falafelite

My last place of work was very open and understanding about mental health. If someone was having a tough time, they were supported, deadlines were pushed back if needed, there was enough redundancy that one person having interrupted productivity didn't mean a project was going to fail.

I don't know how my current place of work thinks about mental health, and it's a very very small team. I am having a harder time the last few weeks, but I am also a bottleneck (i.e. the only person fluent in certain things) and there is a non-negotiable deadline.

All to say, I'm curious about other experiences dealing with this stuff. Do you say anything? Do you just wait to get through it and hope the lower output goes unnoticed? I'm all ears, happy to learn from other points of view and experiences.

I see and hear a lot of complaints around inheriting code bases that are less than stellar. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about cases where you inherited a "good" code base, whatever that may mean: awesome test coverage, good documentation, solid organization, consistent styling/formatting, abundant best practices, whatever!

I, a fairly average and not at all notable software engineer, receive anywhere between 1 and 7 emails from people claiming to be recruiters with addresses that end in @amazon.com every week. It’s different names, sometimes the same content and layout, sometimes unique. I find this quite bizarre, and I imagine it’s some kind of “ask everyone on LinkedIn with software engineer in their title to apply” strategy. Does anyone else experience this? Do you know if these are just bots? I’d love to turn it off too as I have no interest in working there but yeah just curious if others experience this weirdness.

I know there's discussion around RSS readers every here or there on HN. I'm curious about how many of you (especially those of you who write code) interact with publishing to or subscribing from RSS feeds as part of your work or side projects, and if you have any common pain points or favorite tools/libraries (and if it's something you can share here, please do!).

I have a browser extension on the Chrome and Firefox stores. I know I can check for new downloads and active users via the UI, but I’d love to access that same data programmatically. Before I hack away on something to pull it from the UI, does anyone know of an existing way to access daily downloads/weekly users/etc. programmatically (like an existing API from Google/Mozilla that I can’t seem to find)? Thanks in advance!

How do you avoid repeating code for, say, both a Firefox and Chrome extension? Chrome recently mandated that only manifest V3 extensions can be submit to their online store, and that introduces quite the number of breaking changes from V2 (even with the polyfill package). As far as I can tell, Firefox does not yet support V3 (I could be quite mistaken there).

As someone new to writing extensions and trying to write something for at least both Firefox and Chrome, how should I go about it? Or do I have to accept writing separate background.js files, separate manifest.json files, etc.?