bowlich

I've found a lot of improvement in my digital productivity by following plaintext productivity's [1] for organizing my files. But, I also pretty much put everything older than a year that I'm not working on into a giant archive bin that I attempt to organize in no shape or fashion. There's twenty odd years of files going all the way back to middle school in there and trying to make any sense of it would be a waste.

1: http://plaintext-productivity.net/3-00-files-introduction.ht...

Been using Resilio-sync but have been really excited about switching to Syncthing, glad to hear about the 1.0.0.

Not a fan either, but I also didn't read it until I was over 30 and couldn't stomach the narrator. I think most of my friends who recommended it had read it when they were teenagers not as adults.

As someone whose lived all over the giant unlabelled area -- what I consider "the west" is pretty culturally uniform across that space. Western Dakota to eastern Idaho, northern Nevada and some of the eastern range of California. Mostly ranching, resource extraction. A whole lot of beautiful nothing.

Two technologies that I've had an on and off attempt to learn for the last couple years finally clicked into place this year:

Ansible -- I converted my dotfiles install bash script to use Ansible and to also install all my terminal dependencies. Then I started expanding on it to include my entire development box and to provision a bunch of vagrant boxes of different Linux distros so I could test the waters with something other than Ubuntu.

Docker -- Work's been using this now for over a year, and I was a bit of a hold out on it since Docker just seemed like another layer that Ansible + Vagrant was doing a fine job of handling. Once I really dug into how the configurations worked together and set up some of my side projects to use it, it's usefulness started to come together for me.

Otherwise, I keep trying to learn Rust but don't have any projects in mind that would fit with it. I also keep playing with React on the side but haven't gotten very far in my understanding of that ecosystem.

We joked at my last job that it was just a matter of time before the business migrated from Slack to Discord. :)

In fact, Discord became the dev teams unofficial Slack backup whenever Slack went down.

Personal solo side projects that I'm just hacking on, I use MIT mostly because it seems simple. If someone wants to use or fork my software, I don't really care how or what they're doing with it.

None of my projects address significant enough space that I would figure they're being incorporated into anything of business value anyways.

If I have a GPL dependency, then I license it GPL. I would probably use GPL or Apache if I ever was working on a project that I actually thought would provide business value to someone or was going to grow any kind of community around it besides me.

I'd like attribution just because that seems nice, but I don't have the time or desire to figure out or enforce something like GPL.

We already have that coercion in place. In the U.S., labor law [1] says if you work on-site a company is required to put you on the clock when you commute from your duty station to a remote client site.

(I've seen companies try to get around this by having people commute directly from home to the client site and then claiming that was their normal "commute")

So just redefine "duty station" from "office" to "place of residence."

After all, the commute is being done for the company's benefit, not the employee.

[1]: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/traveltime

As a remote worker of 6 years whose recently spent two weeks having to commute in the city. Thank god for my 30 foot commute from bed to across the hallway into the office.

Really wish the government would start forcing employers to pay employees for their average commute times. Would really encourage allowing remote work or relocation into smaller residential areas. It's hard to fathom why being stuck in traffic isn't considered work. Certainly feels like it.

I mean to each their own in terms of your use case may vary based on the UI/UX of your choice. I can see a need for OSX if a big chunk of your workload is going to be in graphic design, front-end development, or some kind of management role where you're spending days looking at spreadsheets or word docs.

I'm also not defending Linux as a consumer OS, but as an OS for use in a work environment tuned purposely to maximize the efficiency of an employee working as a developer who is deploying to Linux from OSX. I'm often bewildered as to why I run into so many back-end developers who are deploying to Linux, yet using OSX for their daily driver.

I suppose the hardware issues that you cite. I've had the occasional hardware issue, maybe once every two or three years that takes a couple hours to track down and fix. My workflow doesn't really make use of pointing devices, and I've never owned a bluetooth device that I've needed to connect to a workstation, so I haven't come across those issues. Battery would be a horrid pain though.

