Musings

I’ve been doing some form of “customer support” for more than the last 12 years. I started my programming journey by participating on StackOverflow, answering more than 600 questions and doing around 7,000 other actions like commenting and making edits. My first full-time tech job at GSAP required heavy involvement in the (very helpful) GSAP forums. I’ve been maintaining a fairly well used (>200k monthly) open-source web extension, Just Read, for the last 10 years. Supporting Just Read means responding to customer emails and (now over 430!) GitHub issues.

All of that is to say that while I’ve never worked full-time in customer support, I’ve done my share of it.

Recently I had my least favorite experience as a customer trying to get support from a company. That company was Thrive Market.

I recently read an article titled “The Timmy Trap”, which talks about how humans anthropomorphize LLMs and how anthropomorphizing them can often be counterproductive.

I found the article compelling overall. I was surprised to see that the Hacker News comments were mostly negative.

The only parts of Facebook that I still use are the marketplace and Buy Nothing groups. To my knowledge, there’s no better place to get rid of stuff that you own in a responsible way that provides use for someone else. I’ve probably sold or given away over 100 items in the last 7 years.

My most memorable interaction happened when I lived in Athens, Georgia. I had listed 10 or so items at the same time during a purge / cleaning. A man had messaged me about two different items: a portable speaker and some other item. When he realized I was the same seller, he said, “what else ya got” and proceeded to buy at least 5 of the items I was selling including a fuzzy blanket.

Creating a TODO app is a software engineering trope. I think every software engineer feels the need to create their own at some point or another.

But in the end most engineers that I know end up using a plain text file. I was one of those people for a while, using Window’s Notepad as my TODO app.

However in the last few years I’ve found myself using Apple’s Notes app more often due to a few key features that it offers.

I’m always open to getting messages from companies. I like hearing about companies that I haven’t heard of and learning more about ones I have heard of. But the vast majority of recruiting messages are not good, especially for senior+ candidates.