- I’m trying to set up an engineering workflow at Dognosis (my current employer). After brainstorming with ChatGPT, I ended up with a template: Engineering Workflow Rhythm for a 20–100 Person Startup.
- I clearly spelled out what I was looking for in the prompt—and what I didn’t want:
- The first thing in the week is a short meeting; everyone should know they’ll work independently for the rest of the week.
- Every Friday, we review work, update status, and report to stakeholders.
- During the week, no cat herding. Each engineer acts like a professional and is treated like one (I don’t ask for updates).
- Write before talking. Every meeting must have a written agenda.
- I did the same exercise with Gemini. The results were not to my liking. ChatGPT’s responses were short, pointed, and—most importantly—felt implementable. Gemini, on the other hand, used language I don’t usually hear from good engineers. It added phrases that would make a PHB from Dilbert proud.
- You may also like this post:Small projects, clear scope | Swizec Teller, along with his other posts on related topics.
- I used to think
std::movewas C++’s way of implementing Rust-like move semantics. Turns out it’s another confusing monstrosity created by the committee that doesn’t do what it sounds like (f**king RAII?). std::move doesn’t move anything: A deep dive into value categories. Academic-type people should never be in charge of a language—or anything used by many people. Get a few normal programmers onto the committee, you C++ 😡. - 💡 Suddenly there’s a lot of incoming interest in my resume. Either the job market is heating up, or my resume is finally making sense to people. I spent over three months tweaking it (revisiting once a week). Talking to AI about my resume helped a lot.
- 💬 I gave a few interviews this week.
🚗 Toyota Connected is almost done. It’s Rust + firmware + software-defined vehicle work, which I’m pretty excited about. The interview itself was very pleasant: the technical team asked relevant questions and were very friendly. I felt comfortable after the first five minutes and didn’t suffer from brain fog. - Another interview was with a seemingly good company working in the secure computation domain. Senior leadership described the role one way, while the interviewer described it differently. The interviewer was very focused on dotting i’s and crossing t’s on a LeetCode question—and asked me to write code in Google Docs! I’m not really sure what he wanted to see. You meet every kind.
- I had a first round with Cloudflare. I applied for a zero-trust and data-protection–focused role. They have the network, they have the edge—I wouldn’t be surprised if they start offering secure enclaves and other services where “trust” is explicitly computed.
- A few surprising moments in the first round: I wasn’t expecting a technical screening but rather a discussion about the role and engineering problems with a manager. It turned out I’m in their general hiring pipeline, which means a phone screen by a manager first. Perhaps I’ll talk to the relevant team later. Not great, but not a deal-breaker.
- I went through the round and felt I did average. I said a few very dumb things and had some brain fog. We finished early, which I really liked. +1 to the manager for keeping the agenda tight and being professional. I wasn’t very surprised when I was moved to the next round.
- After that, I did something embarrassing. I made an off-by-one error in real life and ended up missing my second round 😢. I scheduled it for early Saturday morning (00:00 hrs) but marked my desk calendar for Sunday morning. Strong DND settings on both my phone and desktop made it impossible to error-correct—there was no persistent notification. Very unprofessional on my part, though I’m not mad at DND at all.
- I sent an apology to the interviewer and asked to reschedule, but I’m not sure if this error is recoverable. Let’s see.
- Three more opportunities are in the pipeline—all incoming interest, and all pretty interesting: hardware/algorithm development for space satellites, Windows security kernel development, and a data backup and protection SaaS.
January 10, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/02
Leave a reply