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KhalPanda

524 karma · joined March 7, 2014

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KhalPanda··on Juno – A YouTube Client for Vision Pro
For apps that run exclusively on brand new iPhone pro max's, sure.

...but seeing as that isn't the case.

KhalPanda··on Juno – A YouTube Client for Vision Pro
I think $5 is _beyond_ fair, considering every user will have dropped >$3k on hardware.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: Has the British contract market dried up, or am I just unhireable?
I'm in the same situation as you (or was, until about a week ago). I'd been looking for a new contract for a couple of months and also had lots of enthusiastic calls with recruiters, only to be ghosted or hear nothing more. A couple of my contractor friends have also had the same experience. Compare to late last year, when I was batting contracts away whilst I was taking a couple of months off. Picked up a new contract when I was ready within a few days in November.

Whilst I'm a full stack dev, I found narrowing my CV, or creating multiple versions (one FE, one BE, one devops) helped sustain more interest/got me through more doors. Being a full stack dev puts you behind anyone that pitches themselves as a BE dev for BE roles, FE dev for FE roles, and so on. It's assumed that since they're 'specialised', they're better suited for the role.

Same goes for tech. Whilst everyone _here_ will appreciate the fact knowing/working/having experience in multiple languages will generally mean your the better programmer, it's not something HR seems to grok.

In short: If there's a Go contract, send a version of your CV that pitches you as a BE Go Dev and that only. Once you're through the door and speaking to the people that matter, you can open up about your other experience.

As for timing, generally now is a good time. Some companies will have budget to use before the end of the tax year. Some companies will have new budgets at the start of the next tax year.

There have been a lot of layoffs, so the market isn't quite as much in the favour of developers at the moment.

---

Anyhow, that said, I've just taken a perm role again, just for another year or so whilst I learn some new tech and hopefully the contract market sorts itself out. It's only about £1k/month less. Worth it for the security, for now.

KhalPanda··on Joblint – Test tech job posts for issues
I was hoping/expecting it would flag descriptions that don't mention a salary range, location or worthless perks. Maybe I'm jaded.
KhalPanda··on Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money
I (sadly) don't play any mobile games for this reason. _Every_ game seems to revolve around engineering you to buy to speed up progress.

It's just one step worse (maybe two) than everything being a subscription. I prefer buying games(/software) once and being left to enjoy the game.

KhalPanda··on Open RuneScape Classic
Love the story. My first exposure to programming was through automating RSC. All I was doing though was writing scripts for SCAR. I think maybe in… pascal?

I remember trying to learn some Java at the time, but could never make the leap between building simple CLI app’s and primitive string manipulation to integrating with the RS client and actually doing something ‘useful’. However, I was only 8, so I’ll cut myself some slack!

KhalPanda··on Ask HN: Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion?
That’s a reputation PHP has been struggling to shake for a long time now, but it isn’t the case as of the more modern versions.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: M1 MacBook Pro/Air users, how is it going?
I have a 16" 2021 Macbook Pro M1.

1. It's great. I'm not sure I've ever heard the fans spin up. I've had very occasional glitches with sound when switching workspaces.

2. The only thing that's been a blocker for me is trying to run an old Terraform release and the lack of some arm64 docker images (in which case I have to target amd64).

3. See #2. In addition, I did experience some poor performance when mounting volumes from my local filesystem, but that has been _vastly_ improved since they added "VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing". Now it's great.

4. I only have 16GB of RAM. My workloads are typically not that heavy, but I have edited a couple of videos in DaVinci Resolve and didn't have any issues. Sounds like it would make sense for you to go for 32GB though.

KhalPanda··on Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.

The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.

KhalPanda··on Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
I think they’re saying only backing up _data_ is not enough (S3, GCS). You need to be able to roll out infrastructure elsewhere to, in order to have somewhere to restore said data.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How do websites hide their APIs?
Exactly that.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How do websites hide their APIs?
It's not a stupid question at all.

