Programming Throwdown - 175: Resume Writing

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

175: Resume WritingIntro topic:  DSLR Photography vs Camera PhoneNews/Links:Free Internet while flying by abusing edits to your profile namehttps://robertheaton.com/pyskywifi/Making Animated Characters with AI Arthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSN76gb_Z28On 10x Engineershttps://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/19/the-real-10x-developer-makes-their-whole-team-better/The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnasticshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwJIYj3hPAUBook of the ShowPatrick: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liuhttps://amzn.to/3xNEoRBJason: The Checklist Manifestohttps://amzn.to/3W2JjpMPatreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=hTool of the ShowPatrick: Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch)https://amzn.to/3S9VJLfJason: Amazon Qhttps://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AmazonWebServices.amazon-q-vscodeTopic: Resume Writing (Courtesy of Matthew C.)Why have a resume?Many jobs require it to get into the considerationToday many are screened for keywords automaticallyLog for future youWhat is a resume?One-page descriptionKey accomplishments & experiencesComparison to CVReferencesHow to write a good resume?Do’sInclude your github if it has good contributionsBe specific (dates, locations, skills)Isolate your specific contributionsBe accurate/honestBe conciseBe ready to discuss any point you have on the resumeList hobbies/activities/extracurricularsDon’tsHave mistakes (especially dates)Use images (most companies use text extraction)Use it as a design portfolioPut social qualities (e.gs. hard-working, motivated, friendly)Use fancy templates/toolsResourcesManager Tools: How to scan resumes https://www.manager-tools.com/2016/05/how-scan-resume-part-1 Google docsLatex/Lyx for CVsHow to think about your career and how it impacts your future resume writing (career planning)Technologies and architectures more than specifics of project detailsHow various choices may age over time ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 175 resume writing take it away patrick we i don't know that we've ever talked about it before but probably have we've talked about all the things um i every so often it ebbs and flows i have a dslr and i had recently uh upgraded to a slightly newer one but smaller than my my old setup so you know this is like a physical camera it's large has interchangeable interchangeable lens. Now, what is the SLR? Is the D digital? Oh, so D is digital. SLR is single lens reflex.

So way back in the day, if you ever see the like old cameras, there's like two lenses, one above each other. Those were reflex cameras. In other words, you could look through and the lenses moved in synchronized fashion. But when you take the picture, the bottom lens opens up and exposes the film but the top lens is what you're focusing and composing the picture through and so these are i think they would call them tlr2 lens reflex um okay and then so they move to single lens reflex which has a mirror at a 45 degree angle behind the lens so the light shines through the lens

bounces up into a pentagonal prism and in through the little cup at the top that you would look through. And then when you go to take the picture, the mirror drops down and exposes the film. So then they had digital SLRs where instead of exposing the film, it exposes a silicon sensor, CMOS or CCD. then actually now it's a bit of a misnomer most of the lens reflexes the mirrors popping down are gone and they're all uh mirrorless cameras and so your the lens is directly exposing the sensor pretty much all the time and then the thing on the back or the thing in the eyepiece is you know rendering the the basically it's like a monitor for the the sensor um okay but i don't know i still call them

dslrs because yeah whatever uh yeah that makes sense stuck at it but yeah so the so they give better quality than like your phone that's ah so i mean that's that's the question right um and so uh my phone does pretty good i have a pretty recent iphone personally but you know i think most of the phones you know we've been in a bit of a opportunity for, I think, uh, features to equalize a bit. Um, and so I have a pretty nice phone. It has a lot of nice features, takes great pictures. If you take time to, you know, you know, compose them properly and make sure they're exposed properly. Mine has an option to, you know, do them as the raw images rather than the JPEG images. So you get more dynamic range in the colors.

It uses extra bits to store the color information. So 10 bits instead of normally 8 bits. So you can do those things. And it actually is pretty nice. But if you think about it, just in your head, the size of those lenses, the size of the chip that does it, however many megapixels they are they're still physically very very very small um and so they deal with a lot of noise issues and they make up for it by they sell so many of them the amount of dollars they can spend

to you know do tons of software processing and have the best sensors and do all that is is a huge factor rather than you know these mirrorless cameras maybe they sell you know one-tenth one-hundredth as many as they sell you know whatever the top line phone is and so they can't spend as much but the physical size of the sensor like you mentioned can be a lot bigger so on a they call it like a full frame again going back it used to be 35 millimeter film which is 35 millimeters on the diagonal um if you have a full frame sensor which is the one i happen to have it's 35 millimeters on the diagonal i mean that's size that is like a huge percentage of my phone's total dimensions like

that's a big sensor um and so when you go to take take pictures if you just look at them you know in small size they they kind of they feel equivalent like if you just look at them, you know, in small size, they, they, they kind of, they feel equivalent. Like if you just pick it up and snap it, like you would with your phone, you don't really notice a difference. But again, if you take time to, you know, get a lens that is, has maybe a bigger zoom and you know, that kind of stuff, you start to realize, ah, there's a lot of, uh, more data that you can pull out. There's a lot more color. You can kind of shift around. You can kind of change the exposure because the camera doesn't when you go to take a picture you don't know what you're trying to to show and if you notice like if you go take a picture at sunset

and you pull up your phone or even one of these cameras and you take a picture it's trying to adjust the white balance so you know you're not necessarily seeing the colors and it you're looking out towards a very bright part of the sky with everything else dark and so it's trying to average out across the whole scene if you now in your phone you probably have options but people rarely use them but yeah i have no idea what half those buttons do on the camera app there we go but when you have a physical camera you have all these you know buttons and you sort of like switches and dials and all that stuff is sort of immediately there and so for me it's a bit of a first world problem i guess a luxury i would say but you know you can do these things with the phone you have but if you if you're able to have one of these camera forces you into a slightly different way of thinking and what you find is

or at least i do that the actual process of taking these pictures, sort of like treating them with care, which of course takes orders of magnitude longer than clicking the auto adjust feature and posting them to, you know, family and in a group chat or you on social media or whatever. And I don't even really share these pictures anyone, but just sort of having them and sort of taking time with the content picture. So I'll take a picture of my kid, but rather than just, Hey, smile, snap, it'd be like, hang on, I'm going to take a picture, you know, and you have them sit, you know, a little nicer and you get a little bit more of a composed thing, which is how growing up, at least that's how kind of all the pictures were. No one just like rapid, you know, click, click, click, click, click. Like people would set up a picture. You would take a picture. Now you can say that's fake, but it has a certain, uh, nostalgia and specialness to it. When you go back to edit that picture, you're sort of reengaging a bit with that, that moment because you took time to kind of think through it. And then, and then

it's a little bit of a more of a thoughtful process. So I've been finding that interesting is, and to answer your question, I don't actually know because I treat them so differently, the force yourself to use your phone and to use it in the way where you adjust all the settings. And it's obviously not going to be as capable still. Like, you know, you can put a gigantic, absolutely gigantic lens with a huge zoom and your phone can't do that. Um, but if you shoot in the sort of normal ranges of things, if you really took time, learned a sophisticated phone parameter app and, you know, figured all that, maybe maybe they're the same. But people didn't realize they were going to happen, they end up getting captured. And just, it's just this very interesting thing that I didn't spend a

lot of time thinking about, but I've recently been re-engaging with it and just thinking through like pictures as physical, like actually when was the last time, I don't know, for me, it's been a really long time, printed a picture out, like sent off to be developed oh yeah printed it or held it in my hand it's an entirely different thing to like hold a picture in your hand and like look at it it's crazy remember the last time i held you know a picture one of my own pictures dude it's been i probably haven't had a picture developed until recently i went on a trip and took a family portrait and had it printed for um for my family you know i like a large i was like the first time in probably five six seven years i'd had like a picture become a physical set of atoms okay so i have a couple of questions first of all like

how do you learn how to take pictures like is this something you learned on the internet do you take like a yeah okay got it and i'm by no means claiming to be an artist about it i just it's a interesting process and it's it's really i mean if you're an engineer it look it's not that hard that makes sense so you went on youtube video and it's like okay here's what the different acronyms are and here's you know when shutters one or the other focal length like you can learn these in an hour of, you know, watching YouTube videos and looking on, you know, tutorials. Yeah.

