Principal Software Engineer focused on product data and digital transformation. Manufacturing, distribution, wholesale. Big fan of React.
Minneapolis, MN
Joined December 2015
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- 6:00am wake up, make sure my daughter is awake
- 6:05am check overnight notifications (work emails, twitter, etc.) brush teeth
- 6:15 make sure my son is awake, make an Americano
- 6:20am respond to emails, keep kids on task
- 6:45am bring kids to school
- 7:20am begin workday, some combination of meetings, focus time
- 12:00pm lunch
- 12:20pm back to work, some combination of meetings and focus time
- 3:30pm greet kids as they get home from school (bus), discuss their day, review missing assignments, coordinate on schedule for the evening
- 3:45pm back to work, some combination of meetings and focus time
- 5:00pm end workday
- 5:30pm leave for robotics (I coach their teams) OR stay home and start dinner
- 8:30pm arrive home from robotics, make dinner OR finish cleaning
- 9:00pm clean up after dinner
- 9:15pm flex time: chill with wife/family, help with homework, possibly a bit of work if needed
- 10:15pm start bedtime routine for kids, self
- 11:00pm sleep
Certainly things can vary, and I sometimes squeeze in a walk. My weekends are filled with either household projects or family fun time.
This schedule is the only way I've been able to balance my family and professional lives.
In light of recent “life in the day of” posts, I figured I’d share what my current work day looks like
5:30am wake up, go to gym
7:00am breakfast 5 egg whites 1 whole egg
8:00am start work with cup of coffee
12:30pm 20 minute lunch break salad + protein
7:00pm end main workday
7:30pm dinner and family time
10:00pm ~1 or more hour of work
Usually no breaks other than grabbing coffee or a drink, once in a while a short walk or nap
Saturdays and Sundays another 3/4 hours of work per day
I’ve eaten the same breakfast for like 8 years and the same lunch for a few years, usually wear the same outfit most days.
This has also more or less been my schedule for like 14 years give or take an hour or two per day.
There are people who work more than me, less than me, and are more and less effective than me, but I personally attribute most of any success I’ve had to hard consistent work over a long period of time.
This reminds me of a conversation with my son's 2nd grade teacher.
During conferences she mentioned he was frequently distracted in class. For the uninitiated, this is a precursor to suggesting your child see a doctor about ADHD. While I believe ADHD drugs can be beneficial in the right circumstances, I also believe they're deeply overprescribed, so I'm always guarded. I asked her to walk me through the problems.
She said most issues came during in-class assignment time. My son would stare into the distance, play with his pencil, doodle, etc. instead of doing his work like the other kids.
I asked if he disturbed others. "Not really," she said. I asked if he eventually finished. She said yes, he waits until nearly the end and quickly does it.
I asked if the work was complete and correct. She said yes; he typically gets everything right.
After hearing that, I looked straight into her eyes to show how serious I was. Then I said something that ended this conversation for the rest of the year.
"Thank you for sharing this. I hear you saying my son finishes his work fully and on time, doesn't disturb others, and understands the material so well he needs only a fraction of the allotted time. I don't see a problem here."
I'll never forget the little smile that broke on his face when that message landed.
Is it bad that I'm already annoyed by the "Forward Deployed Engineer" title?
We all know nobody will have this title 2 years from now, it's just going to be product engineers.
Can we skip the part where we experiment with job names for cool points?
One of the best things my wife and I did for our relationship is to call everything that isn't fun "work". Whether we're at our jobs, replacing a light bulb, helping with homework, or cookinf dinner, it's all work.
This turns activities into interchangeable units of labor (work hours) and allows for a much more reasonable conversation on workloads.
We stopped "keeping score" almost immediately as it became clear everyone was working most of the time.
Headmaster Duck retweeted
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Appreciate retweets and any referrals!
Time to update the benefits section of the JD.
peak tech Twitter humor
Of course, that’s your contention. You’re a first-year machine-learning engineer. You just got finished readin' Attention Is All You Need, probably watched a Karpathy video too. So now you’re convinced everything is just transformers and scaling laws.
That's gonna last until next month when you discover convolution, and then you're gonna be talkin' about inductive biases and locality and how CNNs were actually incredibly compute-efficient for vision.
Then you're gonna read the FlashAttention paper, and suddenly everything's about IO complexity and SRAM and how FLOPs don't matter because the whole goddamn thing is memory-bandwidth bound.
That'll last until somebody shows you an MoE model, and then you're gonna be in here regurgitating DeepSeek, talkin' about expert parallelism and active parameters and how dense models are economically obsolete.
Then six months from now you'll write one shitty Triton kernel, look at an Nsight trace for the first time, and start telling everybody Python isn't actually the bottleneck because the GPU is asynchronous.
And by next year you're gonna be standing right here explaining to me that your 400-billion-parameter model is fast because you turned on CUDA graphs.
