jeff 👨‍💻

Software Architect turned Engineering Manager

  • 30 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I use a planck as my daily driver. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have some good reasons to switch.

    It took about 2 weeks of use and practice before I could type at a reasonable rate with it. And then it took about 2 weeks before I could type on a normal keyboard again.

    I had a few reasons why I got one

    • I travel enough that having a small form factor was important
    • I have small hands, and was developing some wrist pain from stretching and moving my hand on larger keyboards. It did help a lot, but I think switching to a 60% would have been just as helpful.
    • I didn’t type that fast anyway and have pretty bad form, I was hoping switching layouts would be a natural way to retrain my typing and type faster. I did improve for a bit, but I stopped practicing and am a pretty terrible typer again

    I do think it’s pretty cool. It’s a conversation starter when people walk by my desk. The planck is a 40%, so most people haven’t seen a keyboard that small.




  • Getting started is always the hardest part. Once you’ve done some good work you can start relying more on word of mouth and charge more.

    I would recommend doing some small jobs on Fiverr or Upwork. Contracting isn’t for everyone, nor is running a small business. Fiverr and Upwork will be pretty disconnected from your local contacts so if you mess up or decide it’s not for you then it’s easier to leave.

    Ultimately it’s networking, instead of rolling your eyes when an acquaintance has an app idea you can offer to help.


  • Right. There is no solution to the halting problem, that’s been proven. But you just showed you can very easily create a way of practically solving it. Just waiting for 10 seconds does it. That will catch every infinite loop while also having some false positives. And that will be fine in most applications.

    My point is that even if a solution to the halting problem is impossible, there is often a very possible solution that will get you close enough for a real world scenario. And there are definitely more sophisticated methods of catching non-halting programs with fewer false positives.