My time at RetailMeNot Group (formerly Ziff Davis Shopping) is abruptly over as I got laid off in what was explained to me as "an immediate budget reduction due to revenue". It was emphasized to me that it was a "purely financial decision" and that they had been happy with my work and was thanked for all my contributions to the project and the team.
That is pretty standard corporate stuff -- I got told a similar thing when I get let go by Mozilla back in 2020. My experience at Mozilla did teach me that loyalty in the corporate world means very little, so to my former teammates at ZiffDavis -- I will miss working with you and I hope the project goes well.
I am not upset about this -- I learned the harsh realities of Working For The Man a long time ago.
A big undercurrent to all this was the decision (like many other companies) to commit heavy resources to the use of LLM's as part of the software development process. They want as far as to make the use of LLM's a part of your work evaluation.
As many of you know, I am not a fan of these tools. The people who created them very clearly stole most of the training data (my books were in the notorious 'libgen' web site) and have made promises about their effectiveness that doesn't seem to match reality.
I expressed my opinions to management (at several levels) and decided that I'd rather keep my job than get fired for not using them. So, I used the tools they provided. They were okay -- they helped get working code a lot faster but required the same level of attention during the review process. I treated them like I was pair programming and would slowly go through the work, telling the tool what I wanted done.
In the end, it didn't matter. I got let go and they are hoping that spending some percentage of my salary on LLM tokens instead of having me around to help with stuff an LLM cannot do will work. They might be right...but there is lots of evidence that LLM's are not delivering on the promises.
So, I am back on the market looking to help your team. Want to speed up getting your code into production? Tired of fixing the same bugs over and over again? Want to know some better ways to use LLM's to build maintainable software? I can help you with all that.
]]>Winter snow blower usage count up to 18. Ugh.
At work:
It's Annual Review Time at work so I spent the week going over my notes and GitHub commits to get a picture of what I was working on.
Also started working on some exploratory tickets to determine what is necessary for us to start using a new "rules engine" to process different types of transactions.
At home:
The Little 3D Printer That Could is working well after fixing some weirdness with it complaining about a fan that doesn't exist. Next steps are printing out some more upgrades for my other printer that is currently disassembled while two more upgrades for the little one: a new mount for a replacement touch screen upgrade and a carbon activated filter for inside the printer.
]]>This week I increased the winter 2025/2026 snowblower usage count to 15 since November 11, 2025. When you add in the other times where the driveway and path to the front door were cleared just with a shovel, we are up over 20.
Certainly feels like an endless winter around here.
At work:
My main focus was the work to port over a Python RabbitMQ-backed worker to use PHP with Laravel and instead get the data from Kafka.
I discovered a pattern that should be familiar to anyone who ends up doing work at an "enterprise" sized organization: people replacing data sources with new ones that do not contain the same information.
As an example, the queue worker was pulling the following information out of the queue:
The new Kafka topic I am supposed to work doesn't have the affiliate network
details and the suppression window stuff looks a little different than
what we had before.
Ticket asking for this work has been updated to ask where I am expected to get the other information from.
At home:
I did a hardware update to my small 3D printer where I added a chamber heater to it. The reason to do this is that some filaments require an enclosed printer or else they warp really easily and not adhere to the print bed. By adding a chamber heater, you can get a very consistent temperature inside the enclosure, which can lead to more consistent results.
I am not a handy person (I am getting better through practice) and was happy that the installation instructions where clear and straightforward. The chamber heater module was pre-assembled and ready to go. Here's what I did:
As I type this out I am doing a calibration print before moving on to some other more functional prints.
]]>Back at work after three weeks off of vacation. I am normally a "CHRISTMAS!!!!" person but the general state of things in 2025 made me feel pretty gloomy.
2026 isn't looking much better as I write this. I am feeling pretty angry about a lot of things to start the year, and the constant drive to smash AI down my throat has me feeling particularly biting.
Like I said on my social media account -- there are some high-profile folks in the PHP community who were AI boosters who are complaining about their businesses getting wrecked by it. I am always a fan of keeping receipts, so you will see no sympathy from me towards those two.
At work:
Being weak coming back from holidays, I decided to let CoPilot convert a bunch of stuff over. What a damn disaster. Never again. Thanks for the outline, bud, but I had to cross check everything anyway. Saved me zero time.
