Life on Max Codes Things

June 1st

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:12:58 -0400

Today is June 1st. It’s been a bit more than a month since I sat down to write.

In fact, I forgot to publish my last post entirely after writing it. It was fine, as it was quite short.

Birthdays

I’ve been quite busy in the past month. May is the month of birthdays, and the last month of nigh-nonstop celebrating from Christmas-forward.

The highlight of which, as it is every year but especially this one, was my partner’s birthday! She turned 30 this year, and I went extra hard on one of our yearly traditions.

Every other year, we host a small tea party for some of our close friends for her birthday. Another of our friends was born on the same day, so it also counts as two birthdays in one!

My trick for hosting is to generally just have way too much food, and some takeout boxes for people to bring some of the party back home.

There’re a few places I know where to buy small treats, and then I try to make a handful of recipes myself.

The plan is simple: feed them lunch, a snack, and supper all in one. And then, when they think it’s over and they’re safe I ship them off with even more food to remember us by.

I pour some of myself in the work, and it’s part of how I show my love and appreciation to those close to me. I’m not great at voicing this love as often as I should, so I try to make up for it in my hosting.

This was the first set of birthdays, but we also saw the same group later that month for two additional birthdays. Overall, a very enjoyable time with some very fun and kind people.

At Work

A bit messy, but what’s new?

The main highlight has been that I worked to fill out my promo packet. Should I have been the one to do so? Probably not, but I’m in an interesting position right now where my direct manager is the senior director of our department with ~70 people under her. Even more interesting is that she’s now the interim VP with >200 people under her banner. She initially filled it out, but she was missing a lot of data as she just started a few months ago so it wasn’t as strong as it could be. Instead, I worked on a V2 and she’s going over the results this week to present later this month.

We’ll see where that goes. If it doesn’t go through, then it’s probably time to look elsewhere, which is not something I want to do. I like my colleagues, the pay is above average and the benefits are good. However, friends, family and colleagues are telling me that if it doesn’t go through for some reason then it’s time to go. The promotion I’ve been working to get for two years is the level at which my colleagues have argued I should’ve been hired at.

Back when I applied to this job, my last company had already been through multiple rounds of layoffs and I was getting worried about the future. I had been put up for promotion, but all promotions were pushed back by 6-12 months, so I started looking. I was more worried about landing a job, so instead of going for a diagonal move I went for a position at the same level I was at. Now after 3 managers, and just as many reorgs, I finally feel like someone has my back to argue for my promotion. I just hope it finally happens, I’ve been working at that level for years now so I just feel like my career has been falling behind numbers wise.

Fun thing that’s coming up, I’ll be doing some presentations internally for teaching our new colleagues! Just some domain knowledge stuff, I’ll prep some slides and whiteboard drawings. It’ll make for a nice change of pace. We’ve had 5 new hires in my team of 13 devs the past two months alone. While AI has been an accelerator for the folks that have recently started as far as getting their boots on the ground and getting smalls tasks done, we’ve noticed that their domain knowledge is just not at the level we expect.

We recently threw one of the new hires into our support rotation as they were reaching 90 days, and they were struggling to answer even the more basic questions asked by our other internal teams, often relying on AI which led to hallucinations. The problems in that channel often involve things like finding production data in a weird state and needing to figure out how that state was reached. Often, these issues touch multiple services under our umbrella. These aren’t things you can troubleshoot without at least some knowledge of the domain, AI can’t fill in the blanks if you’re unable to provide the right context.

In life

Slow, so very slow. So very tired.

My partner and I just started semaglutide medication for weight loss, now that generics are available in Canada. We’re hoping it helps us on the path back to health.

With better health, moving might become easier and energy would come faster after that. At least that’s the hope.

Other than that, I’ve had no time for learning at home. Or in all honesty, it’d be better to say I’ve made no time. Too much of my time has been spent rotting away last month, I’ve had to bring back app timers.

June

This June, we need to rebuild the deck in the yard. We’ve never done anything like this so this should be… interesting?

We’re taking 10 days off for it, which will hopefully be enough. It’ll make for a nice mental break though, which I feel I am in dire need of.

The weather is getting warm, the sun is out longer, my mood is a little better. Here’s to summertime?

Photo by Nelly Antoniadou on Unsplash

Forced Writing

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:02:14 -0400

Following the excitement in my last post about being happy I had written within a week of the post prior to that one, I failed to write within a week again.

I am unsure as to how the average blog writer find the ideas and energy to type so often. The repeated exercise helps I supposed? The forming of habits?

I’ve decided to go for a bit more of a journal-type post today, a series of disconnected happenings.

