I.

I turned 30 today.

I've taken a few stabs at this post, and nothing came out feeling right. I wanted to write about Terry Pratchett, the writing process itself, programming, improv theater, career nonsense, direction, and all the other bits in life that warrant reflection. Normally I try very hard to try and narrow my writing down to a single topic - just imagine how chaotic they'd be without that! - but my birthday present to myself is that I'm going to write about whatever the fuck¹ I want, in whatever way I want, and everyone's gonna have to take it or leave it.

That's probably meta-commentary on what happens when you get older.

The first version of this post opened with.

As I write this, I'm slated to turn thirty in about forty eight hours. It's going to happen while I'm out in Fiji on vacation, which, to my thinking, seems like a very reasonable way to go about dying very slowly, i.e, aging.

It has now been forty eight hours, and I am indeed in Fiji. However, instead of the imagined reality of sitting back and relaxing, preferably with some sort of iced, fruity drink, I slept fitfully, removed a few cockroaches for my girlfriend, then spent the first few hours of my day at Animals Fiji, where I helped time the heartbeat of a cat that had probably ingested rat poison², unloaded a box of saline solution for the logistics manager, then held an I.V bag overhead for the same cat as it was transferred to a new cage.

So the first lesson, and what I anticipated when I wrote last year, is that life never goes according to plan.

The second lesson is that it's more interesting that way (even if you're quite sleep-deprived).

The third lesson is that sometimes, if you're willing to give up some cocktails and instead put on some gloves, you can help a cat. These are little things, but despite being little, they are not small.

Time spent working: approximately three minutes. Good done for the world: higher than anything I've ever done professionally. Even the few times I've made a huge impact on the bottom line, those savings were usually immediately thrown away on something else. Makes a guy think, and on the very special day where he's prone to thinking deeply anyway, that leads to dangerous places.

II. 29

There are worse places to start than reading over last year's reflections. I'm glad I have them around, and I only wish I'd had them going back to age eighteen. We try to pretend everything before that didn't happen. In any case, what was up last year and how have I gotten wiser?

In five years, if all goes well, I'm supposed to be running a small software consultancy with my closest friends and to be a licensed clinical psychologist. I would be 34. My attention is drawn immediately to two things. One, that both does major events start with the good ol' if all goes well. If all goes well, I'd run my own business and have an extremely prestigious clinical qualification, and if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. It's chaos all the way through, and life is driven entirely by that chaos, punctuated by brief periods of predictability where I might successfully make a few cups of tea [...] I have concrete plans for the future, and the main thing I've learned in 29 years is:

It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Well, it turns out I'm wise as hell. I incidentally didn't gain entry into a psychology program in 2024, and the sheer cost (A$60,000!) combined with the amount of preparatory work I would need to do in order to compete with the other applicants (extensive volunteering, frequently with the assistance of wealthy parents) is quite off-putting. I'm not sure if I'll apply for 2025. On one hand, mental health is something I care deeply about, but A$60,000 is a lot of money. And I am still suspicious of plans that start with "I'll pay someone a lot of money and then things will have more meaning".

In summary, I have spent an unhealthy amount of time over the past year thinking about corporate dynamics, and I highly recommend that people, including myself, touch grass more often.

I spent less time worrying about workplace dynamics and happiness last year, so that's good. Most of the writing on the topic since then, especially lately, has been in response to particularly acute instances of things I can't abide, and they're usually gone from my mind within a few moments of getting all the words onto a page.

What's bad is that I don't worry about these things because they're wastes of time. Organizational change is very rare, and I've only seen a version of it that I believe at one company, where they replaced a non-technical CEO with someone that I believed has contributed to the Linux kernel. I am neither well-positioned to become a CEO (though I bet that I could scrounge up a gross amount of VC money even now) and I'm not at that level technically. It's mud, it's pointless, it's almost all people cosplaying at software engineering. We're genuinely in the midst of some sort of crazy crypto-rush but it's the entire software industry, which is why people are being allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to hire engineers that do everything in Excel. The jobs I've seen even since the the last time I wrote have only gotten worse.

Last year, someone ten years my senior asked if we could store our enterprise secrets in Google Sheets.