At least there is an existing test suite for me to convert over and THAT has been way more useful than anything LLM tooling has done for me.
Self-loathing is not a good way to start off a year.
At home:
Continued tweaking my little 3D printer to make it a small printing beast. Along the way discovered a cool calibration print to verify all the basic calibration steps (temperature, pressure advance, retraction length, flow ratio, and shrinkage] have been confirmed to work.
Played board games this weekend with my usual monthly crew. We continues our Apocalypse World game where we started out in what used to be Las Vegas and are headed to The Magic Kingdom to try and rescue a teenaged girl who was kidnapped to be used as breeding stock. I play Thor Thorson, crazy cult leader who runs around covered in tattoos, wearing no shirt and tight leather pants. He is absolutely convinced his gods will protect him, and I play him that way. So much fun.
We also got in a game of Nuclear War with every single expansion IN EXISTENCE as part of it. Great fun.
We than finished things off with a surprisingly chaotic game of Cosmic Encounter where I completely messed up the board setup so we had to wing it. One of the downsides of meeting 9-10 times a year and maybe playing a game once or twice a year -- you keep messing up the same setup steps unless you write your own (which the other person in our group who owns a tons of games often does).
]]>The Internet Baseball League was a hobby that consumed my life for almost three decades. I find it very hard to explain to people who are not competitive by nature why I did this for so long. I wanted to win. I wanted to prove I was smart about baseball, smart about building a team, smart about playing. This part of my personality has caused multiple blowouts in my personal life, and has come up when playing Magic: The Gathering as well. I eventually had to stop doing any kind of "competitive play" with Magic too because it was turning me into a raging lunatic.
In this post I wanted to take a deep dive into this particular hobby, and show you how a person who thought they were good at something turned out to not really be good at it all. I got stuck in a loop I was only starting to break out of but decided to stop doing it because I was miserable.
At the highest level to look at this hobby, you are running a baseball team through an entire season. You are competing against 23 other people in a scenario where only one person wins the very last game of the season.
If you zoom in a little bit, it really is a simulation revolving around long-term resource acquisition and resource management. Can you identify players who can help your team? Once you have those players, can you use the rules of the game (and rules surrounding who you can and cannot keep on your team) to win more games than you lose in pursuit of a league championship season?
As I write this, I finished the last games of our 2025 regular season. I ended up going 87-75, but likely finishing 4th and last in what is the hardest division in the league. With the end of this season, I missed the playoffs in 10 of my last eleven seasons (last made it in 2020).
In 2009 I made it all the way to our World Series. I lost in 6 games. Since that time, I made the playoffs an additional 4 times. I only won one playoff series in that time. 16 years of being incredibly mad at the end of every season. I would print out the cards we use for the game every years and when the season was over, I would angrily dump them in the garbage and tear up the rules. I wanted to win. I could not accept the constant lack of positive results.
For many years my wife asked me why I did not just quit if the experience was making me unhappy. I never had a good answer other than "I want to win". Which is what it really was. It was a selfish answer.
So where did it all go wrong? Why was I never able to get the results that I wanted? I'm sure there is enough here to make a therapist wealthy but I will attempt to explain what I think happened.
I believe I failed at the resource allocation stage which caused any opportunities to have successful resource management to be few and far between.
One strategy for roster construction is that if your team is not already a "playoff contender", you are better off focusing on "resource acquisition" than "resource management". In the league it means acquiring players who have a "bad card" in the year you play but will have a "good card".
After losing the division title in the last week of 2016 I decided to try and "build a better team" by committing to a plan as described above. If the team wasn't already a contender going into the season, spend that year trying to improve the roster and focus on the next season.
That culminated in a series of 3rd and 4th (out of 4) finishes in the division and a wild card playoff spot in 2020 where I went 94-68. 4 years to make it back. My team had multiple players drop from being good to being mediocre, and we were back in the "resource collection" phase.
Given how talent enters the league, for your team to remain good you can only have a few holes on your roster every year. Need a new CF? You can probably get one via our "first card and guys teams could not keep" draft. Or maybe you trade some excess talent you have for something you don't have.
My issue became that, for a variety of reasons, I always had more holes to fill than I could replace via the draft. When you draft players, you are getting prospects (for the most part) and it can take several years to see if who you picked becomes a positive contributor. In my case, I had several picks turn out to be duds. Pitchers who did not develop. Position players who turned out to not have what it took to be positive contributors in the optimized player pool that exists when you have 30 teams worth of players but only 24 rosters to fill. When core players on your team become bad, replacing them while also keeping the talent level going becomes difficult.