Okay. My second question is like, when you're doing something like printing a portrait, have you tried any of these like super scale algorithms where like they'll like increase the DPI of your photo using AI? And did you need anything like that? So I did recently, I had a picture where I needed to zoom

in a little bit more and I actually did use, which I think I could have done it on my phone too, but I happened to have used my large camera for it. I have a Sony mirrorless camera and it has a bunch of extra resolution. So I zoomed in and it was really noisy because, you know, when you blow a picture up, it's noisy. So I actually didn didn't do super scaling i didn't really need more resolution but i did run one of the ai like denoise of visor denoise of fires um and it did actually like i don't want to say creepy because it didn't put more detail that than was there but it did a really good job like it was suitable it went from like this is blurry and you can see what's happening to like you know it was a picture an event for one of my kids and so it was you know like them doing something up on a stage and so it was far and it was dark it was very

noisy afterwards i was able to send it to people and no one realized this was like a tiny corner of a picture that i took because you know wow it's amazing so it's amazing um i recently used the thing where um you you select an area. Basically, my wife had this photo and there were people in the background. It was at the beach. And unfortunately, there was a woman in the background bending over. And so it was just like the most embarrassing shot of this poor stranger in our family photo. And so, yeah yeah there's this

tool you just lasso that part of the image press a button and it in paints it and i was also pretty surprised um you know you know when you see examples you're obviously seeing the best of something or you know someone's at least tried multiple times and they're showing like when you read a research paper they're showing you you know something that they're really proud of and so i was a little skeptical going in but it was great i mean it even drew like a bird i was like wow it's like it had a ton of creativity um and uh yeah it's just shocking where that industry i think but i think that's is from. But I think that's a, to be clear, I think that's a relatively recent development. I think that even,

I believe I've seen some press release from Google has been doing some of that, that they are offering that in their Google photo service and stuff too. But I know Photoshop or Lightroom added some of the things you're talking about. But I think it's been like a two year kind of recent development.

If you had tried this five years ago and you'd circled it, it would have done some sort of like color averaging, blur, texture stamping kind of thing versus it wouldn't have. Like if you had a wave at a diagonal, it would have like cut a piece of a wave and put up a nut, but it wouldn't have lined up quite right. It would have left a thing. And it's always been possible for people to go in and do it. It just would have taken enormous amounts of skill and time.

Now you just, like I said, you just draw a loop around it, tell it you want it, you know, removed and it will, you know, hypothesize about what was there based on what was in the input.

Yeah. I mean, it basically drew an even larger behind, which is exactly what I wanted. That word has become ambiguous in this circumstance because you did want you did want behind what was behind the person that's exactly exactly all right we're degenerating now we better get on to don't be like where's the programming talk oh god uh all right news and links uh let's see patrick you're first uh okay so this one is an article on the blog by i should have looked at but the blog's name is

robert heaton so i'm gonna go that that's the author's name called pie sky wi-fi um and they don't give actually uh as far as i could tell in the blog post they didn't give a ton of specifics about what they were doing um but this story is so funny but i wanted to use it as as per usual to like talk about kind of this there There's actually something really serious here. And what this person did is they kind of have a story. I believe it's probably apocryphal, but, you know, they have this story about they were flying in an airplane and they wanted to use the internet, but, you know, it charges you some amount of money that always feels like a little bit too expensive, but maybe.

And so they needed to do this work, they were going to go, but then they realized they basically could go into their account on the website of the company of the plane. And that was not considered like accessing the internet. So they could, you know, go onto the company's website, check flight times, go to their frequent flyer mile account, that kind of stuff. Then they realized within the frequent flyer mile um there were a couple of their account settings that they could edit things like their name or you know you could imagine like your address and then they had the broad idea of wait a minute i could just start editing these fields and if i ran a program back home i could you know basically start parlaying information by you know think like base 64

encoding there's they use a different scheme but you know i could fill out one field as like a request for a website and have a server back home that could chunk up the website and put it into a different field that i could then read and we could basically pass information at this super low rate right you imagine wait let me let me repeat this and see if i understand so the idea idea is, you know, you can't get on the internet without paying whatever, some nominal fee. But you can do for free is like, you know, in Delta or whatever, you can watch movies. There's like websites they do give you for free. And you're saying one of the free websites is one where you can update, let's say your first and last name on the Delta account.

And so you're saying this person made his first name like google.com and then his last name is like the google.com website. Like another server is also editing the name. Yeah, like imagine it took the whole Google website and coded it in Base64 and put it in his last name. That would, of course, make it really easy. There are, of course, character limits. so you also need to chunk it up which means you need a protocol which means you're probably not doing it by hand so you know how to script and then a proxy sitting on top of

the script um horrible idea uh very likely if they figure out what you're doing you could you know easily it's like tied to your account right you know they anyways not not a good idea i would not definitely not recommend don't try at home a hundred different reasons um but the so two things so the blog article is super useful because it goes into this that if you sort of the beauty of how we have the internet today is it's all these layers right and we tend to forget about them you might learn them in school but um you know all the layers and there? And we tend to forget about them. You might learn them in school, but, you know, all the layers and there's our transport layer and then application layer.

And, but this is the beauty of it is like, if he can find a way to pass bytes reliably, you know, or even unreliably, but pass bytes from the airplane to a computer and from the computer back through some protocol, no matter how slow, no matter how bad the data rate is, you can basically wrap that up. And then everything above it just doesn't care. You know, it may be slow, like you go to google.com and you wait 20

minutes before it loads, but it doesn't matter. Like it'll work, you know? And so he, this sort of thing. So one, that's an interesting discussion, a very weird way to get into that discussion about the internet and the protocols behind it and the kind of specifics that was going on. But this is a broader thing is that, to be honest, I've been in this boat before where I did development on microcontrollers or something else really small.

They didn't have even maybe a serial port that we could use in a way that would work. And if you can find a way to turn something on and off, we were turning a LED, blinking an LED. If you can do it and you have a way to sense it, you can establish a communications protocol. And so we had a thing where we would do a run, we would store up a bunch of data, and then the thing would go into a mode where it would basically blink out ones and zeros with dashes and dots like the telegraph and we had a little like photo cell

that would record it and then we would decode the zeros and ones and we would get out the log messages um and sometimes i think we get into this day where we kind of forget about these things that not that long ago you know we were using telephones with audio sound to transmit the internet through, you know, like this is, this is the way it was. Um, but it actually still true today. And there are times if you're going to do, I would call those things kind of hacker things, um, where you're trying to get something out where you don't have full access or not always, definitely not in an illegal way, but just in a sort of surreptitious way. It's just definitely a very interesting thought experiment to kind of challenge yourself instead of just paying the definitely much easier, you know, whatever, $10, $8 to use the internet. Instead, you do

a horrible end around. But the point isn't the point. The point isn't like not paying for internet and getting this really slow thing the idea is being creative and using the tools that are given to you yeah it's only one thing that just from a from a i guess like artistic uh standpoint i really love the way that this person wrote kind of in the first person and uh kind of like toggled between telling a story and then you know going into some technical details I feel like it's really well done I love it ends with I scrolled around the HTML and reflected that this had been the most and least productive flight of my life yeah there's there's of course a problem there where if you you kind of need to fly twice because

the first time you kind of discover this but you unless you pay for the internet you can't actually access your computer back home or set something up on the other end so that's true yeah you have to build it and pay for that yeah that's totally right but now he has a source code available so so anyone who wants to get banned yeah that's right um all right my my new story first new story is this video making anime character uh sorry animated characters with ai art um i thought this was so cool i stumbled upon this because um i typed this in to Google expecting to see a research paper on how to do animations. We have, everyone knows about DALI and stable diffusion, these things where you type in, you know, a horse eating hot dogs on the moon and it'll like render that photo, right?

But there's nothing, and there are things for video as well right but you don't have is something where it's like you know a a 2d you know rig of a horse uh and and what you end up with is this like this marionette puppet right that you can animate um and so i just thought this is like an interesting void here like no one's built like a text to animation um and searching for that i found this video which i thought was just amazing this is basically uh somebody who's they're heavily promoting adobe products although they're not it's not an official adobe video um but what this person does is they start with a text to image and i think they put like a lion wearing a suit or something like that a bipedal line wearing a suit and so you get this

this lion uh standing on two legs uh you know it's pretty human like figure but definitely a lion head uh wearing a suit and then this whole jungle uh background um and so he goes through like he deletes the background but it's you know it's a it's a complex high frequency background it's not like it's on a white sheet or something so so he shows how you can use ai to like detect the background in a sophisticated way deletes the background and then the lion you know because it's a photo one of the hands of the lion is covering his like midsection so again using like lasso tools but they're like intelligent like it's kind of like snapping you to like the semantic segment right he like pulls the arm off and then now you have this like

hand arm shape void in the in the torso of the character so he uses the ai in painting and it draws like a pocket of the jeans that was missing you know and all that um and now he has this arm that's kind of bent so he unbends it using some other tools. And basically within about 15 minutes, he goes from this image that was generated by an AI like symbiosis of, you know, AI and, uh, you know, real skilled, uh,

artisan, uh, work on the computer. So, uh, definitely worth about 10, 15 minutes. I mean,

if you're not super into it, you can kind of skip ahead, skip to different parts. Uh, but I was just enthralled with, uh, with, with this person's ability and,

