camhenlin

Seeking Work | Oregon | Remote Only

I'm a full stack JS developer, leaning more towards back end. My github with personal projects and open source contributions is here: https://github.com/CamHenlin.

I'm looking for a short project such as fixing some gnarly bug you've got, adding a specific server side feature, fixing a performance problem, etc., rather than serving an ongoing need. Shoot me an email at camhenlinhn@gmail.com if you'd like to chat

Anywhere with an internet connection is good if you get a remote job

I love love love Costco. Just an anecdote, but I reinforced my love for Costco yesterday in fact. Back in February, I bought new flooring for my entire house at Costco. Since I was doing my entire house, I over purchased to ensure that I wouldn’t run out. I work full time so it took my a long time to finish installing the flooring, about 8 months. Yesterday I returned all the packages of flooring I didn’t use to Costco. The person working at the return counter didn’t even bat an eye at the fact I’d bought the flooring so long ago, she just handed me a wad of cash back. Absolutely great return policy. It would have been impossible to do something like that at Lowes or Home Depot, both of those stores give you a hard time after 90 days. I try to do all of my shopping at Costco and this is why. They just treat customers so, so well.

Definitely feeling this during my company's health insurance renewal this year. I used to think that I had it pretty alright, but over the past few years, things have gotten worse and worse. This year, for our "gold" plan, which was sold as the equivalent of the previous year's "gold" plan, our insurance provider increased our monthly cost by approx $120/mo, and increased our deductible by $5,000, up to $15,000.

I used to be against single payer, but now I'm rooting for any politician that thinks they can pull it off. I'm willing to pay a bit more tax in exchange for no longer having the "best" health insurance plan that I can afford that, quite frankly, I am terrified to use. Health care costs in this country are completely out of control. We need to have the system burned down and rebooted.

Yeah, and to add to that, it appears that while airsoft guns are technically very restricted to the point of being non-practical in China, there is no reason to believe that the pellets themselves would be restricted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_in_airsoft#China

Yeah that is absolutely what it sounds like to me, these are toys that many people played with as children or would be willing to give to children to play with. Pretty harmless unless it catches you in the eye. They are specifically designed to not be dangerous. I've never heard of any other type of air-fired plastic pellets at least. Pretty enraging and hopefully Mr. Hohn is able to make it back to American soil very soon

Thanks for posting this. My wife and I already have credit monitoring so we’ve been very frustrated that it seems like Equifax will be weaseling out of paying us our $125 each. We’ll be sending a couple of letters today. Personally I’d like to see the courts rethink the settlement and force the $125 payout to everyone who requested it.

I use a camera in conjunction with a raspberry pi to announce when someone drives down my driveway. Known license plates it will announce the name of the person driving down the driveway. Unknown license plates it announces that I have an unexpected visitor. I feel like it's pretty useful personally.

I spend absolutely no time making decisions on what to wear. I decided a long time ago that I don't care about fashion, I just want to look acceptable and be comfortable. So I took a bunch of company swag shirts so I wear the "same" shirt every day essentially. I have a bunch of pairs of the same jeans. One belt. One pair of shoes. I got a couple of identical hoodies if it's cold. Everything fits well and looks pretty acceptable. I have absolutely no decisions to make, always look the same, always ready to go quickly. Some of my friends and family find it a bit odd, but it saves me money and hassle on dealing with something that I do not enjoy. I also like that I don't have to worry if a shirt or something gets messed up. I just toss it and pull another out of the closet.

I'm not sure if it's real or not, but I feel like dark mode apps are easier on my eyes. I sit in front of a computer in my office most of the day, and I don't need a bunch of white light shining in my face all day. I prefer to have the majority of the screen be dark colors and text be light colored.

Boring companies still have interesting problems for you to dig in on. As well as that, boring can often mean stability, which can be really good for your mental health.

The problem I see with that is that many (most?) users are not going to go deny network access to each app.

Furthermore, what if the app tells me that it needs network access to get calendar info or something along those lines - and then actually uses the network for that -, then subsequently uses the network access to siphon off my personal info? Certainly if you had the ability to "see" what an app is doing, you might be able to catch that, but that's well beyond the grasp of most users. Better to be able to inherently trust the app because it was built by a trusted 3rd party. Certainly I agree that it would be nice to be able to disable network access to any app I felt like though.

As others have mentioned, low or no code tools depend heavily on what you are trying to do and if they fit your use case. This is definitely a growing space and there are a growing number of solutions out there.

I work for and use https://www.knack.com. Our software is really useful for creating no or low-code web apps. We provide a visual interface for importing or creating data, building relationships for your data, managing user roles and logins, and building out a functional web UI lots of different view types and customization options.

Yeah I read through that posting and I’m still not convinced that the original poster there is on to much. To add to all of the disagreements in the comments there, I also noticed that my AC works much less hard on hotter days, and noticed a slight reduction in costs monthly electrical costs year of year. There are a lot of variables in play to go into an electrical bill however.

Yeah and to add to this, adding too much humidity inside of your home can cause mold and other rot issues, not just around the wet swamp cooler itself. AC is definitely most convenient, maintenance, and hassle free for most people, but swamp coolers can be good if you are attentive and diligent about maintenance and noticing problems before they get big

This is an easy upgrade for any home and can be done by a relatively competent DIYer or an HVAC contractor. The main point is that your attic is much hotter than anywhere in the house, so if you can get the attic close to outside ambient, it will help. I personally have my attic fans (one at either end of the house) set up on a separate thermostat from the rest of the house, where any time the attic temp exceeds 90F, the fans kick on.

