⁶.

So, what does one do while staring at a puzzle, other than think about meta-gaming it?

There are many magic phrases — classics such as 'abracadabra', 'please', or 'open sesame' — but I think possibly the most practical (as far as a professional toolbox goes) has to be 'I don't know'.