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Laid Off in 2026

I was laid off at the end of March. Along with hundreds of other programmers and tech workers. This is a new experience for me and I can’t say that I care for it. What I really dislike about it is that I can’t point to a personal reason that I can control or improve. My boss didn’t want to let me go, but the lack of business from the customer led to several of us being let go in a surprise layoff round. Why was I among those picked? No reason was given. All I can do is speculate, and that is not productive.

Job hunting has never been my forte. Going out and contacting people, putting myself out there, etc… All my best jobs have kinda come to me. My dad recruited me while I was in college to be a code monkey while he was consulting, I was called by someone who had seen my résumé once, and I’ve been approached by recruiters twice. Now…

I’m using a recruiter again but the jobs in my area all want skillsets I haven’t been actively using in the past 5 years. Similar for remote. No one wants desktop or mobile; they want full-stack web developers. I’ve done web APIs and SQL Server, and even some Angular, but I don’t have 10 years of Angular/JavaScript under my belt, and that’s kinda holding me back.

So how do I solve this? I work on full-stack Angular projects and other things while I hunt. I go through all the classes on Pluralsight that I can. I start updating this blog again.

SortPaper doing a Cycle Sort on a blue and orange gradient. — SortPaper running a Cycle Sort on a gradient. I appear to have cut it off before it finished. Can you see the out of place cells at the end?

I’m starting with my labor of love though: SortPaper. Ah, beautiful SortPaper. My Android live-wallpaper that animates the scrambling and sorting of images. Originally written in C#, using Android’s drawing calls, it was a beautiful, if sometimes slow, hypnotic vision. It’s no longer up on the Play Store because I couldn’t maintain it due to reasons involving breaking changes in ad serving libraries. Which stinks because I have not made enough money on it to even cash out. I blame it on my lack of marketing, lack of time, and just generally prioritizing other things in my life (that I don’t regret).

That will not be the case this time though. This time, I’ve remade it in Godot. Let me tell you, what an IMPROVEMENT using a game engine for this has been! Battery drain is reduced, drawing is faster, and you can just open the app to watch the sorting without the home screen clutter if you want! It’s not out yet, but I hope it will be soon. Once I get my new developer account approved by Google. They closed my old one because I was not putting out enough content and was not getting enough downloads. THAT WILL CHANGE! I am planning on aggressively marketing it this time.

My Angular project, though, is going to be a gamified website. Think co-op Cookie Clicker, but the goal isn’t an endless run for a high score; it’s to reveal a prize. I did something similar before to announce the gender of my youngest. There was a large egg, and a two week timer. Each time someone clicked on the egg, the timer had an extra second removed. When it finished, it would reveal an embedded YouTube video of my son declaring he was going to have a sister! It was a hit! Friends and family were loading the site up and clicking and tapping away in their free time. They were sharing it on Facebook to get their friends to contribute clicks. Several people tried to cheat by examining the code and trying to trigger the API to send down the final video. They instead got a video of my son calling them a cheater! That was triggered by my dad and several programmer friends. In the end, they beat the game in less than five days.

My current concept is to monetize it with ads, and have the reveal be links to unlisted SteamGifts contests and other desirable links like that. I also want to make it available for people to make their own clickers, with their own reveals.

I have a working prototype, but it needs some visual improvement before it will be ready. Once it is though, fun times ahead!

On Camping

Uncategorized

Camping is fun. Packing for camping is a bit of a chore. I have my Switch lite and Steam Deck with me. I don’t know that I’m doing this right. 😋

Insomnia and Thoughts

Programming

It’s 1:28 am. I can’t sleep. I also can’t do anything productive because I should be sleeping.

WHEEEEEE!

That being said, man, I’ve really been neglecting this blog. A guy has two kids, a wife, and a fulfilling job, and he just abandons his blog.

Honestly, writing in this blog is something I very rarely think about. What I do think about are my hobbies.

I have a Raspberry Pi Zero with an e-paper hat and battery set up on my desk that I’m trying to come up with an idea for. One idea is a display of the most recent tweet from my Twitter feed. It’s not useful, but it might be entertaining.

Another is a display of upcoming meetings. I work from home now and sometimes don’t pay attention to the time. Outlook’s reminder has a bad tendency to pop under the VM I’m working in. I’d need to look into the MS Office or Teams API to get the event info I need for that. I could even wire in flashing LEDs or a speaker to alert me.

The last idea is just a clock with weather info. I’m not a fan of that one.

These thoughts have me wondering now: Is it possible to host VS Code on the pi and remotely access it to write the code directly on it? Just point a browser at https://[ipaddess:port] and see vs code there with the pi’s local display project, ripe for editing?

The things my brain locks onto instead of sleeping. Fun ideas, but I need sleep. C’mon brain, be tired.

??= In C#

Programming

C# has had the null coalescing operator ?? For a while now. It lets you condense

if (x = null)
{
  y = x;
}
else
{
  y = otherThing;
}

into

y = x ?? otherThing;

It’s a great tool for both condensing code and improving readability.