I guess to each their own. I've slowly grown to hate OSX on my MacBook in comparison to the ease of use that I get out of my daily driver -- Ubuntu on my desktop.

OSX seems far too opinionated on things. It keeps installing Itunes even though I've gone through and deleted it repeatedly. It won't let me uninstall all of the Apple software that I have zero use for (I have no use for a word processor suite). I spend 100% of my time either on Firefox, Thunderbird and the Terminal. I have nearly zero use for any other gui applications and would like to uninstall everything down to the bare minimum of applications and processes to do my work.

Too many terminal applications are subtly different between what I have available on Linux vs OSX, and I'm frequently having to resort to compiling them myself to get feature parity. Shell scripts need to be every so slightly altered to account for the fact that its running on OSX and not Linux -- I'd like to be able to write it once and then run it on my dev machine, virtual machine, and server without needing to make these changes.

OSX likes to liter hidden files all over the place that I need to remember to exclude from git repositories.

These are all little things, but they're little things that have grown over the years to really irritate me and I probably won't be doing a MacBook on my next upgrade.

From your username, I'm going to assume you're in the US. :)

I've been working fully remote for six years now, and have recently started hunting for my next remote gig. So I've been in a similar boat.

I have had some success with reaching out to recruiting agencies in urban centers of my general region. Explain that you're an experienced remote employee, and that you are only available for remote work.

Surprisingly (having just gone through hiring two remote employees for my current team), it can actually be pretty hard to find experienced remote employees or even employees who want to be fully remote. Plenty of applicants seem to totally lose interest when they find out there's no office to go into or that they'll have to be pretty much entirely self motivated. Bizarre, but to each their own.

Actually interviewed recently for a firm who hired a recruiting agency explicitly to weed out all the applicants who aren't remote-friendly because they were tired of getting into interviews and finding out that the applicant didn't read the remote-only part of the job announcement.

I've been able to get it to partially work for my PO BOX.

For some odd reason it seems to only work for packages. Not standard letter mail.

At least now I get an alert that a package went to the Post Office and isn't coming to my house.

This thread's making me feel much better about my starting salary of $35k back in 2011. It always seemed to bug me, the nagging feeling that I had way under billed myself for the first two years of my career (looking at all the big salaries everyone was always claiming).

My salary's pretty much followed the same progression that other's have posted for outside of the high-cost-of-living hubs.

It seems that what you are describing though would tend over time to result in a search engine that is principally geared towards returning commercial results rather than amateur/hobbyist results since the interests of search/potential advertisers are always going to be in closer alignment then hobbyists who will almost never be running an ad campaign.

This has been my main criticism of Google's direction the last 15 years or so. Seems like search results use to populate handsomely with personal sites and blogs run by hobbyists uninterested in extracting a dollar from the visitor. If the search results could return either (a) a link to a book sold on Amazon or (b) some Phd's site discussing the topic it seems likely that (a) wins and (b) gets buried somewhere on page 2.

One of my earliest memories of "programming" was the discovery that Age of Empires .ai files could be edited in notepad to change (or in my case, intentionally break) the unit build progression of the computer players.

I work remote in a rural western state, I make closer to the national average for an SE than the SV worker. I ran the math once in my county and found that I was in the top 1% wage earners for my county.

SEEKING WORK - Remote, short-term/part-time projects

Full LAMP stack developer with seven years of experience working in front and back-end development of e-commerce and internal workflow-management software.

I can help with identifying technical requirements from stakeholders, complete MVP development, automation of production and development environments, or modernization of legacy PHP applications.

Location: Arizona

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jekyll/Static Site Generators, Linux, Ansible, Domain Driven Design, Zend Framework 1 & 2+, Doctrine, Slim, Silex, Code Igniter, and WordPress

Resume: http://joehallenbeck.com/static/hallenbeck_resume.pdf

Email: joe@joehallenbeck.com

I've known about the president alerts as long as I've owned a cell phone and that it can't be disabled has never sat well with me and I've considered rooting just to remove it. I don't approve of unilaterally allowing some external entity to force execution of some procedure on my device without my consent.