and all the different AI tools that uh some of which i didn't even know existed i've seen a few examples like like this where you you mentioned it a person with skill just becomes like much more powerful having access to tools and being willing to have a creative approach to the problem. So, you know, being willing to say, it doesn't matter that I have 100 years or whatever, that's too many, 20 years of experience drawing this scene from scratch. I'm going to see if there's a, I'll call it a better way, but also being willing to leverage the fact that I am still an artist. I still know how to rig a 2d you know animated character is something for instance i wouldn't know how to do but they did um and so yeah i think

this is one of those i'm curious to see what will happen like maybe ai will just leap ahead and be able to do it from scratch but much more likely in the midterm we're going to see willing people able to just scale their productivity unbelievably using approaches that are kind of blended or hybrid like this. And we don't really have a term to call it. Like it's not really AI art anymore, but right. Right. That way. Yeah, that's right. I have a friend who maybe AI assisted art or something. I have a friend who's in the games industry and he goes to a lot of these conventions and he said last year you know if you went to gdc one of these conventions and you gave

a talk on ai art um someone would just like stab you in the back uh in the heart and uh drag you away metaphorically speaking like the audience would just destroy you. Throw rotten tomatoes at you, yeah. Yeah, there would be no trace of you left on planet Earth. But this year, he went to I don't remember where. I saw it at GDC, but he just got back from another conference. And he said, it's just everywhere now. He said, it's kind of like he described it as COVID, where people tried to contain it and then now it's just everywhere um so it's like uh there's whole companies with stands and booths

like you know talking about their ai tools and people are giving talks on it and there's just there's just no going back from that now wild times yeah all right my next article i'll keep this short um the title is the real 10x developer makes their whole team better and this is on the stack overflow blog um i i just generally wanted to take a moment on 10x engineers um this blog post was it's pretty short and mostly just talking about uh the there's a sort of mythical 10x developer that that floats around in various forms and people debate you know are there really people 10x more productive uh and the answer is in certain contexts probably or even more um sometimes people call them sort of rock star engineers or rock star developers

and the blog is trying to make the point that uh through a specific process they were sort of rockstar engineers or rockstar developers. And the blog is trying to make the point that through a specific process, they were sort of saying, you know, communities of practice, I've heard them called centers of excellence, or people gathering together. And the real way to be effective is to basically help the team around you. And you really can 10x, you know, an experience or the ability of your team to its total output if you can really communicate knit together encourage good practices mentor like these kinds of things and it really does resonate with me this is something that has become i don't know like a pet peeve is exactly the right word but people you know i want to hire someone just like super

super smart like just the smartest person in the room and And it's maybe, I mean, when I look at them or think about composing teams that are working with such people, it's like, but how do they communicate? How do they work with others? If they're super amazing in certain circumstances, it may be useful, but far more useful as a person that can, you know, work well with others, help, you know, make, you know, better than the, some of the pieces, I guess, is the, is the kind of way of saying that. And it sounds goofy, but I really have run across people who are like that. They tend to be very giving. So they're not super, you know, self-focused, you know, they're always trying to look around and say, how can they help people? How can they improve the stack? How can they make tooling better? And I really do think there's the ability to just have a very outsized return

on, you know, a single person, if you consider it across their ability to help others. And in some ways, regardless of whether there are people who can be, you know, 10 times more effective code output, I think that the ability to knit together a team is sort of far more useful. And so when people think about their own careers, this is much less talked about, how to help others, how to make your team better. And even on this podcast somewhat, it's like specific skills you can learn, ways to make your own problem solving better and more improved. And those things are important, but also thinking through how are you a good team player? And it's a much more subtle and less easy to talk about problem. Yeah, I think that's fair. Totally.

You know, yeah, I've thought about this a lot, the 10x engineer thing. I mean, one thing that comes to mind is like it's really kind of a bit of a faulty premise right because if a person is a 10x engineer then it's it really just becomes about saving money right like like if a person is doing 10 times as much work then there's nine there's that's nine people you don't have to hire and it just becomes this big money game like cisco hires 10 engineers facebook hires one 10x engineer and they both end up exactly the same and i feel like it's kind of a false premise i i think that uh i think you're right i think there's there's several different things that you can combine with your engineering skill that that are very like in high

demand and low supply so i think you know engineers that are really talented and can also kind of coordinate and influence a team uh is is that's a really hard combination to find and those people i think do really well i think i think engineers that are extremely multi-disciplinary and can build a prototype by themselves um that is also kind of rare like someone who is you know they talk about the mythical like full stack engineer right but but really it's like you know you might be a front-end person but you know maybe you have to train this ai because you have this idea that involves the latest ai and front-end and so to be able the ability to just go in and learn whatever it takes to build like a 10 solution you know a

minimum viable product i think that's a rare skill A lot of people are stuck kind of in their niche. And when you can combine those two, it's like, okay, here's someone who can build prototypes that have, you know, something visual could be internal, doesn't have to be perfect, but some kind of visual component and some interesting kind of backend component, and then like motivate that prototype so that a team can work with them to take that prototype into something that creates value. You know, those, when you start like finding the intersection of these very rare skills, that's when you start to get someone who is truly mythic. Um, but yeah, it's, uh, I'm totally with you i think you know the idea that like you have this person who like uh you know can't is is non-verbal but like sits in your basement and writes 10x as much

code as other people like that never really made sense to me either um so it's good that people that um all right so okay patrick i want you to watch this video um i'm gonna i'm gonna read the title while patrick watches it and gives us his his live reaction it's called the beauty and challenges of ai generated artistic gymnastics oh dear oh oh this is will smith eats spaghetti that's right it's it's that but it's it's with oh oh which makes it even worse it's like better than that it's like version two for sure like it's much better than that but it's so much weird okay i just watched a gymnastic shaped thing fall through the floor okay so but i don't this is nightmare fuel my friend why have you done this to me so like at some point it's like wait but it's clearly obvious what it is like you can see legs and arms and gymnastics

leotards i don't know what you call them but none of like if you pause any one of these frames and just showed it to someone they would not it would just be bad ai yeah the difference i think what makes this so much like next level beyond the will smith video is is the quality is so good you know in sense of like you know when you do see somebody's face um it looks good um it's just the the interplay there's just so much i don't know how to describe everyone needs to take a moment go to our show notes click the link um and watch this. It's only a minute, but it's... How does this only have 31,000 views? Like, did this get ripped off of like TikTok or something?

Oh, here, from Instagram. I see. It looks like... Oh, no, I can't tell. Oh, yeah, maybe... I found this in, I think, a machine learning Reddit or something. I'm not sure exactly where I found it. But yeah, let me see if we

could describe this okay so basically what this is is an ai for folks who who aren't gonna watch a video or listening in in their car or something it's a it's a ai generated video of gymnastics so imagine you know the the parallel bars uh the uh what is it called when the balance so more specifically if you ever watch it like during the olympics it uh what is it called when the balance so more specifically if you ever watch it like during the olympics it's like that exact setup so the stadium right you know all like the there's like judges on the side so it's like a very conventional gymnastics meet or competition or whatever you call it yeah and then there's like gymnasts on a balance beam and you'll see a frame where the person is standing like at the start of their routine then they begin to do their routine except instead of bending down and doing

a handstand with their legs flipping up in the air their head folds into their stomach and they go into a gymnastic shaped blob that then falls through the floor and separates into two pieces and but the fans are in the background like they're still bleachers the scene has coherence they look billboarded or something it's still bleachers the scene has coherence they look billboarded or something it's very weird but the scene has coherence it's just like it clearly like yeah it doesn't understand whatever it understands about humans the gymnastics are breaking those assumptions right right and and you know there's this contrast between the gymnast who is like, you know, just just morphing between all these like aberrations. I mean, there's one where it's just like two sets of legs connected to each other that are flipping over over each other.