They will most likely be rendering the page in full server-side. This is how things were done in the beginning, but also what a lot of websites are returning to, for performance reasons.

KhalPanda··on Scunthorpe Sans, A font that censors bad language automatically
Right on the home page...

> How this s** works: Modern fonts can combine letters into a single ligature, usually for things like fi or fl but you can pick anything so we’ve done it for swears.

KhalPanda··on Elon Musk on Remote Work
Gotta get people back to commuting ASAP, otherwise nobody will need Tesla's, right?
KhalPanda··on Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)
I wouldn't say totally irrelevant. I've worked on many line-of-business applications and websites where the database is the bottleneck. People love to obsess over "what language?", happily ignoring the fact database access is 90% of the request time.
KhalPanda··on Show HN: React Routing in 120 lines (including comments)
Or "React Routing in 70 lines, with 50 lines of documentation".
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How can I learn to build distributed systems?
Sure you can. Look into 'load testing'.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How do you track your finances?
YNAB. I've used it for a few years (since YNAB 4). The automated import and categorization of transactions, combined with envelope budgeting is all I need. About as frictionless as it can realistically get, for my use case.
KhalPanda··on How We Went All In on sqlc/pgx for Postgres and Go
I stumbled across this library a few months ago and also really liked the approach. Unfortunately I had to drop it temporarily due to this issue (https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc/pull/983)... which I now see is solved. Taking another look. :)
KhalPanda··on Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering
If they're going to make the leap of switching the render layer, I'm surprised the leap isn't to flutter (which is supposedly stable/ready for production web apps?).
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: What car do you drive?
Surprisingly frugal vehicles posted so far...

Currently eyeing up a 2015 RS6.

KhalPanda··on Ask HN: Why aren't code generator ORMs more popular?
I've enjoyed using https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc on a couple of projects. Give it your schema and queries, get type-safe interfaces in return. It's a happy medium for me between all-in ORM and raw SQL.
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: Is watching livecoding streams an efficient way to learn coding?
From my experience, I definitely learn the most by doing, not watching, reading or listening.

As long as you know enough to get started on <project>, then you can just look things up as you get stuck.

There is an element of "you don't know what you don't know" when you're new to some stuff, but as you gain experience, the effect is less.

KhalPanda··on I’ve made a conscious effort to stop apologizing for bugs in my code
A lot of the replies and analogies here are interpreting this as a business-consumer apology. Of course if a business has disrupted a customer's experience through buggy software they should issue post-mortem/apologies/etc.

But I read this as though the author is saying apologies to fellow teammates shouldn't be necessary, which I do at least in part agree with.

KhalPanda··on Go + Services = One Goliath Project
Sounds nice in theory, but won't you always be playing catch-up? Or will development(/bugfixes) halt on the existing python version? Would it ever be acceptable to the business to commence such a rewrite without any show of value until after completion?

(Speaking as someone working at a firm that did choose (before my time) to start a ground-up rewrite than ran about 3 years over estimate).

KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
I've launched and grown/run a few forums over the years and the key for me was to always seed it with as much quality content as possible.

Fake it until you make it.

I believe reddit did the same.

KhalPanda··on Ask HN: How do you track your blog traffic?
I use, and quite like, Matomo (formerly Piwik).

https://matomo.org/

KhalPanda··on Show HN: Featmap – a user story mapping tool built with Go, React and TypeScript
Oh, I don't think anything is missing. Just seems like the perfect case of a product/tool you would be able to "dogfood".

Good work!

KhalPanda··on Show HN: Featmap – a user story mapping tool built with Go, React and TypeScript
I'm curious, is there a featmap for featmap? :)
KhalPanda··on Ask HN: Is it ok to make a list of female software devs available for hire?
I see the sense in curated lists of remote developers, if that's what you're asking?

- Some companies are 100% remote

- Companies in unfavourable locations may want to expand the talent pool they can hire from

- Timezone coverage (on-call, support, etc)

- etc

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