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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • My take:

    • I don’t want to have my normal spending statistics messed up by vacation spending (food, going out, etc).
    • I do like to see how much I’ve spent on travel overall.
    • When I’m out, I don’t want to think about categorizing expenses (especially if I’m somewhere where I’m using mostly cash). Vacation is for vacation, not for stressing out about categories.

    That’s how I feel anyway, so how I do it is:

    • I have a category group for Travel.
    • When I have a new trip coming up, I create a new category for it and fund that.
    • During the trip itself, I charge everything to that category.
    • Once I get back and transactions have settled, I add something to the memo of the transactions (e.g. #2023-10-my-trip), then I delete the category and move all those transactions to a generic Travel category.

    This way, I can still differentiate between trips if I want to go back and look, but I also get to see an overall view of my travel spending (without cluttering my everyday categories).

    Pretty painless, works well for me.



  • Yeah same. As a rule, I try to never put anything in my checked luggage that is irreplaceable (if it gets lost completely), or that I would need immediately if it arrives late (medication, etc).

    I have also had cases where the TSA has gone through my bags and shattered the fragile items in there because they couldn’t be bothered to repack it gently. So yeah, no precious or time-sensitive items in my checked bags unless absolutely necessary.


  • I’m sure individual interviewers have their own styles, but yeah I’m with you here. Few things are more frustrating for me during an interview than wasting 30 minutes going in circles on something because the candidate isn’t being honest with me.

    Our role (low level software) is going to be full of things they haven’t seen before. I would rather have a candidate who can quickly identify that they don’t understand something, and likewise quickly try to fill that gap so they can move on to the next thing, than have someone try to bluff their way through.

    I understand that there’s a level of “fake it til you make it” during interviews, but the goal of the interviewer is to get as much signal on you as a candidate as possible. Admitting you don’t know something may not feel good, but then it gives the interviewer the opportunity to test you on different things that could really highlight your skills. For example, we ask questions on multithreading during our panel. If you don’t know how a semaphore works, and you tell me that upfront, that gives me the opportunity to explain the concept to you and see what your process is like working through new information.