But there's this contrast between that and the people, you know, there's gymnasts who are preparing or there's judges. And those people, because they have pretty know emotional frequency if they're pretty normal uh but there's this person in the middle who's just completely you know like going through some crazy emotions yeah and the equipment although it bends weird like tends to also be well rendered um but right and you see people in the background yeah like oscillate like there's a judge in a suit and then it transitions to a person in a white shirt sitting at a score table like there yeah the more you watch this the weirder i gotta stop watching this dude all right i'm out yeah i mean it's one of these things you can just every time you see something different

um but yeah i think uh it's a okay actually i remember my point okay so is it uncanny valley related because that's that's what i'm getting the vibes of but yeah oh it's definitely got uncanny valley vibes my point is i'm seeing a critical flaw i saw it in 2012 when we did the alex debt stuff um and then you know i saw it again with self-driving cars, also around 2012. And then I'm seeing it again, where people who aren't in the AI field, especially investors, a lot of people with a lot of influence who are generally really smart people who are counted on on their expertise, they fail to see that AI is this extremely multidisciplinary field. and being good in one area doesn't mean you're good in all of them so so if you have superhuman uh image detection that doesn't mean

you've reached superhuman ai and and i think probably what we'll see over time is is ai like be less of a of a focus and and and us to like break down ai into more of these subfields right because with self-driving car you know the the detecting of stop signs and pedestrians and these things became superhuman right early on um and and and so people thought oh well you know we're we're days away right but the reality is is the policy like knowing when you can break the rules knowing like okay there's a set of road cones here but that really means that that whole area is off limits like the road cones are kind of telling you this lane is shut down like all of the common sense there we're well behind humans but because we're super human on the image stuff people didn't people kind of translated that and so you know i think we

talked about the in painting and and how good it is and everything in the beginning but it's good for you to know that like there's still like entire fields of ai where where um uh we're just massively massively behind and and i think uh this kind of shows that i think you know merging ai with kind of something that's like physically plausible or just having continuity um is something that we don't really know how to do very well yet this one yeah i mean i think there's lots of extensions so gymnastics specifically probably is very difficult because the poses are very uncommon in the training data like the people are to some extent i mean it's super humans, exceptional human, like these people are very elite in a very specific set of skills. So they're doing things that are far outside, like standing on your hands. As an example, if you looked at imagery across human, you know,

civilization, the amount of people standing on their hand at any given time is super, super low, right? But during a gymnastics gymnastics routine you spend huge amounts of your time like hands down feet up right it's yeah so there's problems with that and then like you said too i think there's all these layers and layers of of nuance and semantics that just yeah it i don't know if it's the same but it it feels similar to when, you know, my software is done and it's like, well, maybe like you never, we are very bad sometimes at identifying the quote unquote hard part, um, or the part that'll take the most time. And so you get people really excited and then you, yeah, kind of see it tip over and fail. But the inpainting example is a good example.

Like you inpaint in this way we're saying and if it fails it's very low risk you just do it again or you're trying a different way right that's very different than i have some security camera and there's a tree in the way and so i'm going to in paint the tree and like use that as like anything could show up there people are going to get confused like it's a very you know risky endeavor like that that's not you would go oh that obviously isn't going to work it's like well maybe i mean yeah that case it seems pretty obvious but to some people you may show them that and they may be thinking like oh it can see through leaves and it's like of the tree and it's like that's not really how it works yeah i'm going to impaint

my stock portfolio and it sees oh there's this enron sized hole but you probably could find examples where it worked great for whatever reason just by by happenstance or whatever like yeah you inpaint and it predicts the stock trend and then you think you can just inpaint as a way of doing stock trading yeah you know this is a hype cycle i've seen within like my like kind of local community and I'm seeing it now. And they think they can predict the stock market and they do well as long as everyone else is doing well. And then they get completely crushed. I mean, I don't want to wish any future ill will

to ill gains to anybody that I know, but I've just seen this so many times now that when someone says, yeah, you know, I'm also doing some algorithmic trading on the side and oh it's like starting to make x amount of money and it's like at some point i don't need to work because i'll just make x and at some point x will become enough and and then there's always some kind of market downturn and almost every time people get hit really really hard yeah i pay a fair amount of attention

i mean we talked about on this thing to finances and the stock market and that kind of stuff to be convinced out of what you're saying just go look at the kind of people who work at renaissance technologies and the kind of proven returns that they get and then say can you out compete those folks um if you don't know we don't have time now, but like, yeah, the kinds of people Renaissance Technologies hires for their hedge funds and Jim Simons and like, yeah. Yeah, there's just, yeah.

I don't want to go toe-to-toe with the kind of folks that work there. Yeah, I mean, just, okay. So to play devil's advocate, you could argue that there's also a lot of really uninformed people um but i think it's you know it's not it's not the kind of situation where you just have to be better than the average trader i think you have to be a lot better than that to have a guaranteed stable high yield and so just just saying like oh i i know ai and i can use it and be better than like the 50th percentile trader probably isn't enough

to quit your job for example yeah i would say it a little different is but kind of the same idea is if when you talk to these people and i'm no i'm no expert and i'm not trying to gate you and do whatever you want i don't really i don't really care like yeah it's not financial advice if you lose all your money it's not our fault a lot of the success stories are you know survivorship bias one that's true they were doing this at a very different time you know 40 50 years ago um i i think like you said yeah there's a lot of the meme stocks but if you see the people who go up against on the other side of gme uh the gamestop and how wrecked they get even though

that they're well financed like trading against that you know maybe even now but then the thing is i think a lot of the people i hear saying what you do go to it's like a certain corner of the internet but experts don't hang out there and so you get a lot of other people who are talking about algorithmic trading specifically is a really bad one and Python scripts and things you can share and bots. And people are more than happy to sell shovels to gold miners for technologies and data sources

and this kind of stuff. And they're not a legitimate business. I mean, they're just trying to help people. But if you go spend time listening to industry podcasts or people who are sharing a little bit and just the amount of consideration, so not just volatility, but the curve of volatility as you go through the expirations and options and how hedging and the various Greeks and the various inefficiencies or efficiencies of options versus futures.

And when you start talking to most people who are doing the kind of like, oh, I see, you know, up into the right returns, they have to make an argument that that stuff is irrelevant, that it doesn't matter. All that matters is number go up. And that's fine but you probably need to go learn about all those other things and at least say they don't apply or you've considered them and determined them to be irrelevant rather than i didn't even know that was a thing yep yeah exactly um all right we'll go to book of the show. Patrick, you're first. What's your book of the show? All right. Mine is The Three-Body Problem by, oh, okay. We're going to try it. No, no, I don't know. Okay. Zijin Liu. Okay. I can't say it. All right. You can look it up. The Three-Body Problem. This was a book I had read a while ago. I thought I must've talked about it, but I looked it up and I don't think I have. And it is written by a Chinese author,

which is super interesting in science fiction, because I feel like it feels very different to a lot of Western science fiction that's written. But it recently got made into a series by Netflix from the people who did Game of Thrones. But if that makes it better or worse for you as your own sort of opinion. But the Three-Body Problem itself is, I think it's a trilogy. I only ever read the first book because I actually didn't love the book. But here, the

TV series actually makes it a little bit more palatable, I think, than the book, which was pretty tough to read for me. But definitely an interesting take of, you know, during the Chinese Revolution, someone just basically, like, down on humanity, it's not good, like, there's lots of problems, and ends up communicating with an alien race that, you know, doesn't share that with other people. And then when people find out, there's this whole, like, how is humanity want to relate to the fact that there are aliens coming to earth um and then it sort of plays out from there i read the summary so you may consider that a spoiler but that was all stuff contained in the back of the book so um yeah interesting setup interesting problem um there are all sorts of other like you know semi-nearby people talk about

um you know if if you kind of believe that earth is on a catastrophic course due to you know global climate change in some way could you really just release tons of fertilizer into the ocean to sequester carbon dioxide by causing a giant algae bloom. And it really is, when you start to look at it, feasible that a very, very, very small group of people could take something that has absolutely catastrophic results for Earth or for humans, kind of like just on their own. That there doesn't need to be a group agreement or a large decision-making body.

And it's kind of an interesting take. And so definitely recommend it. I just finished the Netflix series series i also thought they did a good job with it so if you're looking for something to watch it's definitely a pretty serious uh show so um just know that going in but yeah oh cool um yeah i i will actually check that out. So on Netflix, is it also called The Three-Body Problem? Yes. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so my book of the show is also a book that I wasn't crazy about. So I guess Patrick and I have something going on. So just breaking the fourth wall here, listeners, Patrick and I, we read a lot. I don't know if we read more than one book every two weeks. I mean, that's pretty hard for at least for me to do.

And so we're going to have to review whatever we're reading. And so it sounds like this week we read some books we're not totally crazy about. I will say that. So my book is the checklist manifesto um i really enjoyed the stories um so this person is a doctor a medical doctor and so a lot of their stories were just really interesting medical situations um there is a lot of medical uh or maybe what's the right word like uh i mean they are like cutting people open and doing all sorts of stuff and there is some detail there so if you're very squeamish obviously there's no pictures or anything but if you're squeamish uh you know think about that before you get the book but um but i thought it was fascinating i mean it's a there's a whole world around

um patients and complications that can happen and miraculous survival stories, resurrection stories, people who are completely incapacitated and doctors are able to revive them. The point of the book is that you should have checklists and force everyone to use them. And it's like a pretty simple point i mean you know it definitely doesn't need a whole book um the book doesn't you know it kind of motivates through example which is a little strange because it's kind of um you know if you give an example someone can't really argue that like if you're like okay, I added a checklist and then we saved this person's life. The argument against that is what?

