bespoke_engnr

So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with .

I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps).

I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.

It's a work in progress but might be helpful to someone!

I'm also sad to see MIT so overrepresented in their ranks, presumably because the founder went to MIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackb...

Perhaps there's an ethics course missing from the curriculum?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...

    Masayoshi Son: What does your company do?

    Neumann: We lease office buildings, spruce up the space and sublet it in small chunks.

    Son: Hmm I invest in visionary tech stuff, this doesn’t really sound like my thing.

    Neumann: Did I mention we are a state of consciousness. A generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.

    Son: Okay yeah that’s more like—

    Neumann: The world’s first physical social network. We encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds.

    Son: You’re crazy! I love it! But could you be, say, ten times crazier?

    Neumann: You’re going to invest $10 billion in my company, which I will use as kindling to light the whole edifice on fire, and then when we are both standing in the ashes you will pay me another billion dollars to walk away while I laugh at you.

    Son: All my life I have dreamed of meeting someone as crazy as you, but I never really believed this day would come. 

    Neumann: I’m gonna use your money to buy a mansion with a room shaped like a guitar, where I will play the world’s tiniest violin after all your money is gone. 

    Son: YES PUNCH ME IN THE FACE.

    Neumann: Also I’ll rename the company “We” and charge it $6 million for the name.

    Son: RUN ME OVER WITH A TRUCK.

Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing."

I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.

That's good news! That means the system is improving!

I'm not saying you don't have a point (college education has a cost), but on some level it's really just an argument for never making anything better.

I prefer to think, "Are we really so backwards and impoverished as a society that we don't even have the resources to educate our citizens?"

When someone has to do something boring/dirty/ugly, never let them do it alone. Sometimes having a buddy help you with shit work can actually turn it into something fun.

To me, it feels like typing each character manually cements the knowledge in there much deeper than 'oh, I think I understand what I'm copy/pasting.'

Maybe that's a shallow truism by now, but I still see people struggling to learn programming via copy/paste from examples.

$ calendar

Sep 13* Rosh Chodesh Tishrei (Beginning of the month of Tishrei)

Sep 13* First Day of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year; 5768; sabbatical)

Sep 13 Barry Day commemorates the death of Commodore John Barry, USA

Sep 13 Chiang Kai-Shek becomes president of China, 1943

Sep 13 Building of Hadrian's Wall begun, 122

Sep 13 British defeat the French at Abraham near Quebec City, 1788

Sep 13 58� C (136.4� F) measured at el Azizia, Libya, 1922

Sep 13 Walter Reed born, 1851

Sep 14 Francis Scott Key writes words to "Star Spangled Banner", 1814

Sep 14* Rosh Hashanah (sabbatical)

Sep 14 Battle of San Jacinto in Nicaragua

Sep 14 Frodo & Bilbo's birthday

Sep 14 The US Selective Service Act establishes the first peacetime draft, 1940

Sep 14 Salem, Massachusetts, is founded, 1629

Sep 14 Benjamin Franklin is sent to France as an American minister, 1778

They've saved me from some bad gigs.

The second half of the video covers questions for your would-be future managers. Some of the commenters have also added excellent questions to ask.

Here are the co-worker questions:

1. What's the most interesting thing you've gotten to work on (or learn about) here?

2. What's the balance between firefighting and project work in an average week?

3. What's the one thing you wish you could improve or change about your everyday work life here?

4. Every company is carrying some amount of technical debt -- what's the tech debt situation here? -how much they think there is -what they're doing about it

4. What is the policy/practice as far as WFH or remotely? 5. What does the on-call rotation look like?

And just to clarify, I didn't mean to sound negative. I actually think it's a good thing -- I've picked up several really good courses on real estate investing, machine learning, and other stuff.

A few misses at $10/pop come out in the wash when you also get courses that can add tens of thousands of dollars' worth of knowledge to your life.

I think of Udemy as the Packt of online course platforms. There are certainly some gems to be found, if you have the time to look for them and don't mind getting a few duds in the process.

       dp
       dp
       ||
      _||_
     ' || `      ~/
     ) || (     //
     _)::(_    //
     ) || (   //
    (  \/  ) //
     `-..-' /'

2. Where do you see the $(team you're interviewing for) in 2 years? - do they respect the team or are they looked at as an annoying expense? - do they talk about training opportunities, growth, etc?

3. What is your favorite aspect of working here? - If it's a stock bullshit answer, I dig more. - If they duck it, that's a smell. - If they answer honestly, then that's a really valuable datapoint.

4. Every company is carrying some amount of technical debt -- what's the tech debt situation here? - how much they think there is - what they're doing about it

5. How would you describe the culture and if/how it is maintained?

5a. Is there an active mentoring strategy? What does that look like?

I made a video about this a while back with a few more questions, and some people left useful comments on it with their own experiences/additions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9XPTay-x8g

If things had improved that much in NLP-land since I last played around with it, I would jump careers right now :-D.

We've had a pretty splendid experience with Vault so far, so I'm not exactly in the market for another solution, but this looks interesting.

I assume you started development on this because Vault et al didn't exist yet at the time? Or was there another driver?

For those of you wondering, the book he was reading is "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Cheng Nien. For me, that was the most interesting part of the article.

I know very little about modern Chinese history and this seems like an interesting place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-Shanghai-Cheng-Nien/dp/080...