JakeStone

Basics

  Location: San Jose, CA (Actually Los Gatos, but close enough)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: C# (ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WinForms), PHP, MySQL, MS-SQL, Comfortable in Linux
  Email: rrv.jobsearch.2019@gmail.com

Quick background:

  * Started as a web designer in the 90s, started doing backend work in Perl, then PHP.
  * Went back to school, started doing C# work for the University, discovered I loved it.
  * Discovered that academic careers involved bureaucracy I didn't want to pursue.
  * Moved from Texas to California, picked back up PHP and Perl to stay fed.

Goal:

I'm strongly open to EdTech positions, but with the focus of the teaching/instruction part. Some of the education administrative SaaS startups look like they provide useful things, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm happy to discuss other industries other than those that are finance (banks/loans/cryptocurrency/credit/etc) based.

What I'm looking for is a place where I can help build/improve something that allows people to learn something. It could be a college textbook subject, how to rebuild an engine, or learning how to fly a plane.

Additional:

I've got a handful of other skills and knowledge. C, C++, Perl, PostgreSQL, Oracle, shell scripting, HTML, JavaScript, a small bit of Java and Lua, college minors in mathematics and political science, a hobbyist knowledge of 3d graphics and a developing knowledge of mobile game design. I keep learning as much as I have time to pick up books and throw myself at the keyboard.

Thank you. You said what I was trying to, concisely.

At the point it's in the queue, it's already a composed email. Doing a file search and deleting the email file might be possible. I don't know how realistic that is though.

We built your customized email 4 hours ago. It's sitting in a directory somewhere waiting to be read and sent out to gmail. We're waiting because we already sent "X" emails to gmail addresses 3 minutes ago, and we need to wait "Z" more minutes. It might be in the list of emails to be sent as soon as the gates open up again. It might not be ready to go until another 50,000 emails before it have been sent.

So, let's say you've decided you don't want to get our emails anymore. Great. We've updated the appropriate tables. Next cron job will skip you. Now let's implement your criteria.

We've got to tell the MTA to figure out which is your email, and delete it from the queue. Hopefully we got to the MTA in time. We might not have. Remember the example I initially gave? You might be receiving the mailing 2 seconds after you unsubscribed. So we've spent some measurable time trying to prevent something that's already happened.

We don't have enough unsubscribers in general that this is going to cause a significant overhead. The thing is, I'm not even sure I can do that. Our routing application is a 3rd party commercial application that we don't have the source code to.

Not to mention, we're going to have to hop back and forth between machines as our databases are elsewhere. Not even sure they're in the same data center, now that I think about it. I really don't want to look up the NAT information to work this out for a simple internet discussion.

I'm gonna punt and say, "I dunno. I know how my part of the company works, and I'm still learning it. Maybe there's a better way to do it, and if you have information on commercial products that will do what you're stating is the desired goal, I'll do some research on them, and make recommendations to our company if they look viable."

I'm a C# developer. I'm still not quite sure how I ended up handling email. :D

Most of that question involves a level of detail I can't get into. But, we use the same batch of IP addresses for all our mailings. We have authentication set up with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and we're very careful on our rate of delivery, and as above, we respond quickly to unsubscribes. As well as the occasional report of our mailings getting labeled as spam.

We also partner with a reputation monitor that makes sure we're behaving, and they also let us know if we're approaching thresholds of not email friendly behavior. The only time I've seen that happen was when we did some IP consolidation and certain mail handling companies automated systems found our behavior anomalous, and thus was flagged suspicious. Since we knew, and our monitor knew this would happen, it was handled, and everyone (us, monitor, mail domains, customers) was running back to normal behavior within about two weeks.

In the end, no blacklisting from this, and none while I've been here. We've had a fairly high inbox delivery rate (based on our rep monitor, about 3% higher than the average) over the years, and about the only thorn in my side is Comcast, and even our reputation monitor has "special" metrics to measure their customers in regards to Comcast. :)

I work for a company in a department that sends out on average, 2 million emails a day. These are emails to people who (1 or more):

- have signed up and are receiving a verification email.

- are giving us money

- are using our site at least once a week during the first month, and even if they taper off, are at least using it every 180 days.

So, we're not sending email to people who we've never met, as it were. We have an unsubscribe link in all our emails, and an account email settings page that has about half the mailings we can send as initially subscribed (we like money), but which can be turned off. We even have links to our settings page in the emails and on all the site pages.

I like to think we're being fairly responsible, all in all.

Like I said, we send 2 million emails a day. That goes out on a lot of machines, and we have lots of automation going on nearly every minute, and lots of email queues being prepopulated to send out in volumes acceptable to gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc.

So, you've asked to unsubscribe to the email you received last week. We got you, fam. I analyzed logs and did some live testing using our VPN at offices across the world. Over the past 3 years, you've been removed from your chosen lists within 2 seconds of clicking the button. This obviously doesn't cover hardware/network/server problems.