Like maybe you would have had some extra time on your hands. You could have eaten an extra meal or something. It's like almost indefensible or unassailable. So, you know, I wouldn't look at it as a particularly powerful self-help book or anything like that um but these stories i think were captivating um i got this one off the uh from the public library um using the libby app which is i don't know if it's only an american thing but um uh depending on where you live you might have an an app that connects to your local public library and lets you it's effectively like a kindle um uh a kindle or an audible app that's

connected through the library and all the books are you borrow them um and so i i found this one on there i thought it would be pretty interesting gave it a read uh overall kind of lukewarm some some good stories but i wouldn't recommend it all right tool of the show well to say something i actually did enjoy i just finished playing not to 100 but uh i finished the main story for super mario brothers wonder um i don't know that i've talked too much about nintendo switch games um so this is a little bit off topic definitely not a tool but i really enjoyed this game to me it was just like for where i am in life it's the right complexity it was fun and challenging i didn't just you know rip right through beat every level some levels were a bit of a challenge but nothing was too

challenging so you know anytime i did sort of a session where i sat down and played the game i was able to make good progress um and it is not super super long so i was able to to feel the accomplishment of beating it and the sort of style and approach and whimsy of uh those the sort of 2d platformer but rendered in a 3d view and the kind of goofiness it doesn't take itself too seriously it's not dark it's just sort of 2D platformer, but rendered in a 3D view. And the kind of goofiness, it doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not dark. It's just sort of very lighthearted. It was a very enjoyable game to play.

And so if you've not checked it out and you have a Nintendo Switch, I'm sure you've heard about it. But I definitely give this one a thumbs up. I really enjoyed playing it. Cool. How does it compare to... There's a Super Mario... I think it's called Super mario wii 3d

or something but it's on the switch have you played mario 3d world or oh yeah something like that so that one is 3d i think if it's the one i think about i think there's another super mario brothers new super mario brothers game as well or something um which i didn't get into the 3d world i really liked um but it's in 3d so there's a bit of a i don't know there's a a different thing to playing 2d it sort of allows them to be more creative uh in the limitation and so i kind of maybe i just old school i kind of prefer the the 2d over 3d and i don't like when the games get like super hard there are certain mario games i think get very punishing in their complexity yeah the one i was thinking i was actually called super

mario u deluxe okay that's what was like mario and luigi yeah yeah that's the one i have now it's it's okay um i think it is pretty difficult i mean i was able to get through it but but my kids are get pretty frustrated with it um i wonder if super mario wonder is a little easier i yeah i tried that one i didn't get into it nearly the same for whatever reason the clicking there's probably different development teams i know i'm not into it enough to to sort of look but this one was definitely very well done oh cool maybe i'll check it out um all right my tool of the show is amazon q i feel like maybe i think we had it as a news uh last time that's right we had a news and i've been but yeah this uh this uh it needs like it just ate a mushroom

and now it's it's super super uh news um i'm recently building some stuff i i'm not uh ready to release it yet um but i'm getting there uh so i have to keep it all under wraps for now but um um but maybe another thing i i used amazon q4 was the linkedin bot um i don't know if we talked about the linkedin bot yes we did okay so i use it for linkedin bot i'm using it now on this new thing i'm building and um it's amazing like uh you know some things it does really well are um if i'm refactoring something so if i'm taking some code out of a function uh yeah taking some code out and making it its own function then i'll copy cut that code you know create a function paste it there and then i'll go back to the place where uh i cut the code out and amazon queues knows like call the function so it's like it's

like uh it it just like auto completed that for me um and so there's there's just like yeah there's so many things where um and when it hallucinates you know the way it works is it's just like autocomplete where you get this shadow of what it wants to write and if you press tab you know that shadow becomes a reality and if you do anything else it just it just disappears so you kind of get used to this like phantom code in front of your cursor um and over time you get used to sort of being blind to it when it's doing something that you don't really expect but then you get this like wonderful surprise when it actually does auto generate exactly what you wanted and it'll even you know sometimes they'll all generate whole

paragraphs of of you know like maybe five six lines of code. So yeah, I think it's amazing. Folks should check it out. Obviously, as we talked about in the past, you know, don't do this for work. If you're doing this on a work computer, you should instead go to your boss and ask him to get some kind of license or figure something else out. I'm sure there's companies that have enterprise solutions there. But if you're in college, high school, building something on your own, it definitely behooves you to get an AWS Builder account and get Amazon Q. The reason I ended up on Amazon Q and not GitHub Copilot or one of these other ones is frankly just better marketing.

I have the AWS extension. A lot of people have that in their VS code and they just parlayed that into a, you know, like a little notification. Like I think originally it was part of the AWS extension. So you kind of, everyone just got it for and then uh it became its own extension once they had kind of a critical mass so they did a great job marketing it i i think that all of them probably be equally good though yeah i'm excited that when these become commonplace and able to be used at work and there's like a well-established practice around them but yeah for now i've i've not delved into these but i definitely

kind of want to yeah i mean i'd be curious for you know your coding for you know c++ and these things if if it would be as useful my guess is it'd probably struggle oh no no don't tell me that i want to envision it being panacea uh yeah i mean well okay so a couple of things that are just first principles right like it's not going to know like oh this memory address is actually like a fifo in hardware or something right so oh okay well yeah fair enough but oh i mean that would be the day when you can feed a i don't have to do that quite as much anymore thankfully but if you feed it a data sheet and it would build out for you uh communications protocol like that would be amazing oh man that'd be awesome that'd be cool

all right now i'm just fantasizing all right somebody out the topic of resume writing this came from a gentleman i never give last names because i don't know who uh wants that or not but matthew c um we had a discussion um on linkedin uh it actually matthew sent me a linkedin message. He said that you really enjoyed the show. He's wondering if I could take a look at his resume. Fortunately, my LinkedIn AI didn't flag it as spam, which it has flagged actually, it has a couple of false positives. So if you're listening, I do apologize for that. But this one, you know, let through. And um um and so yeah i talked i talked to matthew gave him some tips on his resume and i said hey what if uh we did a show on this and and gave you credit and he was um thankfully uh you know really supportive of us doing that um so thank you matthew to you for inspiring the show to start at the maybe obvious why even uh have a resume i mean in them in uh back in the good old days no they were that good uh it is actually a little you'd show up and uh you know you may have gotten a job interview in some various ways. And then they would ask you for a printed out and you would have like a little leather,

or at least we, that's what we always have, like these little leather binders. And you would unzip them and pull out, you know, on a printed, very nice paper that you would buy specifically for printing resumes. And you would, you know, hand them over. I haven't done that in a very, very, very, very long time now. Most of the time, everybody gets copies electronically, because in order to apply for a job, you have to go to some portal on some website. And the almost very first thing you need to do is upload your resume, and then proceed to type in most of the information from your resume

into various forms. But you know, it's an expectation that you have a resume when you apply for jobs today. And the reason they have you upload it is to share it with everyone, to have it recorded for other potential openings. It is a thing. But it's also because they do run keyword detection. They try to categorize it. And when you kind of read on the internet, you see people bemoaning this. And I do agree it's kind of problematic. But it's also very difficult, especially if you work at a large company and get many thousands of resumes, trying to categorize so that the right people look at the right resumes.

Because as a person who does hire sometimes you'll get a dump of resumes and if they're if they're mismatched it becomes very difficult to trudge through them and say like hey these are totally the wrong kinds of people like it's not that they're good or bad it's just they're not this is not a match for the kind of role that i'm looking for and so i need to find a way to get access to the ones that I need. And so I think having a resume, probably pretty obvious, but I'll give one non-obvious thing, which is as you, and maybe you're already there. I don't want to make an assumption.

But one of the things is as you move through your career, it becomes a little harder to remember some of the exact details that you want to provide for previous positions and roles. And so it's really a log, you may trim stuff off as they become older and older. But having those things written down so that next time you go to apply for a job, you're sort of appending and then trimming down is actually really, really useful to have that sort of log that you can go through and be able to curate for future applications yep yep yeah totally um so what is a resume um there's actually not that much variance uh most people follow you know pretty standard formats um sometimes i've interviewed uh designers and and more creative folks who who have also you know done interesting things to their resume but but in a lot of those cases

those folks also have a portfolio so you really can't go wrong on your resume but but uh for them but for you know for professionals i think you, try to keep it to one page. I think that's important. I think, you know, that way everything is just, you know, fitting on one screen. And it usually starts out with your name and some generic information. Some people have put, you know, whether they need a visa or not, you know, that can be a important point that sometimes I've seen in the very top line of the resume, usually just some basic information, where does this person live, you know, their name, etc, phone number, potentially. And then he goes, it goes straight into, you know, various education and work experiences um and accomplishments there

and then usually at the end it will end with um uh you know a list of of let's say skills or trades that this person has so this person might be an expert on compiler optimization and so they'll put compiler optimization um you know they'll put compiler optimization. And sometimes people will put more soft skills and things like led their volleyball team in college or something like that. This is a little different than a CV. So a CV, which I think is Latin, right? Curriculum vitae or something like that.

