Not actually commuting today but wanted to get a quick video of the two cars in the driveway while the wife has the X5 out. The AMG was cleaned up after many months of neglect -- a sign that I am over-extending myself when I'm unable to keep up with the little things.
Sometimes washing a car can seem like climbing a mountain when you don't have any capacity left.
📄 Auto-Generated Transcript ▾
Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.
what is up I just got my car cleaned and I didn't do a code commute video today so I figured this one's a little bit less of a commute and a little bit more of a car so uh I wanted to talk about this because I talked about things like burnout and kind of getting to like your own personal capacity and what that looks like so I posted about this on LinkedIn I like talking about burnout cuz I think it's important and I don't think people in software engineering talk about enough so for me um when I shared this on LinkedIn one of the things I talk about is that I notice oops shouldn't step on that uh I notice like little things that are like should be habit like I can't keep up with and the example I give is something as simple as
like taking vitamins right um every morning I have caffeine and I have it like in powder form so I go to the same spot caffeine need that to stay awake and then or wake up I guess and uh my vitamins are right there like I won't take them and it's little things like that where something just as simple as taking vitamins are like it's it push it's like it seems insurmountable and I know it sounds ridiculous because obviously it's a trivial thing to do but um for me I I have rarely found like in my entire career that burnout looks like a oh I'm so tired I hate this project at work like I don't like work it's it's almost never like that it's almost like I take on far too many things and then um Little Things fall off but the amount of little
things that fall off is sort of my indicator of like how um how burnt out I'm I'm starting to become so um the the car washing thing number one it's code commute so I want to show the car um I thought that was my wife pulling in but it's I don't even know who that is they're getting too close to my house um no but the my car that I drive for code commute is this AMG GT and it's uh it's dirty like and it's been dirty for a long time and I struggle with like keeping it clean and even though it's simple and I can stay on top of it I don't because because it's just one more thing and something as simple as just driving on the way home taking it through a Touchless Car Wash I can't do it so my wife
was like you she keeps saying like you need to do it you need to do it it's embarrassing you drive this nice car around and it looks like trash and I get it um it it sucks because like I'm I'm very aware of it but at the same time it's almost like I just I don't have energy to do it and I know it sounds so silly because it's so simple um but finally uh like she had said like why don't you get a detailer and she's like oh how did she say it she's like I'm going to I'm gonna pay a mobile detailer or I'm gonna pay a detailer or something in general and she looked it up and it was like $400 to get it detailed and I'm like look you're not paying $400 for someone to come clean this car like that
absolutely not I have all the cleaning supplies like don't you dare um and she's like well you better clean it then and then I didn't so um she found someone that was cheaper it was like 200 bucks to do the interior and the exterior so I said you know what for a couple hours of cleaning let's do it then I'll try to stay on top again kind of like that it's like activation energy like once it's been done it's okay to do so it's finally clean do a little walk around I'll show you the TT cuz I talk about it and it doesn't get love um TT's battery is dead so I can't open the doors I can't show you all the cool stuff unfortunately so you got to you got to trust me and then when it's good to go we'll do another walk
around I want to do code commute from the TT because I think it would be super cool um we're just not there yet because the battery so anyway let me let me flip this thing around give me a sec there's the GT it's finally clean this car is not modified at all except that it's wrapped so I don't think I don't have the key on me um but the the color of the car under the wrap is actually closer to like closer to this color I'm pointing my fingers on on the camera but it's closer to the color of the wheels it's like a like a gunmetal gray kind of thing that's the GT it's a lot of fun to drive it's rear wheeel drive um it is not like a GTR it's not the the top end version of it but it's still fun
to drive you get to hear it obviously when I'm driving around um sounds really nice I probably should have got the key and done a a cold start or something but this is the TT so this is my pride and joy um it's on air suspension so and one of the airbags is empty right now but it's able to basically sit down on the ground like this the front is not aired out but the back is so if I park it if you're not familiar with air suspension you can just go up and down with your suspension so it lifts the car up to like stock height um so this back airbag is currently empty it shouldn't be but it is and the battery is dead so I can't fill it back up right now but uh yeah I can park the car it's for
show right you can't drive around like this um it would completely it probably rip the the fender off the car uh but it's hard to see but if we go right in there there's not enough light maybe a little bit there's actually lights around the inside there if you look close the brakes are pretty gnarly car hasn't been moved in a while um but there's lights there's underglow which you can't see but this is a custom wide body there is there's no other wide body in the world like this cuz it's custom made oneoff the back wheels are 13 1/2 in wide again it's going to be hard to see but so they're 20-in Wheels 13 and 1/ 12 in wide so it's not like there's spacers to move the car out it's got this really big wing on the back also with LEDs along
it you can see um arm Matrix exhaust it's got a carbon filer filer wow can't speak carbon fiber diffuser here so if you're familiar with the RS version of the cars they have like a an oval tip exhaust and in order to get the army tricks to fit on here like the army tricks is for uh an S3 an Audi S3 and I wanted army tricks so basically had to get rid of the um what do you call it the oval tip exhaust and fortunately the rear diffuser just kind of fits on which is nice um what I would love to show you is that I have this custom trunk set up inside so because it's on air suspension oops one sec I wanted to turn it around so I can have me um because it's on air suspension there's controls and stuff obviously to
raise and lower it but the trunk is set up to be on display which is really cool there's lights and stuff around it there's a custom sound system but uh yeah no that's my like I said it's my pride and joy um flip this around one more time it's the front you can see like obviously the the wide body when you get at a good angle it has uh vertical doors on it as well so the doors open upward uh the only thing that is stock in this car is the front windshield and the seats in the front there aren't back seats um it is a fully built motor has a Zona rotor 9567 turbo in it uh tuned for 650 wheel horsepower I'm trying to remember it's been a while since I've had to go through all this stuff cuz I used to do