So we're cool, right? Nope. You're unsubscribed all right. However, we already placed you in the queue for our most recent mailing about 4 hours ago, and you're going to get the last one from us anywhere within 2 seconds from now to maybe late tomorrow.

You really won't get anymore from us after that, though.

As someone who used to live in Lubbock, TX, revealing yourself as being a member of the LGBTQ+ community could lead to anything from shunning (job, church, school, "friends") to verbal/sexual harassment to direct physical violence.

I'll concede anecdotes are not data, so believe me as much as you want.

However, as a very shallow representation, google: lubbock lgbtq hate crimes

I haven't been there in years, but as of the beginning of this year, out of the maybe 2 dozen folks at possible risk that I know from my time there, only one has stayed, and that's mainly due to her wife's extended family living there and property she can't sell for what she wants.

Slavery was a Constitutional policy. Article 1, Section 9 contains:

"The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."

It had nothing to do with the Democratic party or the Republican party.

If your linking of slavery with the Democratic party is somehow connected to Lincoln being a Republican, so of course the Republicans freed the slaves, then I'd suggest reading about the presidencies of FDR, LBJ, a bit regarding Nicon's "Southern Strategy", and Clinton. The geographic south of the U.S. was conservative Democratic prior to them, and shifted to conservative Republican. The parties changed. The people in place (for the most part) didn't.

There's Munzee, that uses QR codes stuck on items. I've never played it, but a buddy of mine loved it a couple years ago. I believe it had an active community at the time. It didn't interest me, so I can't comment further on it.

I grok the issue regarding socializing. I was doing some WU-GO last night, and ended up attacking a fortress with somebody, but couldn't find them while I was in a town plaza. They may have been parked in a car nearby, but it would be kind of creepy to walk over to someone sitting in a car at 11pm and ask them if they're playing the same game as you.

I grok. Our business relationship was very good (thus my outburst) but our somewhat distancing (and very "proper" and "professional" Midwestern based) personalities in the 90s led to it being slightly embarrassing for us, then.

We obviously got past it, but it makes for an amusing story as she's never seen me that inebriated since, and actually didn't know I could get that buzzed as well as be demonstrative.

She and I were somewhat standoffish people back then, not really huggy types. Meanwhile, I come into the office, 3 sheets to the wind, see her, and said something like "S., I am going to miss working with you so much!" at a fairly loud volume, and I'm a good half foot taller than her.

It's something I still have to buy her a beer for every couple of years or so.

Kudos to him.

Man, when my company got shut down in the dot com days, after the 10am all hands, I said screw it and took my entire team out for drinks until about 4, out of my own pocket.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the way you do it if you're going down with the ship. Drink with the crew, pay for them, and tell stories and try to make plans as you slip into the waters. 19 years later, I'm still friends with all but one who disappeared to the offline somehow.

Ended up giving my director a slightly embarrassing hug when we got back in, but we'd been through enough over the past that she forgave me and we're still friends.

Actually had an option to make something like this a teaching moment to my kids yesterday. I'd been reading articles about the bridge between Abell 0399 and Abell 0401. There was a Forbes article that said this provided supporting evidence for dark matter. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/06/06/scie...

Dark matter bothers my sense of cosmic aesthetics. I'm not a physicist, I just like reading about how the universe works, so please don't attack my ignorance; there's only so much I can read. I'm painting with very broad strokes here.

Going back to the Forbes article, it provided some good arguments that this was supporting evidence. I had to concede that the blocks making up the argument seemed sound, so I started rearranging mental furniture.

Then there was the correction at the end of the article, and I'm at the position where I can understand how you can provide a situation that can at least provide supporting evidence to support dark matter.

---

However, that's not the main point, it's just the foundation for where I'm going.

I used it to show my kids that you can understand/believe something that seems right or is "known" to be true. But when you come across evidence that shows you're wrong, or presents valid evidence to support a differing point of view, then you have to consider it outside of what you desire to be true. Mind, after examining it, poke at holes that exist and shred it if it's garbage, but if it's not susceptible to that, you need to change your world view.

That was interesting, and if it had been an actual song (with a little bit of cleanup) would have made for interesting interpretation, depending how it was approached by music and singer.

Then you get something like this: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712

:D

My current "flow" music is the Hamilton musical, so I threw in Lin-Manuel Miranda into it.

The entire result was hot garbage.

However, there were buried segments that were good, but I'd have to lay that on the tightness of Mr. Miranda's lyrics as we're dealing with Markov chains.

All in all, that was a few minutes of amusement.

An acceptable compromise. I've read some of the reports done on various projects and found PVS-Studio interesting.

As an individual developer, I'd been interested in the product, but hadn't convinced myself to invest in the time to install/learn a new tool that I didn't know the price of.

