Posted: 2026-03-12

🔗 From The Mines: Software Engineering Day Jobs

I spent around a decade doing day jobs. The impact on me has been documented elsewhere.

Here are some vignettes from that period:

🔗 Car

I was subcontracting remotely. My agoraphobia was horrific, and I was never able to go onto the work site in-person.

One day I was suddenly unable to log into the Slack. I call the contractor.

"It's chaos. We all turned up and everyone was locked out. The CEO got on top of a car and said 'company's over.'"

The incident came up in my next job interview when they asked for a reference:

"So... did the company go bust because of you...?"

"...no."

🔗 Sleep

I was going through a challenging period at work. I had to build the geofence service, which was technically challenging, and I had aimed extremely high in my design of it with very little oversight. It was, in short, kicking my arse.

One day I woke up and my partner said, "what's a geofence?"

"What?"

"You were talking about them in your sleep."

I foolishly mentioned it at work: "...omg you shouldn't have told us that."

🔗 Note

"Hi all,
Does anyone recognise the handwriting or the note below? It was left on Lewis’ keyboard some time ago. He is becoming desperate to know what it says. It is, in fact driving him crazy. Worse still, he’s involving (snip) and me in this now. Frankly, it’s escalating out of control. I beg of you, if you wrote this, please, please tell him what it says.

Regards,

(snip)."

🔗 Bravery Certificate

I will allow this image to speak for itself.

Professional Truncatist

One of my coworkers accidentally truncated a critically important table. For those not in the know, "truncate" is effectively SQL-speak for "delete the contents of".

We were able to recover a relatively recent backup and it wasn't the end of the world. But from then on, any time a table needed truncating, he was your man. He became the unofficial Professional Truncatist.

🔗 Coffee

At one of my workplaces, upper management mandated that we spend a certain number of days per week in the office in-person. This was a complete waste of time and resources for software engineers, so the team adopted a policy: you waste our time, we waste yours.

We had coffee breaks that became the stuff of legend. We'd be talking about domestic terrorism and nominative determinism, and colleagues (including management) would wander in and out and put their 2c in on whether Diogenes was the forerunner to the punk movement.

We were still the most productive team in the entire department by a mile.