I found out recently though that C# 8.0 expanded on that idea. There is a common design pattern of caching a computed value in a variable so you only have to compute it once.

private int? _Example = null;
Public int? Example
{
  get
  {
    if (_Example == null)
    {
      _Example = ComputeExample();
    }
    return _Example;
  }
}

This isn’t that bad. It works. But it’s tedious to write (especially on mobile like I am now for this post). Enter the null coalescing assignment operator.

private int? _Example = null;
Public int? Example
{
  get
  {
    return _Example ??= ComputeExample();
  }
}

I love it!

Things I’m Enjoying

Uncategorized

Hello there. It’s been forever since I’ve actually kept a blog. Even this one I haven’t done anything on. Some people at work asked me about a reusable notebook I had, so I posted a short description and a few links to it. I have been lost on what to put up here, but then the it occurred to me, why not just do a post about things I’m enjoying right now. Heaven knows we need more joy in the world right now.

Tales Of Vesperia

I have not played a single game in the Tales series that I haven’t liked. They are an anime styled RPG series of games that is very heavy on story and character development. I’ve greatly enjoyed the near constant interaction between the characters. Every RPG has cut-scenes that move the story along, scenes that play out like a movie, but this game has a bit more. For example: at the end of every battle is a little sound bite from one of the characters, and sometimes a conversation. What’s more, these scenes evolve over the course of the game. You even see growth in how the characters treat each other in these interactions

Then there are the skits. The skits are optional cut-scenes that are fully voice acted and animated with character portraits. A notification with the title of the skit will pop up and you can hit a button to trigger it. These skits range from random conversations between characters, to characters talking about the area they’re in, to reactions to what just happened in the story. There is a bounty of character growth in these optional scenes alone. They can be funny, heartfelt, sad, contemplative, and many other adjective filled descriptions. I just don’t want to stop seeing them.

These characters are deep and the story is strong. I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m not going to put it down until I do.

Galaxy Tab S6

I just got this tablet on Monday and boy do I enjoy it. It’s small and light, and the stylus interaction is spot on. They were on sale on Samsung’s site, but that looks to have ended.

Years ago I had a Dell Venue 8 Pro with a stylus and it was my note-taking machine. OneNote on there was a dream. I’ve found that I can focus better on a task if I have the chance to actually write about it with a pen and paper. The problem with that though is that I wind up with a lot of hand-written notes and very little organization. Enter OneNote and searchable handwriting. What a difference that made! Then it all fell apart. I got a larger tablet with a larger SSD and I found it didn’t fit in my workspace like the smaller Venue 8 Pro did. I rejiggered things, but it just wasn’t the same. Eventually, the active stylus started acting wonky, the tablet actually started falling apart… I switched to paper again, and then the Rocketbook note-book.

I have been pining, longing, for that experience I had with the Venue 8 Pro again. I agonized over what I should get, but I’ll spare you the details. I settled on the Tab S6 and this thing is nice! It offers a very smooth and clean Android experience and OneNote works like a dream. And OneNote’s sync is faster than I remember it being. I had a notebook up on my desktop, and on the tab and seconds after I wrote it on the tab, it was on the desktop! I loved it.

The writing experience is top-notch. Palm rejection works perfectly and the feel of writing is like a very smooth pen. Like the finest of gel-ink pens. I haven’t tried gaming on it yet. I’ve downloaded some of course, but Tales is my main gaming focus right now. I might do a full review of the tab at some point in the future, but for now, I like it a lot.

Minecraft + Hermitcraft

I was sick with suspected Covid-19 (not high-risk enough to warrant a test and vitals were too good for hospitalization), so to protect my family, I was living in the basement. That was not fun. Shortly before that though, my wonderful wife convinced me to set up a Minecraft server (Java edition, not Bedrock) for my son to play with us on. This server saved my sanity. And Hermitcraft gave me the motivation to play on it.

If you’re not familiar with it, Hermitcraft is a series published on YouTube by a group of people who play Minecraft together. Think of it as a reality show within a game made from the view-points of all the participants. Each one has their own YouTube channel and they document their builds, interactions, games, and pranks played with/on other players. It is funny, sometimes exciting, and intriguing all at once. My favorites to watch right now are Grian, Mumbo Jumbo, and GoodTimesWithScar, but I’m also starting to watch XisumaVoid, Iskall85, and FalseSymmetry. Grian and Mumbo are excellent entertainers. They know what content makes for good watching and skip the boring stuff and get right to the action. Some other hermits will show them just mining or rowing a boat as they ramble, but the ones mentioned have great editing skills and know how to entertain.

In any case, Minecraft was how I could interact and play with my family. My son or wife would play on my wife’s laptop in the living-room and I’d talk to them on the phone. We’d watch the Hermitcraft episodes “together” (at the same time on different screens) and talk about them after. It was great fun. Now that I’m over this disease, we’re playing side-by-side. I have plans for building up a Tron like area, but first my son and I are looking to build a slime farm.

I’ll likely write about more things at a later date. For now, that’s it.