HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alexanderscott

108 karma · joined September 15, 2012

submissionscomments
alexanderscott··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
most large venues have a rev share agreement on these fees. they aren’t all going to the ticketing company.
alexanderscott··on DELETEs Are Difficult
this is a “soft delete”. as the author notes, depending on the nature of the data being stored a soft delete does not meet the requirements of many data privacy laws and compliance regulations (like GDPR’s right to erasure).
alexanderscott··on The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
I feel every admin panel I’ve built over the years, including recently, have been “mildly dynamic”. only enough jquery to be usable by other staff.
alexanderscott··on U.S. home prices have far outpaced paychecks. See what it looks like
that heatmap be like https://www.reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/
alexanderscott··on Most common PIN codes (2012)
that’s amazing! I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!
alexanderscott··on Peter Yang's 10 rules for making products that customers love
> Product lead Peter Yang taps into his decade-plus career

> His career stretches back over a decade

Sorry, is a decade a notably long career these days? Am I old?

alexanderscott··on Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job
if this was just to improve SEO, why not just slap in pre-rendering middleware and forgo SSR? like prerender.io or some headless chrome variant w/ cache? honest question, I’m not as experienced with the nuances of frontend dev
alexanderscott··on SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years
You mean in 2023? So many of my favorite SF dives closed during or as a result of covid: lucky 13, hemlock, whiskey thieves, bachus kirk just to name a few
alexanderscott··on Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option
a former employer of mine insisted we use phabricator (self-hosted) instead of github. while I initially fought it because of vpn requirement and UI/UX differences after years of github, I grew to quite like it. in particular the comment organization, handling of back-merges to trunk, and workflow standardization. not sure if it’s still maintained or not though
alexanderscott··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2023)
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: Yes, but open to hybrid in the Bay Area

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, Golang, Python, Java, Scala, Typescript, gRPC, GraphQL, AWS Serverless, GCP

Site: https://ehrns.com

Email: alexanderscott46 at gmail

Resume: https://assets.ehrns.com/resumes/ASE-resume-2023-04.pdf

---

Hi, I'm Alex - a Bay Area software engineer with 13 years of experience, primarily in gaming and live events & ticketing industries. Most recently led engineering as Director then Principal Engineer for a small, interactive livestreaming startup.

Looking for a full-time position as staff-level IC or EM, either remote or hybrid. Contact me over email or linkedin (link can be found on my website above) with serious inquiries only.

alexanderscott··on Payments 101 for a Developer
kind of like spreedly https://www.spreedly.com/

API + unified card tokenization

alexanderscott··on What you give up by moving into engineering management
surprisingly I didn’t see anything in here about managerial responsibilities of big decisions involving company $$. budgeting, vendor & contract negotiation, build vs buy, etc. I found this to be one of the starkest differences and all a bit unnerving when I made the transition from staff IC to manager. will say that having a good boss and mentor helped a lot with the feelings of imposter syndrome.
alexanderscott··on GitHub's User Content certificate has expired
didn’t they announce a bunch of layoffs recently?
alexanderscott··on Ask HN: What do you do with vested RSUs?
Agree with other comments to sell immediately upon vesting. Learned this the hard way a while back when I held onto my vested RSUs for 1y to reduce the tax burden. Per-share value dropped below the tax % difference, and I was not diversified enough for risk.

As I also recall, holding them complicated my taxes that year and put me into AMT threshold. This may have been from option exercise though, I can’t remember.

alexanderscott··on Hydra: Open-source Snowflake alternative. OLAP Postgres
shares a name with popular yet completely different OSS oauth2 server by Ory: https://www.ory.sh/hydra/

also in case the author is reading, the documentation link from the README appears to be broken (https://docs.hydras.io/getting-started/readme)

alexanderscott··on Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
I agree with that. it shouldn’t have to be extracurricular. in fact, having outside interests other than programming is a plus.

but there are plenty of ways to learn the general basics of modern computing on company dime. whether thru training, talking with peers, reviewing others code, or taking a step back and looking at architecture outside your specific domain.

if I’m speaking with a frontend engineer on my team who doesn’t understand how his code is deployed or basics on the compute resources used to run that code it’s likely not going to be a very productive discussion

alexanderscott··on Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
didn’t say need to be “fluent”, said need “working understanding” in today’s environment. countering that idea is futile.

working on an open source JS framework is great and all, but doesn’t make you a seasoned engineer IMO.

TlDR: take this list and dedicate time in 2021 to learning so you can be productive in real world business engineering teams

alexanderscott··on Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
no offense, but from this list the author is either 1) stuck in a particular domain or language or 2) not very proactive in broader learning or side projects.

I agree it’s ok to not program C or understand network/transport layer in depth. but things like unix shell basics, python, micro services, docker - these are all fundamentals I assume everyone (backend, frontend, mobile, or game engine) has working understanding of in order to be a proficient developer today.

nice that the author recognizes the areas they lack, and should commit to learning in 2021. happy to give good recommendations on books or online classes.

more curious to see this list authored from someone with more diverse experience.

alexanderscott··on Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?
^this +1. took me years to learn.
alexanderscott··on Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?
map and filter are not concepts of FP - they are just syntactic sugar around for loops. fully evident if you check any native source code. many languages (such as go which I currently use) do not even have these functions but can apply FP. this is by design of simplicity and visibility: it does not get much easier to read than a simple for loop and know the exact iterations count at runtime.
alexanderscott··on A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life
click bait for author’s software
alexanderscott··on Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
I found the Akka source code to be very clean and readable: https://github.com/akka/akka
alexanderscott··on I got tired of PHP and Perl, so I tried bash
Look thru the code though... Thought this would do more than serve a static html file. Not impressed
alexanderscott··on I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
PROTIP:

1) Write blog article on interviewing 2) Promote on hackernews 3) Use as leverage for salary/equity negotiations

alexanderscott··on Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar
This misses the mark completely. A separate repo and service simply for different serialization and routing? Each performing the same basic function. That’s not a legitimate use-case for microservice separation and was doomed from the start.