I think that's right. So a CV will list out, typically list out all of your research papers, uh, um, or depending on how many you have, it might be a subset of them. Um, and so that's where it can take several pages to list out. But, but, you know, even if you're writing a CV, I would, um would um you know effectively have effectively a resume on the first page and then have a section of you know notable papers and awards and then you can have a list and that that list might be four or five six pages but it's it's basically a glossary of your uh you know favorite research journal papers and awards um so you're still basically writing a resume and adding some content to it

yeah i would agree if for some reason you need to go past one page and some people say it's okay to be on two sometimes people have a very strong preference for one. And if you're going to two, unless there's a really, really good reason, it tends to just draw on too long. So if you have stuff that requires more, I would say prepare two different. I think that's what Jason's alluding to as well as like, have two different documents. One is your resume, concise one page. And then you can even say on there, you know, more details or CV available if needed, or just, you know, something and then have another document, which is longer and goes into more details if there's really things that you need to list out. So here's another one though, Jason, I don't know how you feel about it.

Some people say having a GitHub on the resume, a GitHub link is a requirement. Oh, that's a good question. I think, okay, i think you should only put things on your resume if they're good um this you know it's a great answer okay yeah i mean i think this is um your resume is not uh your your autobiography right you're you're you're uh maybe your autobiography is also rose-tinted but if i was to write an autobiography i would definitely call out all the extremely dumb things I've done in my life, along with all the things I'm proud of. So this is not that.

This is supposed to be the absolute best side of you. No flaws, nothing. And so your GitHub could be the best part of your resume. And I think if it is, you could have an entire section dedicated to that i've seen that um work to really good effect where they'll say here's a personal projects section and the header will have their github and then they'll have a bunch of projects um and if if they're popular they'll have stars um if they're not popular a good thing to do is to say kind of what technical uh problem this solves and um you know maybe what projects it's similar to so if you built for example an automatic differentiation

engine uh and a dsl language that, then you could say, you know, similar to PyTorch. Uh, and so, you know, you built your own, obviously it's hard to eat into the market share of PyTorch or TensorFlow, but, but you built something on that, uh, you know, in that milieu. Um, so yeah, I think generally it's really, really important to have, to have that kind of portfolio, just like any artist or creative person would. But don't just put your GitHub and you have like zero repositories or something.

That's not helpful. Yeah, I agree. I've seen, and I know people who say you have to have your GitHub, but there's a lot of personal preference here. But if I if you put your GitHub, I think it's you're saying there's important to have spent space on your resume to put it. So I'll go visit it. And if I go visit it, and it's like, oh, you just have various forks of projects that,

you know, require you to fork it for some reason, or like configuration files, or just things that are obviously, you know, class projects where you started with the template. Yeah, it just doesn't feel like, you know, what, what this isn't helping me, it's not really hurting me. But like, I would just leave it off and save save the person the time if there's not something there that you're really trying to show off. But I think it can depend um i think some people don't don't hesitate if you have stuff even if it's not having a lot of stars or isn't really popular if it's code that you wrote that you know you worked on you should be proud of it and you should put it um but if it's code that you just copied or forked or is a you know was a group project. I don't know.

Yep. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the thing too is if you don't put it, then people won't think about it. It's a Streisand effect, right? If you put the GitHub repo and yeah, as you said, it's all like University of Chicago, course 12, you know, zero stars and

there's no tests or anything. Then now people like, you know, it's and there's no tests or anything, then now people like, you know, it's actually kind of worse than just not putting anything. All right. Well, I think maybe we'll go through some do's and don'ts. And so I'll start off with a couple of do's. Definitely be specific. So when you're writing that, Hey, I was at this company. I mean, that's, you know, very specific, but the dates that you were there, the location, those things are good. Um, you can put the skills used. I think that's, that's important too. But also like when you write projects, you know, say specifically things that will make sense to

people who may not be super familiar with the jargon of what you were doing so if you were you know doing something in a database but your database had a particular internal name probably not super useful if you're applying externally to put the internal names of those databases so put down you know database you know schema design right um but definitely be specific about not the work that was being done on the project but the work that you were doing on the project right and so we see i see a lot of people that you spend time asking because they're pretty junior and they put a pretty high level project and it's what did you do what were you responsible for um and i think and it's not again you don't have to be nervous or ashamed or bashful about it.

But just put down the specific thing that you were doing. I was writing unit tests, I was doing integration, whatever it is, that's fine. Put that there. Don't put you know, I was responsible for a project that, you know, did $100 million. And, you know, was 10 000 lines of code that you know had a sla of you know 99.999 uptime it's like okay this sounds like a group of people were doing this what were you doing yeah it's a good call out too because it'll give you it'll give the the person looking at the resume some some idea of your kind of compass right so for example if someone says you know i um you know implemented the python standards committee at my company and i made like 20 or 30 decisions around like different syntax and all these things then it's excuse me, it's going to paint a picture to, uh, interviewers that you're somebody who, who is, you know, really cares about

dev infra and the developer ecosystem and all of that. Um, you know, conversely, if you say, Hey, you know, I wrote this code that added this much incremental revenue, uh, to the revenue to the bottom line of the company, and I worked on these features that caused this many more customers to come in the door. Then people know, okay, this is somebody who's very product-focused, and they're going to be a good person to be in between the business and the engineering.

So isolating your specific contributions helps the interviewer know like what where your what your strength is yeah i mean i think the i guess i know kind of corollary the the the sort of thought there if you i mean i'll be a little harsh if you try to scam your way into getting the interview people are going to figure it out especially in the kinds of jobs right that we're talking about here almost always there's going to be a technical portion of the interview and it's going to become obvious so even if you happen to put something down to score an interview either when they go to check your references or they're talking to you or it'll come out and so you'll just have wasted time and then people are going to be irritated and upset or you're interviewing for a role that's a higher level than you'll be

able to successfully interview for and sure you may tell yourself well there's like a very outside chance that like i'll score it i i don't know the opposite is is worse right like the opposite that you get sort of kicked out of the queue because people are like no this person is just like there's just no good rather than oh they were miscategorized right right and even like at a more granular level you might just not get the right job for you like maybe you really should be spending half your time with these python committees you know setting the course of the company like and the language specs and all that um but you know you like really tried to fluff up like your like impact numbers and because of that now you're on some product team

you could have been on some other team it was a better fit etc so so it's like you know represent yourself i guess it's i want to make sure that we're not creating contradiction here like obviously you know the time you accidentally deleted the production database you know don't put that on your resume uh but you know of all the good aspects of you, you know, be faithful to that sort of distribution of talent and represent that as faithfully as possible on the resume. Another thing is any item that you put on your resume, be ready to talk about. And so if you put down, hey, you know, I've seen, I'll give a goofy one first. Someone put down, oh oh i can solve a rubik's cube in under a minute and then so the interviewer thought it'd be funny they brought a rubik's cube

and asked the person to solve it um and so i mean that's a bit of a goofy goofy example um and they just put it in there be funny but they got called out on it but i've seen people put down you know i i'm an you know i'm an expert or you know i, and then they put down six programming languages. And then someone starts talking to them about one of them, like, well, I used it for a tiny project one time once. And it's like, well, maybe you needed some way to qualify that or call it out. But similarly, it's very frustrating

when someone puts down that they worked on a project that's relevant to the role that they're interviewing for at a company and you ask them to talk about that project. And I've had people just tell me, I don't remember or I don't know. And it's like, why did you put it on your resume? Like you have other stuff here.

Like what is it that you do remember, right? Like be ready. If you put it on there, people are gonna ask you about it. Yeah, that's a really, really, really good point. Yeah. Don't put that, you know, 20 languages unless you've been listening to the show for at least a few months.

There we go. How many languages do you put down? If you were going to put them down, Jason, I'm curious, like what threshold would you have to cross? Like how many do you think you'd put? You know, that's a great question so okay i have maybe a slightly different view than patrick although it's very similar so i think that you can put down any language as long as you're prepared to like really understand it between now

and when you're interviewed so for example let's say you're interviewing for a game development job right so and let's say you have like a you've done a few small projects in c-sharp right so you can put c-sharp but if your resume gets through the screener and you land the interview, you're going to need to take a week off whatever you're doing and cram C sharp really, really hard because you don't want to show up. I think it's OK to flex a little bit on the interview as long as you're prepared to back it up by either knowing that language really well or getting like really up to speed with it very quickly okay so i will accept this that you say that if you're willing to at least do one of the technical interview programming problems in any language you put down right yeah we're on the same for the interview okay i i will buy this premise all right so how many how many for me personally yeah what would you how many would you put again not saying like you like you might be plus one because you are trying to target

a specific job and it's close enough to something you've done i'll buy that but like how many would you feel comfortable yeah so here's here's what i think for me personally obviously different for different people but um i think that if i cover like the three or four most popular ones for my profession. So my case, that would be Python, C++, JavaScript slash TypeScript. And what would the fourth one be for AI? I would actually, you know, I would probably put something to the effect of like bash Unix kind of scripting. I mean, I haven't thought about this in a while, but something like that. Right.