There are only two permanent jobs in Australia that I'm contemplating now, both where I have referrals from readers. Both of them would be stretches with my technical skill (the state of the industry means that almost all my learning is self-study or, more recently, mentorship from readers). Putting those two aside, I have no interest in pursuing permanent roles at large companies without someone inside them vouching for them. My CV now says I'm pretty much only open to contracting, as I'd rather be paid more money than less money if I'm going to be asked to do shuffle spreadsheets around all day.

III. Doing Good

A few weeks ago, I attended the Melbourne Databricks meetup. Possibly a Meetup, I'm not sure what the etiquette is when you actually use the platform. I went with Sam Campbell, Eastern Health's Deputy Chief Data Officer³ and one of my company's co-founders. Lots of good things to say about Sam, ranging from his programming talent to friendship, but I'm going to leave those all out because you will see from the rest of this story that he is, to use the vernacular of the under 30 crowd, based.

The first speakers at the meetup are the slavering ghouls known as Tabcorp. I knew the name sounded familiar before turning up, but it turns out they are a gambling company, an industry that I presume is mostly filled by fucking bastards. The presentation did not disappoint.

They were using Databricks to build an entire platform aimed at ensuring they have better real-time analytics around gambling behaviour. They said one sentence around the start of the talk about maybe stopping problem gamblers, complained a bit about harsh regulations (go fuck yourselves, you malevolent shitheads), and then proceeded to vomit incompetent engineering practice over the audience. A few minutes in, they talk about detecting the best moments to offer people better deals in real-time to prolong their gambling sessions, such as giving them discounts on the next go after a losing streak that might otherwise stop them.

I feel sick writing this out, but apparently the term they use for such an offer is a generosity. I'm unsure if this is used elsewhere, but in the context of gambling, this is violence to the language.

Sam leans over and very, very audibly whispers, "This is the fisherman calling the baited hook a gift", which is why I hang out with the guy.

Incidentally, Tabcorp, it took me thirty seconds of looking at your diagrams to realize that you guys suck at data, have been conned by consultants, and the only thing that makes me feel better about the whole ordeal is that your platform will suck forever, and if I'm lucky, other unethical industries will copy your slack-jawed practices and suffer from similar inefficiencies. Truly, only by the grace of your incompetence are our most vulnerable people protected.

Tabcorp takes up fifty minutes of their scheduled... thirty. And then take another five minutes for questions even as the event organizers attempt to prevent their banshee-technicians from wailing sickening horrors into the crowd through a microphone. The talk was really quite bad. Well, I'm sure they didn't take the time from anyone that was -

Oh that's right, they took the time from fucking Red Cross, who were trying to talk about their state-of-the-art blood packaging facility. Can you imagine how fucking stupid you have to be to represent a gambling company and take time from Red Cross?

I won't get into the details of the Red Cross operation, but it was extremely impressive, and the talk indicated something I didn't expect to see at a non-profit - extreme caring and extreme competence, in a very complex domain. I'm going to try arrange a tour of the facility so that I can write about it, or possibly get one of the lead engineers onto the podcast.

All of this did make me think though. So much of technology is sort of... nothing. The engineering industry is much smaller than it would seem based on market cap and what I call the Click-Ops-Monkey market is huge, but for some reason we've decided to call both roles engineering which leads to a lot of confusion. The former worry a lot about professional development, deep study, system design, and process. The latter plumb spreadsheets and breathlessly listen to people talking about how innovative they are.

But then every so often, you see something like the Red Cross setup and think "Wow, that's demonstrably going to save lives, and would have taken countless millions of dollars and cross-specialty collaboration to make happen. Is that a camera that tracks the packets down the line and runs OCR to see if the labels are smudged to prevent misdelivery? Why on earth is Red Cross the place that showed me my first non-stupid machine learning project?"

Or consider this blogging platform, Mataroa. I am pretty sure it delivered my writing to approximately a million people last year. I mean, it really just facetanks the Hackernews hug of death effortlessly. Yes, it's just HTML, but do you know how many Click-Ops-Monkey teams would somehow create a React monstrosity that explodes on 5,000 concurrent users for no reason? I raised an issue in the early days where my name was getting leaked (although it's a moot point now) and it was fixed within twenty minutes.

