At work, they’re always talking about ICP (ideal customer profile) and I always make a dumb comment about the band.

A couple weeks ago, I finally decided to make a meowji.

I made it on my phone in a moving vehicle, so it took a _while_, but it’s one of my best works, I think.

My husband is getting tired of the number of blankets in our house.

This one is heavily inspired by a Displate I keep getting advertised on Insta.

!rant I pity anyone who may have overheard my interaction with a gecko that managed to sneak inside my house when I went to get a package on my doorstep last night around midnight

“Hey little guy, let’s try to get you to go back outside, okay? Nonononooo not that way, fella. Down the wall. DOWN. DO NOT CLIMB BACK UP. Okay. Yeah, see, there you go. Good job. OH MY GOD DO NOT DO THAT. Listen, I think you’re fucking cute, okay? BUT IF YOU CHARGE AT ME LIKE THAT, YOU TRIGGER MY FEAR RESPONSE AND YOU MAKE IT REALLY HARD FOR ME NOT TO KILL YOU. Hooooooly shit, little dude. You were so almost dead. Okay. Okay, yeah, go out the door. Door. Yesssss.”

closes door, only to realize little dude’s tail is still on this side

“OMG LITTLE DUDE, are you okay?!!” opens door, little dude sneaks back inside

“Noooooo you need to go outside. Come on, you know you want to go outside”

Finally managed coax him out the door and confirmed he’d cleared the doorway before closing and locking it.

Finally finished the blankets I was making for some of my friends’ kids. They’re supposed to make them look like little dragons but who knows if that’s what actually gonna end up happening 😂

!rant

Me, reading the GPS for upcoming obstructions: “Man, I really gotta learn the different road signs. Because I’m 99% sure that’s not telling us there’s a man digging his own grave up ahead.”

“That’s roadwork, Amy.”

Crocheted a shrug!

!rant I made the mistake of consuming a root beer float too fast and ended up feeling nauseous.

But then I remembered there’s a stupid trick that sometimes works where sniffing rubbing alcohol can sidetrack your system to prevent nausea so sniffed the heck out of an alcohol wipe.

Successfully avoided puking. Great success.

++age

I feel so old.

Layoffs are exhausting. Especially when you have to come off PTO to attend meetings. Still have a job. Back to PTO.

!rant I swear I only started out with the intention to make a Mario.

The mad dash to crochet all the gifts before the offsite continues.

One of my teammates really loves this cowboyger emoji https://slackmojis.com/emojis/...

Today’s my work anniversary, which also means it’s the anniversary of the day my friend Kirk got a Twitter response from Missy Elliott after he tweeted about writing a function called missyElliott that takes a data structure, flips it, and reverses it (something that may have been a crazy thing that happened once but that we as his friends tell everyone about and celebrate every year, much to his horror).

https://kirkday.club
The org we volunteer for (and that he’s a maintainer of) even went so far as to create Kirk merch (https://store.virtualcoffee.io/sear...)

I’ve been making so many crochet things to give as gifts to coworkers during an offsite.

Ah, yes, Don’t Trust Anything from Anyone Day, my least favorite day of the year.

I’ve been crocheting … a lot.

!rant

“Are you drinking my soda?”
“Statute of limitations!”
“Did you know in some countries there’s a statute of limitations on murder?”
“And?”
“And that means sometimes it can run out.”
“And?”
“And that means you can’t be tried for the crime.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“What? No. Why?”
*gestures at soda* “You literally told me that after I took your soda.”
“Oh! Shit. You mentioned statute of limitations, _that_ was the connection, it wasn’t a response to you stealing my soda.”
“You looked me right in the eye and told me that some countries have a statute of limitations on murder.”
“I looked you in the eye because we were having a conversation!”

!rant

Pro tip: if you wear a full face mask with a BiPap, do not start puking in your sleep.

Glad my body apparently decided to nope the hell out as soon as I started aspirating, but it was still a singularly unpleasant experience I hope never to repeat.

Thankful to still be alive.

When you want to get up but this is your POV.

Latest crochet projects

Added googly eyes before realizing the grate is an exhaust. Here’s hoping this isn’t the way I die. 😅

The one awkward thing about amigurumi is when it’s a pattern that’s assemble at the end rather than assemble as you go and it feels like you’re collecting body parts. (Currently trying to make a Kitsune, which means that I have 1 head and body, 2 arms, 2 legs, 1 belly, 1 snout, 2 ears, and 9 tails)

It’s also nerve-wracking because I just know that these pieces are all okay independently but I’m going to suck at assembly and make it turn out awful.

😅😭😅

A recruiter emailed me.
And called me (and left a voicemail).
AND texted me.

About a job opportunity in California (I live in Texas).

That requires experience writing performance critical and thread-safe code in a large multi-threaded codebase (I work primarily in JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, fat chance of that).

Responsibilities listed as: Focus on Supercharger Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) software features. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.

Opportunity is for a 3 month contract.

Why are you so desperate, lady?

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Amigurumi frosted donut turned out really well

Amigurumi cow, first attempt

I just want a goddamn option to “Never trust this computer. Never trust *any* computer” when I plug in my phone to charge.

Also, only got an hour of sleep. No idea why.

But woke up to find an emergency alert that we’re in flash flood territory, so that’s exciting.

I hate the process of trying to get hydrated when I’ve gone through a period of apparently thinking I’m a cactus.

When I don’t drink water at all, I feel fine. No dry mouth, no symptoms of dehydration.

I *start* trying to hydrate and it’s like my body thinks this is the best time to start giving me all those dehydration symptoms it doesn’t even bother with when I’m not drinking water because it’s just given up on me listening to them.

I drank 64 oz of water yesterday and woke up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and my throat scratchy.

I know that I need to keep drinking water in large quantities for a period of time for my body to chill the fuck out again, but words can’t describe how tempting it is to just go back to being a cactus.

Hydrating sucks.

!rant Spent days reading Unicode docs, trying to make sense of what codepoints were included in every Unicode property escape in JavaScript and awk’ing the heck out of the different text files associated with them.

Then at around midnight the other night, it came to me. I was an idiot.

I could literally just create an array including every Unicode codepoint and write a program to iterate through the array and test if it matched against a Unicode property escape.

Unicode array: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

Program to compare against Unicode property escape: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

So. Much. Easier.

Happy 2024, friends.

I really need to learn to think through how many stitches I’m putting into the first row of a project.

- Takes over an hour to do one row
- Already used more than 2k yards on it and it’s not even short blanket length yet (though width is ridiculous)

Started a new blanket with stitches I’ve never tried before. Bottom is Victorian stitch, followed by a few rows of double crochet, followed by alpine stitch.