And so I would put those and then I would just assume that companies know like, OK, all of our AI is in Swift. But we know that like, yes, there's a lot of people who are really smart who don't haven't used Swift yet. And so they're going to have to interview Python people. That's, that's the way I would approach it. Yep. If they wanted it for AI, they would, they would just let you learn Swift on the job. Yeah, exactly. Um, now if you're, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, now if I'm like, let's say I'm junior engineer, you know, straight out of college, I would probably try to figure out

what language the company is that I'm applying to, like what language they need. And I would put that language and I would study it hard if I got the interview. That's what I would, that's what 19 year old, 22 year old, whatever Jason would do. All right, fair enough. So I would put two.

And I hear your points. I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying no on them, but my, my reason for bringing this up. So, so you said three, four, okay. I give it the bash thing. Okay. Maybe everyone could add that. I don't know. I don't actually consider my bash scripting to be that great. So maybe I would have two tiers and in total have maybe four maybe maybe three um but we routinely see people out of college six seven eight programming languages written down and i'm just like no there's no way it's like you know what is the bar here if i asked you even just basic questions in a random one of these what is the chance you're actually going to to you know be able to answer these yeah it's it's it's tough because uh like for example if you're applying to do um uh you know i work at a self-driving car company if you're applying to do work on the car

you're gonna need to know c++ and so literally people who don't have C++ on their resume, they just, the resume just doesn't make it through. And so, and so if C++ is like, you've done a few examples, you know, you've done, I guess, I think the part where we agree is you need to be able to show up and do a 60 minute interview in every single language you put on there. Now, I think that there, it's probably not too hard to get to the point where you could do a technical interview in six languages. It doesn't mean you've

had years of experience in any of them, but yeah, I, I, I guess, yeah, this is a interesting topic okay there's some variance here i if you in your example i mean i've hired people who i needed to know c++ i'm going to ask them oh okay use this hash map standard unordered map what's the default insertion policy for standard unordered map hey what is that like you know what is this thing going to look like what is if you have this kind of error that you know equates to a symptom of a stack overflow what is your suspected reason why or i'm going to write code up on the board that introduces and you know array index out of bounds and asks you hey what's going to happen here and the answer is undefined and then we should talk to what are potential things that could happen so oh see that's totally different see what i had in my simply no that's an extension that's a yeah if i needed a

specific language and i wanted to check that you you know actually know that language but yeah so this one this one's interesting okay so this one's people should be thoughtful about yeah i mean in my mind i had this mental model where like you're using one of these uh tools to interview right like like you're saying like yeah i could i could write leet code problems in one of these six languages yeah right but but you're totally right if well so that's an interesting thing right let's dive into this so if someone puts let's say python as one of their languages but they're a junior engineer you know they they graduated last year from college right or they got a bunch of coursera certificates last

year um or let's just stick with c++ they let's say they only have one language and it's c++ they'll probably still not be able to answer those questions, right? So I think it matters whether someone says they can do a link. There's basically like three levels. There's, I bet I can learn this in a week to where I could be as productive as anybody else, like any other person who is not an expert. then there's like i could fix like weird problems and then there's like i'm a guru it's kind of like there's three levels probably more than that don't put guru on any of them just as this don't ever put your guru but uh but you're right i think if if someone uh sort of transcends a number of languages right if someone

just puts c++ they're really not telling you whether they can pass the kind of questions that you just asked and i wonder if there's maybe a way that in their resume they can yeah all right so i'll amend i'll amend what i'm saying based on on you did. I think when you list them out, maybe having tiers, like, you know, not as an expert, it's like proficient in, and then maybe a couple languages, you know, proficient.

I'm trying to think of like wordsmith it, but like proficient and like, you know, familiar with, and then maybe a few other languages. Oh, yeah, right. Something like that. But I'll amend. I think you're right.

I wouldn't be harsh. So I'm not going to bring someone in and ask these kinds of questions. Unless, and we didn't talk about this, when you're listing out your experiences, you should definitely write what languages each one of them was primarily in or which language or languages each of them was in.

So I'm going to look, if I need someone with actual years, not out of college, but someone who says they are a C++ programmer, because I go look in their resume and it says they spent four years in this project doing C++, then I'm going to expect them to have some day to day. I mean, I was trying to give extreme examples to evoke a response, but like, I'm going to expect them to have some familiarity if they've listed that. That's that totally makes sense. I think that's actually the way to do it. Because all

these things like expert guru proficient, they're all very qualitative, right? But if you were to say C++ for 10 years straight, well, then, then yeah, I think it's fair to ask that person, like which of the different standard maps is better and which cases and whatever. That must have come up in the past 10 years. So yeah, I think that's a good way to go about it. We've made progress. The world is a better place.

That's right. So don'ts on your resume. The biggest one is don't have mistakes. I had a, not a mistake, but something that was confusing on your resume, the biggest one is don't have mistakes. I had a, not a mistake, but something that was confusing on my resume where, and I think you probably had this too, Patrick, where, you know, I was a student and I was working at the same time. Now for master's degrees is very common, but it's not very common for PhD students to also work um and so this really threw people for a loop and uh um you know and what ended up like really helping here was that i put very specific dates so originally i put you know i started my phd in in uh 2004 and i finished it in

2010 or whatever it was. But instead I put really specific like, okay, this is the day I started. This is the day I got a master's degree. This is the day that I worked. And then this is the day I finished my dissertation. And so I think just being really specific, like ambiguity is a form of a mistake when it comes to your resume. And being really specific

helps a lot and definitely don't have mistakes if you put just from personal experience if i see someone and they like the dates don't really make sense like they kind of work two jobs at the same time and they didn't work and the dates aren't really lining up, especially if they don't match their years of experience, like 10 years of experience, but you only worked for three years, then I'll just say this isn't like, this is actually kind of a segue I'll go into briefly. Managers have to look at a ton of resumes, right? And typically we'll only need to hire one, two, maybe three people at the most at any given time. And so the goal isn't necessarily to like spend an unbelievable amount of time to get the absolute best person and squeeze out every single percent of the interview

experience to be absolutely flawless right and this is knowing this actually helped me a lot even as an interviewee like i'll get rejected i don't apply that much to jobs anymore to be honest but uh there was a time where i was really you know when i was changing jobs like a few years ago i was applying a lot of jobs and in the past like sometimes i'll get rejected for really weird reasons or things seem like they'll be going fine and then radio silence and uh what i've realized is that the system is trying to trade off you know the manager's time with you know having the perfect possible interview experience and so um and so and so if you have a bunch of mistakes on your resume, the manager will say like, this is going to eat up a lot of my time.

Uh, I can just skip this resume and get somebody who's probably as good and save myself from having to ask all these clarifying questions. Right. So mistakes are really, uh, uh, not good. Try to avoid them. Look at the resume. Make sure that you don't have a cover letter that's for the wrong company. I've seen things like that. And just be really diligent. It's important. I think the other thing that is a mistake is i have seen grammar mistakes are not

and i'm okay with that because not everyone has english as their first language but sometimes like spelling mistakes to where you said like it creates ambiguity it's like i don't actually know what they're saying here um and especially if you're looking for someone on it like they did this one thing and this one thing tells me maybe they have prior experience here and it's written in a way where i can't parse what it's supposed to be saying like jason said that the company i do right now like there isn't even really a good mechanism for me because i can't reach out to that person directly so i have to go back to hr ask hr to reach back out and like hey can you act like this is not a thing that likely happens unless I really, really thought there was good potential in a resume.

And so you can get kind of bumped out for for relatively small. So have people who aren't like just family, have your family read it and just say, like, is this reasonably clear to you, even though you may not understand some of the terms? Do you see any spelling mistakes? You know, that kind of thing yep um another very simple one uh don't put images so um my company yours probably too patrick uh pulls the text out of the resume and so um uh images really mess that up i've seen this where it's just the information is just totally corrupt. And then you have to click on the resume and all of that.