This, though, is something I can easily place in my source, get the usage, and if it seems usable, contact you for the price and make a decision then.

Something to consider, how about having the ability to delist domains?

I have a few domains that I use as pre-spam filters so that I can see immediately if my email address was spammed. e.g., I receive an email addressed to sun.com@myhappydomain.com but it's advertising something along the lines of rutabaga hentai.

If I could remove myhappydomain.com completely, that would be a happy making thing.

And the San Francisco Bay area is _not_. That's been frustrating. Fortunately, I had a lot of PHP in the past so that helped me find a place when I decided to roll the dice and leave Texas.

Now back to scraping up some Python and coming up with a good project to throw on GitHub to show "Yes, I are engineer. Here is me saying 'shibboleth'."

Location: Los Gatos, CA (Willing to commute up to San Francisco/Oakland or points between)

Remote: Willing, but not prefered.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Linux, more

Email: career[at]richardvasquez[dot]com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardvasquez

Web application developer with strength in backend development and developing tools and applications for university and federal government.

Hierarchy of preferences: EdTech domain, .Net

It'll be interesting when someone sues for a false positive result. Emotional damages can be costly depending on your state.

Hm. Many thanks for the info.

I'm a 45 year old developer who's rolling the dice hard and heading out to SF next week. I've had a lot of talks with recruiters over the past few months and they've all crashed into a wall where the phrase "Oh, you're in Texas" kept coming up.

I understand companies want to keep hold of their cash these days, just in case, so no flying me out to meet the folks, but we live in the future now, don't we? Skype, WebEx, and a couple dozen others exist.

Anyway, Mohammed, mountain.

I may borrow the general approach of this, if you don't mind, in working out options when I'm out there.

And if there's anyone out that way that's looking for someone who's been doing C#, did PHP, teaching himself functional programming and is working his way through Euler (81 solved so far - friend key: 51000425304827_c78cb3e2345fa50b98591ce10f15341a), then drop me a line at [career][at][richardvasquez][dot][com].

Yeah... I'm not a Millenial, and I might have been tempted to forward the response with a "WTF?" preceding it to a few select friends.

Seriously, I've received a few LinkedIn requests from obvious scam accounts or some kids I that I never met, but we have a connection or two in common. The scammers I ignore.

The earnest strangers, I tend to tell, "Hi! Thanks for the connection request, but I think LinkedIn works best for me when the connections are people I've actually worked with in one form or another."

This job bank woman stepped way over the line as far as I can see.

Interpretive reading is hard. Read that in Barbie "Math is hard" voice. :)

I believe the desired effect was to present a whole bunch of different types of people that get dinged by HR people after a resume made it through the filtering software.

Anecdote here instead of data, but I know someone who took off 10 years from their resume including military service because they received no calls with that resume; presumably being too old for the jobs they wanted. With the 10 years gone, they received calls non-stop.

As for the point of the article being "Hire everyone", I took it to be, "Take a look at everyone that's initially qualified." Now, granted, if someone doesn't have the background, then sure, toss it. But if you see that someone has X years of Technology Y which is what you're looking for, but they're named Jamal and they're 50 years old, why not take a look at them? They've at least met your requirements, and some older people work well with younger people and vice versa.

And there's no vote from me since I don't submit links, but I'll every so often join in on a conversation.

You guys had electrons? We had to use scotch tape on a bunch of quarks and give them a half spin and then push them.

Uphill. Both ways.

This was my take away line, on a base level:

> MR. SEEGER: I am sorry you are not interested in the song. It is a good song.

The first two, I could accept from a certain IP lawyer viewpoint. The first contained an amusing non-admission admission, but they took down the game, and I'll let it slide, from my perspective. The second one was a stretch, but they provided existing examples, and I can see their point even if I don't agree with it.

That last one though was ludicrous: "We’re not trying to stop Stoic from using the word Saga but we had to oppose their application to preserve our own ability to protect our own games."

In order to save the village, we had to destroy it.

I don't play that many games on my phone or tablets, so I don't have a dog in this fight directly, but now I guess I'll never make my app SagaNoteAngryFruit.

Hrm. Networks are not my strength. I know enough to setup and secure my home network, but would never consider myself a guru.

So, after running this, it said my IP address was 192.168.2.250. Which it is, since this computer is using my wireless router which is connected to my DSL, which has its own IP address. Interestingly, it did the address for when I use a virtual box at 192.168.56.1.

I guess I'm not seeing quite what the issue is. Would someone enlighten me, please?

I always love this site for when things get a little slow and I think I could use some relaxation.

Then I remember that I only took a little bit of math, so then there's the research, the papers to read and decipher, the code to write, and I finally solve the problem and swear I'll never come back.

So, yeah, I just finished a batch of problems last week so I could get a couple of ego badges just within reach. 75 down, 379 to go!