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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • These aren’t exactly exploration games, but they’re simple games that my toddler likes too:

    • Animal Crossing is easily her favorite. She loves “helping” my wife pick outfits and fish.
    • A Building Full of Cats is short, cheap, and cute. She likes making up stories about each apartment and cat. There’s also tons of similar games in different locations.
    • Cats in Time has simple puzzles that she can do with a bit of help.
    • Slime Rancher might be a good fit. It’s simple and cute with a focus on exploration.
    • Dorf Romantik is a relaxing and cute game that’s a good introduction to resource management. She might not be good at the actual goal of the game, but she likes placing tiles.
    • Subnautica in creative mode might be interesting for exploration, depending on how sensitive your kid is about some of the darker areas and creatures.





  • Every job will have some sort of crunch time. Even just staying in a programming position, the definition of “crunch time” will vary wildly. I’m lucky enough that “crunch time” just means that I set aside all my other tasks until I fix whatever is on fire, but I still get to go home on time unless I really want the overtime pay.

    I don’t envy positions with forced 80-hour workweek crunch times. That’s a sign of bad management.



  • That makes sense. I really like that the documentation is right at the top; many times all I want to do is find the right page in the official docs. You might want to look at how results are prioritized though: right now when I search for something simple like “how to center a div”, that result from Mozilla’s docs is included but it’s hidden as the second or third result. I would expect the page that’s explicitly about centering a div to be the top result, followed by the docs page for the element itself and maybe pages for flex or grid or something. That’s a really simple example, so maybe it’s not the target of this project, but I would still hope that simple topics are covered just as well as complex ones.

    EDIT: I was a bit mistaken: “how to center a div” does bring up the Mozilla documentation for centering an element, but “center a div” brings up a page about accessibility as the top result.








  • I’ve thought about it many times but can’t find a good way to implement it. I don’t have access to the company’s GitHub or any shareable network locations. Don’t want to upload to my personal GitHub either since there is proprietary information in some of them. Right now I have them shared in a OneNote notebook that I manually update as I revise the scripts.


  • I’ve just given up at this point. I have my scripts and I’ll share them if I’m helping someone with an issue, but it was such a fight to even get them rejected that I don’t want to bother with that again on top of the rest of my work. If nobody in this chain that I’ve already gone through seems to care, and if developing these scripts doesn’t change my eligibility for a promotion (which I’ve been directly told it doesn’t), I don’t see the point in pursuing it any more.


  • I wouldn’t quite classify this as automation, but I’ve been fighting for the past year for better scripting tools. I work on kiosk-style systems on customer networks. A big part of my job involves connecting to a device, pulling some logs, and running connectivity tests. I created a PowerShell script to automate this and submitted a KB so that others could use it, which sat in the approval queue for a few months before it got rejected.

    I reached out to the team who rejected it and was told that all scripts need to be approved by a senior. I told them that a senior had reviewed it and approved it, and linked them the approval which they would have seen anyways. They then said that it also needed approval by the development team. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the process to get that approval? I don’t see any documentation about it.” After a number of emails to several different departments, I found that there is no process. I bugged everyone I could think of but got no replies; my manager got about the same.

    In the 12+ months it took to come to that conclusion, I’ve made scripts to automate just about every common fix we apply. Right now most of our KBs instruct us to schedule downtime with the customer to fix things using the GUI, but that’s not necessary for 90% if these issues. I’ve submitted KB revisions for each of these, all of which have been rejected because they need an approval that doesn’t exist.

    I’ve brought this up to my manager several times and gotten my seniors to back me up on how much time these scripts save. I’ve shown how effective these scripts are when we have system-wide critical issues where I save us hundreds of man hours of work. None of this has made any difference; apparently the development team just can’t be bothered to create a webform or whatever or even just answer emails.