And so this is probably folks who didn't even make it through the screen because of all sorts of weird artifacts that came out of the images in the resume. So just avoid that. There's not really a reason to do that. Related is, and we're going to to do this but i'll just combine them here it's not just images but people will use like colored sections like oh you know gray and then a darker gray for like each experience of work to get visual separation looks great i don't know whatever some of the i think they get printed on a fax machine and then scanned in sometimes we end up with them they're super super hard to read. The contrast is destroyed. The text extraction could fail under such circumstances. If you go

to a job fair and you're handing a physical resume, sometimes like that's the one that goes in the system, even if you upload one later. So just be aware, like in my opinion, two things, one, don't use a fancy template, like with lots of image bullets and like think like just like very as simple as it can it needs to look nice but it doesn't need to be complex to be looking nice uh and try not to don't certainly not using any colors besides black and white would be my opinion try to keep it black and white try to make sure it's like the most parsable like the easiest to scan and if someone gets a black and white copy or a decimated version of what you uploaded. And so really, really do keep it simple. And this is specific to our slice of engineering. If you're an artist or applying for

a summer job, some, I don't know, those probably have their own sort of ways people like, maybe a spritz of cologne or something on their resume helps. I don't know, but none of that's going to help here. And like, it's just going to create more problems. Yeah, totally. I mean, my, um, my college experience, I built a lot of different things. Um, and I really wanted to show that off, but you should send people to landing pages for those things so my resume was all black and white but it had hyperlinks to the pages which were then then had some nice like design on them but yeah i think the resume is just not the place for that um i just think that you have to appeal to both the people who are looking at it and,

this sort of lossy, partially automated autonomous system, uh, that's going to do all the pre-screening. And so you have to be careful there. Um, another thing I wouldn't do are, um,

you know, put these like qualities of your character. Um, this is actually, I mean, it would be really nice to show your character on your resume. But the problem is, it's just, you know, when people are reading resumes and they come across like hardworking or friendly or something, at best, they just ignore it. Like they have blindness to it.

I mean, this is our 30th resume they've looked at today and it's just, they just ignore it. Like they have blindness to it. And this is our 30th resume they've looked at today. And it's just, they skip over it at worst. It does seem like a little bit weird, right? Because, uh, um, it just, it's just weird for someone to call themselves friendly or motivated or hardworking. Um, I think again, similar to what we said with languages you know if you're hard working then find objective things that you did so for example let's say you built a hundred houses a year for habitat for humanity like physically built the houses well then that shows you're super hard working right so just put that um so you know find a like how have these social qualities resulted in some objective thing that you've done in the world and and just put that thing yep i agree and i mean this extends to the interview we're not talking about interview prep right now but

everybody's on their best behavior on resumes and on the thing for the most part so if anything so two things one everybody's saying they're hard working and motivated and willing to work long hours or whatever they think like i'm not saying anyone should or does do that but like whatever they think will you know get them the job everyone is pretty much trying to do and on the other side the people doing the interview assume those things so they assume that people are on their best behavior and are that way and so like jason said it's really better to show than to tell um and if you need to put it like like don't don't make it too flowery like it just because then people think you're kind of like overcompensating for something like why are they saying they're so hard working um you know it's very weird yep yep totally agree i

think uh um you know we didn't really have this in the do section kind of but we'll cover it now is i do think it's important to call out your um what do you call it what would you call this section uh basically like i think it's like hobbies and activities yeah you know extracurriculars yeah Yeah, extracurricular. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, one thing I put on my early resumes was that, you know, I ran like a volleyball team. I played in like three different volleyball leagues. And so I gave people the impression like, OK, here's somebody who like can be on a team, can lead a team, can like play a sport pretty regularly for a long period of time. And I think that way I didn't have to put things like, like motivated or something or friendly or something. So, so yeah, definitely.

I think extracurriculars are good. I wouldn't put things that are controversial because again, it's like if something is really polemic, right. And, and half the people will love you, half the people will not like you. I don't think the people who love you are going to pass you in the interview if you're not competent. But I do think the people who don't like you will make your interview really difficult.

And so it's kind of a lose-lose situation. So I would avoid putting things that, you know are are just like polemic like that but but you know for things like sports you know charitable things i mean these things are great for your resume so i i think a little bit about briefly resources how to produce your resume so because of all the other things we've already been saying i think it's pretty much any reasonable text editor would be fine but even just using google docs to produce it it really shouldn't have requirements that it be fancy and needs to be done and you know adobe illustrator or I mean, if you want to do that,

it's probably because you're looking for a job related to that. But for our field, at least, I think it should be able to, you know, Google Docs is free on the on the Mac, as you have pages or Microsoft Word, just something that in general is, you know, text focused and does allow you a little bit of formatting. I mean, to format it to look nice, but don't go overboard. Yep. And just a general rule, if you're doing something, you really want to think about the audience, right? And so this is a, I'm going to link a podcast that I listened to that's geared towards managers. It's literally called manager tools, the podcast. And, um, um they're they have an episode it's actually a five-part series on how to scan resumes and so like putting yourselves in the shoes of someone who's looking at your resume i think can really help you uh in writing your resume so if they say

something like you know if there's too many colors just throw it in the garbage and you're looking at your resume that you created in adobe illustrator yeah it'll kind of put things in perspective um so so yeah i think this is a great chance to see kind of what other people see when they look at your resume by listening to that episode that's great um and then i think you put this on here but i mean for the programmers out there using la tech uh to do their uh markdown version of the resume i guess is a is an option it's going to get made into a a pdf anyway so i i guess that's an option is that is that how you do it yeah you know the oh the reason i used la tech is for a CV, it helps with the references.

Now I remember. But I wouldn't recommend that. Even if you're a PhD student, there's probably better ways to do it nowadays. I think the important thing is what Patrick said. Use the tool you're comfortable with and the tool that is pretty popular. And don't try and do it in in an image processing tool and create something that's really uh ad hoc uh layout wise all right well the wrap like last statement here i think we're running a bit long but hopefully this is useful i think for a lot of these things

one of like jason was mentioning is um if you want to say you're hard working show your hard working put down things that indicate that you're hardworking, show you're hardworking, put down things that indicate that you're hardworking. And I think it isn't the only goal, but when you are picking projects to work on at your job or careers or hobbies to do, thinking about how they may show on a resume is worth considering, right? I think not because the resume matters a ton, but because you're thinking about that as part of career development. And part of having a career is having hobbies outside of that, but having the ability to show your potential as an employee. And so I think putting thought into how am I going to choose what to work on? And what is it going to

look like, you know, later. So as an example, if I was reading something this morning, oh, COBOL, there's a dearth of COBOL engineers. So at work, someone might say, hey, we have this COBOL code, we really want you to take on, you should think, is that something that I really want for my future? Is it something that in a way of thinking about that? Is that something I really want to put on my resume? Like, am I going to want another job in COBOL? I mean, to be fair, it could be really lucrative. It's an interesting bet if there really is going to be a, you know, scarcity of COBOL engineers, but if it's not something that's going to make sense there, then you might want to find and see if there's an alternative or something else within, within reason, Not again, as maybe the only thing you think about,

but trying to consider how that might look. People do this all the time for university applications. They think in high school, what should I be doing to get into a good university? You're going to work a job probably a lot longer, can work a lot longer. People can work four or five, six, seven years. So even putting a little bit of thought towards over that time, how do I compound things that will help me be marketable is very

important. And I think as a manager, it's something that I try to think about for my employees is I'm not trying to retain them by making them unmarketable. I'm trying to make them feel like they can stay here by continuing to let them do things in a way that would be very marketable because then they're going to feel no need to, that they're trapped, right? They're doing things that they know they could parlay into other careers or other jobs, other places, which makes them content and happy and growing. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I mean, that's a great call out. I think just the last sort of call to action is you're if you're in college, you might think that you're.

The work to kind of like build yourself up is kind of over like, oh, I get my job and I never have to look at this resume again. I can just throw it in the garbage. But but no, like you're you're. I think it's always good to kind of keep that in mind. I mean, definitely there's several different reasons to take on a project or a job, but that's definitely one that you should keep up there. Cool. All right. This is awesome. We covered a lot of good material if folks out there have

other resources other tips feel free to uh you know throw it on the discord or on the patreon uh group um thanks everyone who um have given us their patronage on on patreon we really appreciate it um i did ask in the members only section um what kind of uh perks do folks want do folks want to have like a zoom call with us uh do they want us to look at their resumes like what sort of like patreon uh benefits are folks interested in and um you know i think there's a as pat Patrick used the word earlier, sort of a survivorship bias here where the folks who are in our Patreon really just want to thank us for the content that we give everyone for free. We do really appreciate that. But I'll ask to the general audience as well, if there is something, you know, interesting that you think we can do as part of the patreon experience

uh always just throw us an email uh throw a growing throwdown at gmail.com or uh you know throw it on the discord or or in uh in patreon thanks a lot thank you everyone Thank you. to share like and kind