a lot of modified car content and it was all around this car so before I was doing Tech like content creation it was all uh it was all modified cars so I used to take this car showing and stuff but those days are over cuz I'm old and this car is a pain in the ass to be honest this one is uh like I said it's stock aside from the wrap it's just easier so that's that um one sec flip you around but yeah I I wanted to talk about it because uh you know finally it's clean the the GT and you don't get to see over on the inside side and I figured it was a good opportunity to talk about like burnout and like for me that's a thing like I to be honest I don't I don't know how long that car
is going to stay clean um especially because it's winter coming up it's only fall right now but winter coming up it's going to be like it's gray it started raining while I was filming this but it's going to be gray and crappy and I'm not going to want to clean it and I'm going to have a million excuses but I I think you know now that we've done a little reset here um you know something that gets me motivated is like I don't want to spend 200 bucks to have someone detail my own car when I have all the supplies um and like no I'm not trying to knock them or anything but like when I came out to check it there's still like I don't know there was like marks on the wrap and stuff not from them but like just from like parking
and parking lots and people brushing up against it you'd think that people would leave a little bit more space but apparently not um so I I they just left right and I'm checking it out cool and then I'm like go inside get my buffer and I start buffing the car to get all these marks out of it um so like I kind of told my wife this I'm like look like we'll get this one done and she I'm I'm I think I'm pretty negative a lot of the time so she I don't think she was uh enthusiastic that I was kind of like this is going to suck they're not going to do a good job guess they don't um they they did a great job on the inside but I think that was the problem they spent like 85% of the time on the
inside and like I don't care the outside is what needs it like I said it's uh it's good to have that reset and uh we'll stay on top of it so this weekend I'm going to be cranking up more course content I got I feel like the videos I recorded this week for our course they're supposed to be like 10 minutes long I have a feeling they're going to be like 15 to 20 minutes so closer to 20 minutes um so I might have put like too much content in some of them um but I'm going to get get some progress on the other ones uh what else uh there's some we have a couple of the guys on the brand ghost team are taking uh it's uh some of them from Canada so I'm from Canada too but it's Thanksgiving there so um they're
going to be off for a little bit so it's going to be a little slow for front end stuff uh um which might give me an opportunity just to like get a little bit further ahead on some of the backend systems and just like I don't know like crank out some code right um so that'll be good got my newsletter to do tonight and I was talking with someone on LinkedIn that gave me a pretty good uh we were talking through some challenges they're having and they gave me a good idea for a newsletter article so I'm pretty passionate about this one we're going to be talking about like uh blameless and blame culture and software engineering so I'll do a live stream on that Monday night 7 P.M PST by the way um if you're watching this if you want to see like this
is not live obviously as I'm talking it's live but it's uh it's obviously pre-recorded for you uh I don't edit them though but the live streams I do I was doing them at 9:00 p.m. PST on Mondays for almost the entire year and switching to 7:00 p.m. just to help the East Coast people out I think it's a little better and then I finally did like a coding live stream I do those on Tuesday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST and uh we're going to be looking at moving my blog from from WordPress on light sale which is a Amazon service so we're going to move that to um probably an Azure hosted um I'll have to get an instance and stuff set up for that probably won't get that right away but the next uh next one this Tuesday coming up we'll be doing uh
what do they call it so Steven I think his last name is pronounced Gil he's a doet developer MVP's awesome content creator really smart guy he has a Blazer blog engine so I'm going to be trying to get my posts migrated over to that but it's for me it's not about making sure I get all the posts in one go um I have them uh sort of exported to a a database already from WordPress it's the format so I'm really nervous about the format WordPress obviously has all these plugins and stuff for formatting the formats in HTML this is going to be in markdown but there's certain things in my posts like I have reusable uh course advertisements I drop in um I don't want to I want I don't want to lose control over that I want to make sure I have they're called
like short codes so you put a short code into your your blog article and then when it goes to R it it knows to go grab the content for that um that short code and drop it in um I need to be able to embed videos I need to do there's just a bunch of stuff I don't know if I can do yet so this upcoming stream on Tuesday morning is going to be about like trying out some sample posts and just seeing like what does it look like so I can figure out how to do it more automatically so we'll see how that goes but anyway that's that I'm going to get back inside cuz it's cold and wet and crappy and uh we'll be back to the code commute next week and I'll see you later
Frequently Asked Questions
These Q&A summaries are AI-generated from the video transcript and may not reflect my exact wording. Watch the video for the full context.
- How do I recognize burnout in my daily habits as a software engineer?
- I notice burnout not as a feeling of hating work, but when little things that should be habits start to fall off, like forgetting to take vitamins. For me, the amount of small tasks I stop doing is an indicator that I'm becoming burnt out.
- Why did I decide to get my AMG GT detailed professionally instead of cleaning it myself?
- I struggled to keep my AMG GT clean because I lacked the energy to do simple tasks like taking it through a car wash. My wife suggested hiring a detailer, and although I initially resisted paying $400, we found someone for $200 to do both interior and exterior, which helped me reset and motivated me to stay on top of cleaning.
- What modifications have I made to my Audi TT RS widebody car?
- My Audi TT RS has a custom wide body that's one of a kind, with 20-inch wheels that are 13.5 inches wide at the back, vertical doors, and air suspension that lets it sit very low. It has a fully built motor with a Zona rotor 9567 turbo tuned for 650 wheel horsepower, a custom sound system, underglow lights, and an Armytrix exhaust system.