Getting good at Markdown

One thing I found myself doing often while writing the past few posts is struggling to find appropriate documentation about how to do some of the fancier markdown available to me from either Hugo by default or the theme I am using.

So today, I wrote up a cheat sheet, which I’ve put up as a de-listed article right over here. My first secret not so secret post!

Rustlings update!

Still going, but reaching the end soon. Looks like I’m 91/94, I could probably knock them out tonight if I truly wanted (I don’t).

I’ll make a post about it after closing out the few last ones, though it may be slightly underwhelming.

Pleasant weather

Today, we had very pleasant weather. Bright and sunny, going up to the mid tens (celsius) and plenty of wind.

As I would jokingly tell my partner, a perfect day to be taken by the consumption.

There’s something incredibly relaxing about sitting in bed with the windows open and plenty of wind coming through.

My calling this situation “the consumption” came from passing by the bedroom one day only to find my partner sitting up in her bed, a book down in front of her, looking longingly in the distance through the window – reminding me of a victorian era patient stuck inside hoping to one day bask in the sun again.

It’s a bit grim as a name, but I yearn for the feeling of comfort finding yourself in that bed position brings. I can only seem to get it on a sunny, windy afternoon in spring or autumn.

Consumption

The name for it always makes me laugh, as I draw parallels to the joking deep voice a friend of mine gives to my pets.

A common sentence, when one of our cats comes to complain at us at lunch time is:

“f a t h e r, I must c o n s u m e.”

However, the consumption itself was quite devastating, and one of the greatest leading causes of death in the 19th century. Nowadays, we know the consumption as tuberculosis.

I recommend this article by Imogen Clarke for the UK Science Museum, which talks about tuberculosis and the bizarre obsession with “consumption aesthetics”.

Minecraft!

I’ve been playing Minecraft since the Alpha days, even before the Nether was a thing. I was terribly young, and had no money to afford the game back then. I invite you to fill in the blanks.

I, like many, still get the cravings to play some Minecraft. I find the mindless digging to be quite relaxing an great time to listen to music albums I haven’t gotten around to or various podcasts.

However, having played the same game for so long, I grow tired of the usual loop quicker than I used to. This hasn’t been so bad for the rest of my backlog, as that means I get back to playing other games I paid for.

But then, one day, during my my rotting times on Instagram, I was presented by a reel of someone reviewing a modpack for the game.

Modding back when I tried doing it involved a complicated system of managing jar files to place them in the right place in my %APPDATA% folder, only to break the game every other mod. This was a necessary evil for the time, as Optifine¹ was the only reason the game even ran half-decently on my laptop at the time.

Nowadays though, the process is incredibly smooth. I’ve been using the Prism Launcher, which is an open-source launcher that allows for the easy setup of multiple Minecraft instances, including the download of full modpacks + automated setup from a variety of sources.

The only feature it lacked was the ability to download an setup FTB modpacks², which are some of the most well known Minecraft modpacks out there. However, they’ve since released version 11.0.0 which brings (back³) that ability. This is a fresh release from within 24 hours, at the time of writing this.

With this, I’ve done very brief research and downloaded some random modpacks from the CurseForge provider. I am currently playing Over Stars, which calls itself a “challenging Technology-RPG modpack”. The reason I picked it is due to it’s extensive number of custom quests, which are letting me learn about various mods a little bit at a time. I’m currently in the “Steampunk Age”, learning how to use the popular Create mod to craft automation machines using gears powered by a water wheel to enable more complex crafting methods like crafting metal sheets using some kind of powered auto hammer?

This pack goes as far as the space age, involving going to other planets and setting up orbital stations. At that point, I don’t know if it’ll even still feel like Minecraft.

These modpacks contain hundreds of mods on average, each with their own little flavours and mechanics. There are some larger mods with tons of mechanics that take a while to learn, and finding a mod pack with plenty of quests is a good way of getting your toes wet.

Closing thoughts

This was an interesting writing experiment. I didn’t know I would write about these things until I started writing.

This might’ve been better as a handful of blog posts instead of one with so many subjects, but this is how it came out this time.

I’m thinking of maybe taking some notes throughout the day when (and if) I think of subjects of things to talk about.

Cover by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Optifine was the de-facto Minecraft optimization mod back in the day. Surprisingly enough, the Minecraft forum post still exists for it. ↩︎
“Feed the beast” mod packs have existed for quite a long time, here is their website. ↩︎
Github issue. For a time, FTB forced other launchers to remove their packs, in an attempt to drive more traffic to their own packs. Their modpacks were removed from PrismLauncher in version 7.0.0. Looks like they’ve walked back that decision and have since allowed other launchers to put their packs back in. ↩︎