I've thought before that it would be neat to have the ability to specify an alternative markup inside any element. A kind of:

<div markup="markdown">Browser now _interprets_ content as markdown until end of div.</div>

It would make user-submitted content so much better since you could just directly embed bbcode, markdown, etc. without needing to parse it to html or validate that their submission is valid html/only using approved tags, etc.

Number 1 seems to be a pattern that I see coming out of text books where the author begins the chapter by giving you an anti-pattern or okay solution to a working problem and then through the course of the chapter introduces the reader to a better solution. It's a pattern that I've always found frustrating since rarely would the "incorrect" solution have occurred to me if the author hadn't suggested it.

I picked Dune/Song of Ice and Fire because they're thematically similar.

In terms of bloat, excluding the Tale of Genji or the Story of the Stone, I can hardly think of anything in the 1800s that pushes into the 1M+ word mark in order to tell a complete story. I mean, people used to joke about War & Peace being long and it's hovering around 1/2 a million words -- and at least when I read it, Tolstoy seemed to be using every last one of them.

Fiction has suffered the same bloat. Used to be that letting an author ramble for 200,000+ words was considered indulgent. Dune told it's entire story in around 180,000 words, I can hardly say anything more intriguing is going on in Song of Ice & Fire at 1.7 million words.

Google Map's lack of geographic features has been off putting for me for quite some time. They can list every last commercial entity under the sun, but can't be bothered to get the name of a river correct, name high points (which would be useful for navigation), canyons/ravines are generally missing. Items like campgrounds tend to direct to commercial enterprises rather than dispersed sites.

OSM has all of that, it's great.

I haven't had time to really dig into OSM. One item that confuses me is the community-based editing which lends me to not wanting to touch it out of fear I'll cross someone (like Wikipedia). I do a lot of personal mapping on Google Earth of routes, points of interest, etc., just dumping GPS data out after walks. I would like to do the same on OSM, and store it as my own private overlay but I don't see how.

It feels to me like we're moving away from cards back to cash in the last decade:

- Gas stations offering cash discounts

- Stores requiring minimum purchases for cards

- Restaurants adding a service fee to use a card

I don't think I every came upon these three items a decade ago, and now they seem standard.

If it costs $2,000 to replace an employee, and the award incentive to stay on is $100. Then I would say the employee is getting screwed out of $1,900.

(If the military can get contractors to run a fast food joint in a war-zone then I imagine that an employer can get employees to work in NYC.)

I use Resilio Sync:

https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

Although, I've also been hearing some good things about Sync-Thing.

For a while I used a set of rsync and unison scripts but they required too much manual intervention resulting in a lot of collisions.

I've been working from home remotely 100% of the time for five years now. I'd say a dedicated space for the majority of the work is a good plan, although it's also nice to grab the laptop and go out to a cafe, or work on the porch on a good day.

My set up:

300 square foot room, dual 24" monitors on an 4'x6' drafting table + stool for sitting/standing. Desktop, plus battery back-ups (desktop is set up to automatically boot back up if there's power loss), two internet providers for fallback, static IP from the primary ISP to the desktop so I can easily remote in while on the road. Synced laptop so I can just grab it and go with my current work-state already saved.

Because my statically generated blog really needs https.

This is really going to create an additional layer of inconvenience for people who just want to drop some html documents in an ftp folder and be done with it.

I would expect anyone in a professional position to be receiving whatever the going market rate is.. which will likely not correlate to a chain of progressively higher pay as you go up the local hierarchy.

This, at least has been the case for each of the SMBs that I've worked in which managers are purely non-technical and hired for their ability to manage people and projects (can't afford to not have Engineers doing engineering).

At one place, my direct sup was expected to wear both the manager and Engineer hat (being technical). The next two layers up were middle managers who only managed. Neither layer made more than anyone in engineering.