Regret:

• Not taking care of my health. Too much sitting in front of a computer, not enough walking around. Too much junk food.
• Not keeping track of people after leaving their immediate circle (team changes, company changes, leaving college, etc.). Literally every opportunity I’ve had has come from somebody I know, yet I’ve done a poor job of keeping a network socially. It’s not that hard to chat with people every few months, but I didn’t initially put enough effort into it.

Happy:

• For me specifically, staying at my first job for a long time was really good. It helped me grow, and the company was pretty good with salary increases.
• In contrast to my regret, I did a good job of making friends with teammates and getting along with people I work with the most.

tl;dr: The right people, the right exercises, the right atmosphere.

I started by sitting down to a pair programming session with a member of the team that was hiring. We did some minor work directly in their code base, and he showed me some of the interesting things in their stack. It was great.

Then we had a panel interview with other team members and the CTO (not a giant company, but there’s over 1500 employees, so I was impressed.) We discussed some of my previous work, the designs involved, tradeoffs, etc. There were a couple white-boarding conversations. We talked about leadership and various people topics.

Then most of the panel and my referrer took me out to lunch, and we had a good informal chat.

Finally, we went back and I did another pair programming session with a different member of the team where we did code kata problems for a while. We discussed pros and cons of pair programming and mob programming.

Why did I like this so much?

1. The two programming sections were with senior developers on the team they were hiring for. Also, pair programming is great because you see how somebody collaborates as well as how they can solve problems.
2. The panel mostly consisted of people I would be working directly with. The questions in the panel were very relevant and you could tell they were looking for my strengths.
3. The atmosphere in general was great.
4. What I saw of their codebase looked really good.

I was very impressed with this company. They made a competitive offer. I ended up declining, mostly for external reasons like a long commute, but I still wonder to this day if I should have given it a shot.

• Audiobookshelf - Self-hosted Audible. I cannot believe how smooth this is. I set up the docker container, tweaked the ID3 tags on my audiobooks (to group series), and that was it. The Android app is listed as alpha, but it has been nearly flawless for me. I am astonished.
• Tailscale - A slick low-config VPN solution. Probably everybody knew about this except for me, but I recently tried it and it’s great. I had to tweak several things to fit my exact setup, but once I figured it out, it has been exactly what I hoped for. No more messing with dynamic DNS or opening ports. I just start the client and I’m home. I’m hoping I’ll have some extra time soon, and if so I’ll try to go full FOSS and attempt to use Headscale on a VPS.

A few I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Moon+ Reader - My favorite ebook reader of all time.
• Tea Time - Simple timer widgets
• Simple Time Tracker - Track what you do
• NES.emu, Snes9x EX+, M64+ FZ - Emulators
• Thunder - Lemmy
• Root Explorer - file explorer
• Lichess - Chess, free of ads, no fees. Almost entirely FOSS.

Also +1 to the usual favorites: Firefox, Termux, Nova, etc.