Day 328
On this day of the Cowden Support Protocol:
The last week has been a rough ride, with increasing pain, mostly headaches and joint pain, without any break in between each potion. Many days I don’t leave the apartment, and only get out of bed to get food or go to the bathroom. Today, early this morning (it’s about 6am), I started to feel a reprieve, and felt well enough to do my coding exam from Signal.
Here’s the rundown. It’s my first coding interview this cycle, and contrary to the advice I hear and receive, you should never interview first with the company you care about most. Signal is on my short list of companies doing something technically interesting, being used by millions of people every day (via the open source protocol used by WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), being an all-remote company, having humane values, and supporting a social good (privacy for democratic uprisings, independent journalism, and hacking evil conglomerates on Mr. Robot).
Other companies on the short list, focusing on those with a strong, beautiful design component to their products, are: Instagram, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Uniswap, MakerDAO, Mailchimp, and of course, Etsy.
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This is just one data point of interviewing for tech jobs while treating chronic lyme disease. If you are a lymie who is a programmer and not sure if you can work, or if you should conceal it from your co-workers, I am leaning towards being upfront about it, but unapologetic or unashamed. Imagine you are disclosing Tourett’s syndrome or some other chronic condition that has its own benefits, but is a more-or-less fixed part of what it’s like to work with you, and will come out sooner or later.
I didn’t write my own tests, because I thought I was pressed for time, but ended up using only half my allotted time. I admit I’ve been hot on the cycle of running tests, see where it breaks, and fixing cycle, which can sometimes be like trying to snowboard down a hill with trees and not looking up. So going forward:
Interview Tips, take with grains of salt:
* Know how many problems you have and budget your time.
* Think of your own edge cases and write tests / asserts for them in your solution
* Double-check your work (simulate in your head) line-by-line
Okay, here’s my beef about programming puzzles in general. In real-life, you can try to “get it exactly right” by yourself, which might take a lot of time, but more realistically you would ask another engineer to double-check your work (pair programming or code review), and you would also check with your team to see if Pareto optimality is good enough: 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. At Etsy, a staff engineer I respect would say “Do it the dumb, simple way first, and then only re-do it the smart, complicated way if it matters.” I’m not saying write sloppy code when details matter, like when security or money are at stake, just know where effort matters.
Back to Cowden Protocol: I have four days left in the houttuynia/enula phase (Month 11) before switching to the banderol phase (Month 12). My current theory is that the herxheimer reaction (and resulting pain / bed rest) flares up most around Day 10 into a phase, then subsides and gets substantially better by Day 15. And if that’s the case, what if we were to compress the Cowden Protocol by switching phases sooner after the herxing peaks? That’s one possible question for the clinical trials. Another phenomenon to look out for next month. Take ❤️, lymies.
