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 I’ve been in a lot of interviews over the last two or three weeks. But there’s a moment that stands out and that I’ll remember forever as the most-smug I’ve ever felt during an interview.

This particular interview included a mixture of technical and non-technical questions, but a particular technical question stood out for reasons that will rapidly become apparent. It went kind-of like this:

Interviewer: How would you go about designing a backend cache that retains in memory some number of most-recently-accessed items?

Dan: It sounds like you’re talking about an LRU cache. Coincidentally, I implemented exactly that just the other week, for fun, in two of this role’s preferred programming languages (and four other languages). I wrote a blog post about my design choices: specifically, why I opted for a hashmap for quick reads and a doubly-linked-list for constant-time writes. I’m sending you the links to it now: may I talk you through the diagrams?

Interviewer:

That’s probably the most-overconfident thing I’ve said at an interview since before I started at the Bodleian, 13 years ago. In the interview for that position I spent some time explaining that for the role they were recruiting for they were asking the wrong questions! I provided some better questions that I felt they should ask to maximise their chance of getting the best candidate… and then answered them, effectively helping to write my own interview.

Anyway: even ignoring my cockiness, my interview the other week was informative and enjoyable throughout, and I’m pleased that I’ll soon be working alongside some of the people that I met: they seem smart, and driven, and focussed, and it looks like the kind of environment in which I could do well.

But more on that later.

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I spent an hour this morning dealing with an error when updating dblocks in Emacs. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to just use Apple Notes for everything. Except that once it was fixed, things were awesome again, so there's that. And that's why I stick it out with Emacs

The HHKB is back under my fingers. I've been trying to use the stock Apple Magic Keyboard for a while. The idea being that it's less jarring when switching from sitting at my desk, to using the laptop keyboard. The HHKB moves things around a lot, and this causes hesitation or mistakes when switching. I don't care. Like Emacs, the HHKB is so much better than the "easy" options that it's worth the trouble.

I'm trying something. Every time I feel the urge to just scroll around social media or YouTube, I will create something instead. It can be anything: a blog post, a journal entry, a doodle, a photo, anything. Create, don't Consume, is the idea.

Then reality doesn’t live up to those expectations. We become disappointed, and everything feels like a big failure.

What if we lowered our expectations a bit? We can still look forward to things with joy and strive to realize our ideas, but our happiness and well-being don’t have to depend on the final result.

Life turns out as it turns out. Sometimes good, sometimes less good.

And that’s okay.

By embracing the unpredictable nature of life, we can find peace and contentment, regardless of the outcome.