They do all this on fucking ninety dollars a month. I'm over here fucking trying to desperately perform CPR on every data warehouse in Melbourne because the fucking clowns at Deloitte keep telling everyone that needs to be hand-crafted Lambda functions connected to spreadsheets connected to DynamoDB connected to Snowpipes connected to fucking Javascript stored procedures connected to Snowflake tasks, running up half million dollar bills for <50 GB of CSV ingestion every day⁴, and some fucking chad is addressing my emails with a twenty minute turnaround time for ninety dollars.

Even today, at the clinic. We made it to Fiji using planes, we stay cool because of air conditioning, we reach the clinic in a car, and I note that staff are operating decrepit X-Ray machines (that nonetheless get the job done) and have iPads even in Fiji for case management.

On one side of technology is the stuff that lets me read every book in the world, and communicate globally in the blink of an eye, and ensure that we know that your pets get dosed with the right medicine. It is limitless reach and connection and comfort and health. There is no disease on the planet that I am confident that technology will not one day disdainfully sweep from the face of the gameboard like a blundered knight. It is morphine for suffering cats, and getting your kid to the football game on time, and having access to Terry Pratchett from a small island in Malaysia.

And on the other side is a slate-gray machine whose teeth are chomping cubicles that mulch humans, whose fingers puppet empty suits that speak only of synergy, whose blood runs cold with cash and hot with nepotism, whose demands for soulless collaboration can steal the sun from you, whose eyes only ever read summaries of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, whose cogitating mind crunches reality and emits LinkedIn posts, whose heart is fake innovation with murmurs of corruption, whose worshipers build heretic shrines to Elon Musk and Crypto.

There's a lot to write about technology as a concept, but for now, it turns out turning 30 didn't mellow me out at all, and I'm still at war with the latter. But now a professional has explained to me how much well-being can be accomplished with A$200,000 in medical supplies for animals in Fiji, so I'm even more pissed off than I was before.

Sometimes people pull this "You're immature" shtick when you get upset at the corporate world being the way it is. Those people are stupid bastards that haven't seen a veterinarian in the developing world explain that a (low) Click-Ops-Monkey salary in Melbourne could pay for four thousand treatments for animals here. I'm not saying don't get paid well for your country, I'm saying I will not accept paying a team of ten people to make PowerBI dashboards that no one will read. Fuck that.

(Can you tell I was very attached to the cat this morning?)

I'm going to spend a lot more time figuring out how to do things like save cats before I'm 40, and I'm going to spend a lot less time saving on Snowflake bills unless I can prevent the savings from being immediately wasted on bullshit.

IV. Pratchett

On writing - writing this blog has changed my life in a lot of ways. I meet great people, I get lots of amazing mentorship and general education. Say what you will about unnecessary swearing, but it removes all the people that pearl-clutch. By the time someone gets to the end of one of these posts, if they still want to talk to me then we're in for a great time. It also helps me think very clearly on many things, and you would be astounded how much of good public speaking is simply having worked out a bunch of good phrases to trot out regularly - even people like the late Christopher Hitchens have an arsenal of zingers they fall back on when you've listened to enough of them.

Not only do I want to keep writing, I want to write a lot more. Certain authors have made a huge difference in my life, and I suspect Nassim Taleb and Terry Pratchett are the two who live the most rent-free in my head. They both unlocked my mind in fascinating ways, and sometimes I think that all the truth in the world is locked away in Pratchett.

Pratchett deserves a whole post of his own (as does Taleb), so perhaps I'll leave it there. I would be lying if I said keeping this blog hasn't hurt my employability. It is possible that no large company will ever associate with me again, and the only thing keeping me employed is that employers are so lax that they probably won't discover my writing until after my probation has passed.

However, a goal before the age of 31 is to get an honest-to-God novel out. Years ago, I read David Edding's book, The Rivan Codex, where he challenges readers to write a book within ten years if they really are "something of a writer". I laughed at that, but more than ten years have passed, and he was right! I didn't deliver. In any case, I've started writing and I hope to finish in a year. We'll see what happens, but I've gotten good at finishing things even if they aren't very good. And lots of people have asked me to take a stab at writing more fiction, and who am I to deny the people?