Trading is another way to fill those holes but I never had enough "extra" to trade to fix things and because my teams were bad, I would be giving away draft picks to another team that could be used to draft building blocks.
I got stuck in a loop.
So, every year became "oh well, I guess next year is the year to try" from 2021 onwards. But I never got to the point where it was time to shove hard, trade away some future, and make a run to be a playoff team. In both 2023 and 2024 I thought I had teams that were on the fringes of being a playoff team so I felt I would play the games and see what happened. "Your team looks pretty good" was something I heard a lot. Instead I finished 73-89 and 81-81.
I'd finally had enough of my own inability to generate good results despite what I had been told by other people was the "correct process". Being results-driven is hard, but in a league where we are counting wins and losses, I just could not avoid being angry at the outcomes.
So at the beginning of the year I decided this was going to be my last year. I felt I had a team that was close to being a playoff team. I used my best draft pick on one of the best prospects in the game at a position where I needed help but their current card in the game would be terrible.
"Let's play it out and see where we are after the first third of the season" is what I said. If I felt I was still in it, then I would shovel some resources into improving the team and make a run for the playoffs.
After week 8 of 25 of our season, I was still in it. I traded away my two best prospects to try and patch holes. I grabbed a great starting pitcher, two outfielders, and some bullpen help.
The chase was on. Then the team stumbled hard. I had a stretch where I lost 13 of 18 games and that was it. I got as close as 2 games out of a wild card spot. I had one of the league's best offenses for most of the year. In the end, variance and inexplicably bad luck with my pitching pushed me out of contention. 13-22 in games decided by 1 run is how I ended up missing the playoffs as well.
It was a terrible end to a long participation in the hobby. I spent the first 14 years trying to figure out how to win in the league. I spent the next 14 years chasing that and failing to develop pitching good enough to contend while always having too many holes to fill on an ever-changing roster. There are people in this league who are really good at this. In the end I was not good at it.
I ended up managing 4600 games in this league. I went 2141-2455 in them. Roughly half the time I finished .500 or better. The times I didn't my teams were very bad. I could never figure out how to win consistently in this league and it stopped being fun a long time ago. I hung in there in a misguided attempt to "make it work".
It didn't work. I'm very sad that a core part of what I did for so long turned out to be such a misery-inducing failure for me.
When I announced to the rest of the league I was leaving (just after our trade deadline so any deals I made would not be suspect) I got some nice emails from people telling me they understood why I was leaving and thanked me for helping them over the years.
That was nice but there is a big hollow part of me now. I clearly cannot fill it with other competitive hobbies because it will lead to the same outcomes from where I sit now.
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this post. Learn the lesson that took me too long -- a hobby that you no longer enjoy is now a job. Your hobbies need to have positive outcomes to them, or else they are just a job. Something you resent doing. Something your loved ones have to hear you angrily complain about.
I am mad at myself for subjecting my friends (and league members) to my unhappy rants about my team. I wanted to win. I couldn't figure it out. Leaving is the only way for me to break that loop and try and pour the energy into wanting to succeed into other hobbies where I can have a much healthier relationship with them.
Failure at something you really want to succeed at hurts. It is never eased by being reminded "it's just a game". It wasn't just a game. I ran the league for a decade. I build the league web site. I even helped build the game we use.
In the end, all I have is this blog post.
]]>One of the reasons I stopped doing the baseball hobby after 28 years (I was in this league before I even met my wife) was that I no longer found the struggle to try and build a successful pretend baseball team to be enjoyable.
Perhaps I am wrong to be results-oriented, but after missing the playoffs for 10 of the past 11 years I'd had enough. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, and this was no longer fun. In fact, I had grown resentful of this team I had built and that the failure to create a team that could be a playoff contender was making me angry and frustrated.
I had gone through this before with other hobbies, and it took me a very long time to stop feeling that way and come to terms with my other hobbies and make them enjoyable. Mostly by dropping the competitive part and find a way to participate that makes me happy and not a raging lunatic (the bad behaviour is all on me, not other people).
