u/eatingfoil

GENERAL WARNING TO THE SUBREDDIT ABOUT SAYING THE WORD SLUR

ALSO, SLUR

INTENTION OF IDENTIFYING WITH SEVERAL ANSWERS CONFIRMING THAT I AM IN FACT VERY SMART

Don’t get me wrong, I eat cooked food l for health and taste and all that, but the process… it’s pretty gross if you think about what you’re doing. You take a perfectly preserved thing, nearly identical to how it was living but maybe cut into chunks, and either heat-damage the fuck out of it or turn it into goopy slop.

Made jam? You took a natural miracle that was a fruit and degraded it into sticky goo to smear over some kind of wheat powder concretion for your breakfasts. Pulled pork? A muscle, a piece of biological engineering with molecules arranged just right to facilitate movement, denatured, liquids spewing out of every cell, peeled apart into a steaming pile of floppy worm-like brown stuff.

“But cooking made humans how they are today! It helps make the nutrients in food more available to absorb!” You know what else makes nutrients more available to absorb? Fucking digestion. Stomach acid. And yet don’t marvel at a pile of puke from a healthy gut, do we?

I have epilepsy that gets triggered by food-related disgust. If I take out a slice of bread and it’s moldy, there’s a chance I’ll have a partial seizure. But at the same time, probably for related malformed-brain reasons, I don’t really feel disgust. I’m the designated cat vomit wiper-upper. I once cleaned out a full fridge left without power for 4 weeks because I was the only willing volunteer; it was whatever. But you know the most frequent seizure trigger is for me? Fucking COOKING. I feel just as much disgust over the process of cooking as I did scooping up the brown, dead-maggot-filled sludge from inside those vegetable drawers.

Does nobody else notice the awful processes involved in cooking because they get yummy treats afterwards or something?

I want to put my best leg forward here. Given that I’ll be growing my second head soon, about how many rocks should I eat?

I’ve been doing web for 7 years at this point. The first majority of my career was analytics, up and down most of the tech stack. That was a good time.

Then suddenly, without warning, our entire 2,000 employee product was shut down by the parent company, most were laid off, and I got dumped into a desperately understaffed Rails app at a senior full-stack level.

This was a desperately old project with a massive set of sparsely-documented yet strict development/release/support requirements and no manager. I had never read a line of Ruby in my life. I had nobody to train me on anything except what everybody’s names were and where the main repo lived. The main source of info was one grumpy guy who’d been working there for what must’ve been 100 years judging by the massive organizational encyclopedia in his head. There were about 12 logins for different things, grouped seemingly by vibes only. It took me a full year to understand enough to be comfortably senior. Not because it was complex, but because I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do.

How often does this kind of thing happen to people, anyway? What’s the best way to deal with it?

—

As for the “+”: I finally left for greener pastures 6 months ago, a hyper-NDAed semi-greenfield web thing in a de facto staff promotion with positive feedback, and find myself today… being warned that in a month I’ll probably be moved into a new, very different Android and Linux kernel role doing [redacted] for the new [redacted] device by [redacted]. It’s not clear if there will even be other people working with me on it; they’re all busy with equally important stuff. I’m flattered that my manager thinks I’ll be able to do this (unless he’s very sneakily flattering me into failure), but… I’m thinking I need to prepare myself.

Does anyone have any good crash courses on Android and the Linux kernel that I can force into my brain in a month? I implicitly know a little from scanning nearby codebases, and have prior miscellaneous SWE knowledge, but nothing much on this topic. (Also, problematically, there’s not much I can tell about it for better specificity.)