That's interesting to hear, I didn't know Rails was a growing community. I haven't gone to public tech talks in sf in a while (3 years before covid), so wouldn't have as updated pulse on the market. Fwiw, the best advice i got in my short stint as a ruby developer was to check out "Destroy All Software" - https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog - the strongest engineer I knew loved it, hope it helps someone out
I started my career in RoR and regret doing so - I really had no idea what was going on, found a gem for everything, and understood very little about performance tuning other than some nuances about ActiveRecord. I wish I started with React+Python/Django, would be incredibly marketable.
Thank YOU! I have literally been looking for something like this to try to build a rocksdb-like project for fun. I've been waiting to pull the trigger on YC's code crafters (https://codecrafters.io/) which have you build your own redis and mysql-lite compatible db. Looking forward to going through this.
That's crazy, I was actually diagnosed with this about 3 days ago - it's living on my skin and I went to the doctor because an area of my skin was visibly red and smelling "fleshy" according to the doctor. Currently on antibiotics that I wasn't too fond of taking but after seeing this, will probably be more aggressive with it.
I have a (currently inactive) consulting company that was clearing 40% above my senior software engineering salary in the sf bay area. Eventually the stress of getting a company's treasury dept's to pay on time to cover my contractors and I induced so my stress that I developed GERD (also known as heart burn). The money was great, and I was single at the time so I had a lot of great experiences with the extra cash. The company is inactive now but I still own it and get requests from clients a few times a year, I'm pretty busy with married life now though I would probably do it again full time in the future and sell it off to a big 4 consulting firm (which is what a family friend of ours did for $XX million).
Most DevOps technologies and teams are unnecessary. Things like app.logz.io, Prometheus, and Grafana provide no value. In fact I wish I could lay off the majority of our infra team @ every company i've worked, but I don't have that authority.
There was a phrase in the recent Netflix show "Recruit" - everything in America tastes like sugar and everyone's struggling. Having lived in Finland, SE Asia, and Calfornia it's completely true. We mask our real issues and replace them with processed foods, drugs, and entertainment. I hope as a society we wake up to our coping mechanisms and lift up our communities, I can teach good values to my kids as my parents taught me but it'll get lost eventually.
I've been learning video streaming tech for the last year (ffmpeg, webrtc, all the great videos available of SF Video Technology - https://www.youtube.com/@SFVideoTechnology) and I haven't been able to come up with a remotely interesting product idea. When I came across this, I thought it was the most clever SaaS video tech I've seen in a while. I'm probably dating myself but I'm certain TokBox had something similar 10 years ago. In whichever flavor markee is doing this, it was a refreshing idea to see.
I have no affiliation to this product or engineering team.
My mentor worked at JPL - he was a BS, MS, PhD from MIT - he got out of there so quick (i believe less than 2 years). He said the pace of work was so slow, he didn't feel like anything got done in his entire time there.
I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around.
The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.
yeah, looked up the old email thread. It seemed like a nice deal - if anyone is interested Bay Systems Consulting, Inc. contracts with Nasa Ames Research Center. Hope it helps someone out.
I'm surprised more people haven't brought up NASA? I was offered 180k/yr salary in 2020 doing fullstack development. While the offer was brought through a recruiting agency, I believe it was a full time position as a NASA Employee - I was surprised by the competitive salary, maybe worth looking into for others interested in the space.
the problem I have with this is that I'm a lead in a team of 12 engineers + 1 manager + 2 pm. There's too much bloat and everyone knows it, but the moment I make a succinct argument to the effectiveness of our pm, the director of product will jump in and screw the engineering team. anonymous feedback normally isn't the problem when it matters, it's the structure of the org and powers at play.
my wife and I absolutely hated 1899, but we also hated midnight mass as well - it's possible these types of series aren't our pallet but I wouldn't invest too much time with 1899.
As someone in the tri community in vc funded silicon valley, I haven't heard of a better alternative to strava? would genuinely be interested in trying something better but all my running clubs still seem to be using strava
This is one company i've always wanted to work for- my mother is a CTO of a company in the same space/different aspect of the pipeline so I knew this company was going to do well when it entered the YC batch, but I've never even received a screening interview. Hope i can apply once the economy recovers
Coincidentally, I was thinking about this about a week ago. If you look at my post history my career traces a pre-ipo FAANG where everyone knew how to spin up a service and connect it to the internet (think bootstrapping 101). I had a thought experiment last week where if I were to ask this to new grads entering FAANGs, the majority of them probably would not be able to elucidate the steps required.
This happened to my grandmother! I frankly never believed it because we're taught one cannot go into remission, but one day in her 60s she no longer had to manager her diabetes.
I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
This is a problem as old as time. Over a decade ago I saw startups from Stanford trying to tackle this. This is not an expert perspective, but I believe the market is too small to really make it worth while. As alluded to, people in their 30s/40s lean into their family, children's activities etc.
I used to know jeffiel personally and let me tell you he is the sweetest person. He was incredibly humble when twilio became a darling in the sf-sv scene and (imo) he steered twilio to IPO effectively and quickly. Being a PoC, i'm disappointed people have felt so offended by the "anti-racist" comment in the statement, the person I know would mean that from a sincere perspective.
As someone who works in this space, ^ this. I would say don't overthink any component, use common crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) to build your initial index, use a pagerank implementation that's been thoroughly researched and published, and use off the shelf components from the apache foundation when you can.
I've wished at least 2 dozen times over the last decade that the nordics had better research universities. I spent a portion of my life in Finland and the quality of life is so much better there, I would say it's probably unattainable here (the reduced crime, the affordability of everything, lack of homelessness, a more well educated population, etc.). Unfortunately the research being done at the top universities there in the hard sciences are rudimentary compared to resources available here. I was quite interested in pursing a PhD in chemistry there, but the research labs I checked out had resources less than and not comparable to the undergraduate labs I had here.
I've used Java my entire career and i'm fortunate for it. I appreciate how readable the code is (unlike my experience with Erlang, Haskell, etc), typically i don't have foundational issues in the web framework (once again had some with Haskell). Everything works, if I need to do low latency, there's great libraries and resources, if i need to build a simple internal tool, it can be done effortlessly.
I think python is the same way, the ecosystem is so rich that you can really do anything you want (until you get into low latency).
I almost joined fivetran as a staff engineer, I had a terrible experience in the hiring pipeline - the manager i spoke with was convinced he was sounding clever by asking someone with 10 years of experience the difference between a java hash table and hashmap. Also the scope of work offered was at the level of a early senior engineer, i felt the vibe this company stagnated 3 years ago.