For Magic it was easy -- switch to multi-player, resist attempts to make it competitive, and run a weekly event encouraging others to do so. For my simulation baseball hobby, well, there is no casual outlet. We are playing games against each other where this a winner and loser, and the results are there to be shared with everyone else. The team you built is yours -- your choices and your successes and your mistakes.
In the end, I could not figure out how to create a team that had, as the floor, being a playoff team. Clearly I was doing something wrong. Could never quite figure out which metaphorical levers to pull. Does the team I built have some talented players? Yes. I just could never figure out the complementary pieces to make it work.
It was very disappointing and it went on for years. I used to rip up all the cards for the game after each season in a rage -- April to October spent trying to beat 23 other people and, from my perspective, failing miserably at it.
I will miss some parts of being in the league -- I will not miss the blinding rage that came with failure, or the obsessive behaviour where I would try and figure out where it went wrong.
One of my good friends who has helped me out a lot over the years has basically stopped talking to me once I told him I was leaving at the end of the year. This is someone who I have visited for 20 years to watch baseball games in Detroit. It's a shame, but I can't really blame them -- they are even more invested in the league than I am.
I build the web site and some other administrative tools that are used to run the league. I am going to transfer ownership of those projects to him and that will be the end of my involvement.
It will be very strange to change the hobby to just be trying to enjoy watching the Blue Jays on TV and not get upset when I player I have on my pretend team not do well.
Hobbies should be fun. I want to have the ones I participate in to be fun. The Monrovia Madness, the team I "owned" for 28 years, was no longer fun. Don't let your hobbies become obsessions. Take it from me.
Current mood: 3/5
]]>At work there has been a poorly-planned migration from one authentication service to one that we have built internally. Our team was tasked with helping to try and push this over the finish line. My task? Update a React application and change all the internal calls to the authentication service to use the one built in-house.
Setting aside that my React and JavaScript skills suck, I quickly realized that this was going to be a task I was not going to be able to finish on my own.
Simply put, the state of the application is such that I was unable to get it running locally. Which means it would be impossible for me to test my changes. Sure, we have instructions but when I followed them, I got error after error and was so frustrated I eventually started asking Gemini and CoPilot for help.
They were absolutely useless, just helping to confirm my own biases against these tools being useful.
There are other people on my team and in the org who have a working version of the application so eventually I handed it over to them. I, once again, reiterated to my manager that any application we have to work with must be in a state that anyone can install it locally with approved tools.
It was madness doing it the way I was -- make a change, push it, see if the build in CI failed, repeat until I gave up.
To make matters more complicated, the system in question is one that we are trying to replace with the system we are now building. My manager did not want to invest any time into fixing things so I could make it work. "We're replacing it, why would we fix it" he said. Which is true, but I remain unconvinced that this is the last time we will have to go into the codebase and make changes. Which means if it does need fixes I won't be the one doing them.
Current mood: 1/5
]]>As someone who suffers from a tendency to pick tasks that exceed my current skill level, it has been a lot of growth that I have slowed down with all the 3d printer upgrades and keep the pace slow but steady. My Sovol Zero prints fine now, which is good. My Sovol SV08 has not printed anything in over a month as I wait for a replacement fan to show up.
Ironically, the shipment of the first fan didn't happen as Ali Express silently refunded the order when the vendor "could not provide tracking data". Not to worry, I have ordered from Amazon instead. It's okay to hate Amazon for a lot of what they have done, but they make returning things that do not work or fit your needs super easy.
So the plan with the bigger printer is:
Current mood: 3/5
]]>I miss my in-ground pool when it's hot like this.
The 3D printing hobby has been a frustrating one for sure. My large printer is essentially a kit printer. Even though assembly is straightforward, their choices for a lot of the hardware is suboptimal when compared to other printers in the same category. I've already made some upgrades:
Part of me thinks I should've went with something a little more beginner-friendly, but I really wouldn't be learning much. The options for upgrading and modifying this printer appears endless. It is a very interesting intersection of hardware and software, as these things are essentially computers that know how to take instructions done with an industry standard into commands for hardware to melt plastic filament and deposit it via a tiny nozzle.
Current mood: 3/5
]]>The current merger at the day job has been very unfulfilling. Lack of direction, developer-related metrics that don't make any sense, and a personal frustration that some of the solutions I've wanted to implement are now feeling like pounding a square peg into a round hole.
Current mood: 2/5
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