Doing this will even make your AC system work better if you have one, since you won’t have the extremely hot air in your attic heating your ceilings

Sure, but that car took 20 seconds to get to 60 and only weighs 1300lbs. It probably offers little more safety than a motorcycle. Neat piece of history though

Any reasoning behind central AC not being allowed? Just energy efficiency?

What I was pointing out is that distraction is the problem. Walking on a street and operating a vehicle are both potentially dangerous tasks, and people need to be vigilant looking out for others and themselves. If you're going to cross the road -jaywalking or not-, you should look both ways. You can't assume that a driver is going to see you, just as a driver can't assume that you aren't going to hop out in front of them, right or wrong as you feel that may be.

Anecdotally, and I'm sure other people can share similar experiences: I've also had a couple of instances of people jay walking, popping out from behind a parked car right into the road - staring at their cell phone and not at the street around them - and have had to slam on my brakes to keep from hitting the person. I'm glad to have been paying attention but things could have easily gone badly.

I use one to control a 3D printer with https://octoprint.org and another to integrate some smart home devices that are not homekit compatible with my homekit setup, using https://homebridge.io.

I start a new page each new day if I was in the middle of the previous page, and I write the date at the top of each new page. Other than that it’s essentially stream of conscious and that tends to work well for me

I spent the first decade or so of my career not taking any notes at all. Constantly, I was forgetting little things after meetings, spacing out on information after a week or a month or whatever. Now I keep a notebook on my desk at all times and I write with a pen. I constantly write down what I am doing, what I am working on, what I am thinking, the gist of conversations that I have throughout the day, and more. More information is always better. I find that writing in pen is better than pencil because I am not tempted to try to fix when I spell a word wrong or make some other kind of error, and I find that physically writing things out with a writing utensil is much easier for me to maintain verbal conversations vs typing the notes out with a keyboard.

It seems to me that the notebooks create their own value, and you have to start somewhere to begin seeing the value. Then you will find that value and you will accelerate your usage of note taking.

Notebooks can be a really incredible tool - if someone asks me what happened on the first Tuesday in May, I can flip through my notebooks and figure it out. If I wonder what the heck I was thinking as I was writing a PR, I can check the date of the PR and find my notes. I've never once regretted taking a notes and now I will likely never stop.

Not totally related to your point, but it seems to me that Google doesn't care about the quality of Google Maps as much as Apple cares about the quality of Apple Maps.

For example, my house had its address changed by our county in late November when a new street was cut nearby and the location of our driveway changed due to right of way. Our address was updated in the USPS AMS database back in January. As you can imagine, I wanted Map providers to have my most updated information as soon as possible so that people could easily find my address when I gave it to them and so when UPS or Fedex people look up my address on their phones, they can find it.

In Google Maps, I've attempted to contribute an edit several times: each time with links to county tax data, county records, county maps, city maps, and a personal statement explaining the situation. Every time Google rejects it without action or any message other than "not applied". I'm pretty sure there is someone manually reviewing these requests as it always takes a variable amount of time before I get the rejection. It's really disappointing to put so much effort into editing someone else's data - for free - and have it be rejected outright without any sort of explanation.

Now, I went and I did the exact same thing with Apple Maps! My edit was applied within a week and the Map is updated - iPhone users can easily find my house. It seems to me that while maybe Apple spent several years playing catch up with Google, at this point they are hungry to do well by their customers and are extremely responsive to quality concerns. I've not personally had a problem with Apple Maps in several years and don't see myself leaving Apple's platform any time soon

Exactly- if a person created a device that dispersed diseases and placed it in a public area, would they not be charged with a crime? Is it much different to enter public areas unvaccinated, knowing that you might be a carrier of a disease that could be vaccinated against, especially when there are active outbreaks happening?

I've been doing this for years with some of my own personal projects like https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient, https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageWebClient, and https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessagebot and some others - one thing that I'll note is that in my experience, Apple is pretty aggressive and somewhat arbitrary at banning accounts from accessing iMessages if they get on to the service from a VM - even if your usage is normal, personal iMessaging. I was trying out using VMWare and virtualbox specifically. In fact, I've been accidentally successful at getting my computer and home network banned from Apple services by accessing iMessages via VM. I strongly recommend running these types of services on bare metal Macs although ymmv.

For most users in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud keychain is an excellent, extremely well-integrated solution. I recommend it to all of my friends and family.

Great, insightful book and a fun read. Highly recommend

The blog is great too! http://randsinrepose.com

No. I work for a fully remote company, and we decided that individuals within the company could pay for working a coworking space if they wanted, but giving them a stipend for doing so created a benefit for those employees that didn't exist for employees that optimized their home office for remote work. Personally I am in favor of more pay for every employee across the board at an organization rather than trying to come up with lots of extra benefits to take advantage of to collect more money.

I think that some kind stipend for office/equipment/etc does make sense for companies that have remote and in-office employees, but feel that it should be a set amount and not tied to actual usage, as I feel that in those cases, the company is getting a clear benefit from the worker being remote, in not having to provide them with space in the office.

Some states also take into account intent. Meaning that you need a dealers license and insurance just to purchase and sell a single vehicle, if the original intent of purchasing the vehicle was to sell it.

In my state, Oregon, for example, the DMV has agents watching craigslist, facebook, autotrader, etc. who go test drive private party cars under cover and ask the question, "So, why are you selling?" where answering that question incorrectly (along the lines of, "oh I bought it to fix up and make a few bucks") will net you a several thousand dollar fine.