(One of the most valuable pieces of advice I ever read was to practice finishing, and that's why this blog gets tons of updates while my previous one with an actual readership got one a year and fizzled.)

If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.”

And while we're at it:

It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.

And I would encourage everyone reading this to write. I get a lot of emails from people that think their writing isn't good or not original or whatever. Nah, just go for it. Even the paragraph above about cubicle-teeth, which I was quite proud of, is so obviously inspired by Ginberg's Howl. Steal shamelessly, my friends.

V. On Compromising

We all have to compromise on moral ideals sometimes. To quote Tom Lehrer: "You can't always break the rules, people who try are fools. When you get older, maybe then you will see."

I hate compromising, but I've done it. However, I read the following article on lying from friend of the blog, Nat Bennett.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the "man I need the job" line but this "well a manager lied to me first?" thing – just play the fucking tape forward. Just put your anti-capitalist self-righteousness on hold for one goddamned second and think. If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.

This caused some consternation when people discussed it - in an industry where recruiters won't even talk to you unless you lie about your experience, how does one feed their family? I've been very lucky in not having to lie, and frequently urge people around me to just change all the databases on their CV to <whatever-the-employer-is-using> because they don't even know that SQL is mostly the same everywhere. If you write Postgres even once on a CV, some employers will not talk to you, and there aren't enough jobs in Australia to write those employers off if you have kids.

While this is mostly self-indulgent nonsense, I do have a bit of actual advice that probably someone reading this is still early enough in their career that they haven't heard it yet.

If you want to be the kind of person who walks away from your job when you're asked to do something that doesn't fit your values, you need to save money. You need to maintain low fixed expenses.

Acting with integrity – or whatever it is that you value – mostly isn't about making the right decision in the moment. It's mostly about the decisions that you make leading up to that moment, that prepare you to be able to make the decision that you feel is right.

It me!

I'm that person, early enough in the careers to make use of this advice. I'm going to do my best to position myself for a good, ethical career now, before it's too late and I've got a mortgage and I'm three moves from financial checkmate. Hell, if I had been smarter when I was younger (big if, sure), I probably would have thought a lot more carefully before studying, worked a lot harder, possibly picked a different industry or country, and be blissfully unaware of how dumb the economy writ large is. I'd be out there tuning Kubernetes clusters so that people can run protein folding more effectively, or something like that. There's still time for me!

So I'm going to make sure that my finances are in order, that I'm meeting good people, that my cost of living is low, and that's how I'll maintain the ability to be honest (but, yes, jobs I get through readers and friends probably aren't going to get blasted on here, assuming they aren't like, committing warcrimes in developing countries and are instead just using spreadsheets badly).

VI. Performance

I'll keep this one brief, as they probably deserve separate posts too. My music and improv lessons and really enriched my life over the past two years. I'm going to be performing on stage for the first time at Impro Melbourne's Monster Of The Week show, probably on June 14th. Readers are welcome, tickets are very cheap as it's a student show! But I'm going to do a lot more of this going forward.

I'm also going to try and build up for a joint vocal-piano showcase at a student night at my music school, which for some reason is much scarier than the improv theatre. A one hour totally unscripted show? My heart rate barely budges, your boy is just built different. Three minutes of piano playing with as many practice sessions as I want? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

VII.

About two weeks ago, my girlfriend threw a surprise party for me. She did this via the very clever trick of telling me there was going to be a small party, thus lowering my guard, then inviting many of my colleagues⁵, my old fencing team, my classmates from psychology, and my improv group over.

It was weird seeing all those people in one place (in my head they existed in separate dimensions), but I also had a shocking moment where I realized how lucky I was to be able to fill twenty seats in a pub with people who:

1. Made time on a weekday for me
2. Are only the subset of people that my girlfriend knew how to contact
3. Didn't even comprise any family

I've been bullied for how doggedly I maintain my relationships⁶ but this is the first time I've ever seen the results of pouring all that energy out (sometimes a little bit too much) appear in one place.

So, more than anything else, I'm mostly hoping to keep being excellent to each other, all the way up to 40 and beyond.

And now, in the spirit of practicing finishing, I am not going to proofread this post and just send it. Enjoy the typos, I'm going to be writing a book and reading in Fiji for three weeks! See you on the other side.