caseydm

OpenAlex | Software Engineer | Remote | Full-time | $150–200k USD

OpenAlex is an open index of the world's scholarly research: hundreds of millions of articles linked to authors, institutions, and topics, free via API and bulk download. Traffic runs about a billion API calls per month from universities, governments, and AI companies. The team behind it is a small nonprofit funded by grants and enterprise support.

We're hiring two engineers to work across the whole backend, which is SQL and PySpark on Databricks, Python/Flask APIs, Elasticsearch, and Cloudflare Workers. It's a small team with lots of autonomy. You'll notice what's missing, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it. We're AI-native, with agents writing all of our code.

Apply here: https://openalex.org/jobs/software-engineer

"Hey I got some great news. Got 20 minutes for a call later today?"

Oh really? Logging into the portal or logging into with the CLI to push code? The CLI login is down for me.

Our startup uses managed elasticsearch through elastic. We're a very small team so support/consulting advice is important to us and they are good at that.

Ha! I always laugh when I hear those. Guess we will find out!

I was a naysayer but find copilot makes me more productive. Especially at writing tests. It's very good at recognizing patterns in your own work, and completing an entire test based on the function name.

Anybody using Cloudflare to cache an API that serves JSON? Thinking about setting that up.

No I never used any of that. I would have moved on to another job if someone insisted on it.

I sound like a shill for Upwork (promise I'm not!). But the fees for long-term clients (>$10k in earnings) is 5%. If you go on your own and bill through a system you will likely pay 3%. So it's not that different.

I would give it another shot. Since your history is older you likely need to keep your rate at $60 for a while and complete a few jobs. But UpWork has the biggest market and there are plenty of people out there willing to pay for developers with a solid history.

People say it's underpaid or terrible, but part of that reputation comes from people doing one or two jobs and quitting. Plus, I've hired developers on UpWork and a lot of people suck at writing proposals. I have a lot of advice on that too.

I was very successful on UpWork. However, it is not something you can jump into with no work history on the site, like "I have 16 years experience so my rate is $125/hr." People don't believe you when you say that. They want to see proof from a third party. So you need to start lower ($30 to $50/hr), stay in a niche, and successfully complete jobs while gradually raising your rates.

When someone sees glowing reviews and completed jobs, you become the "easy button" and they will pay more to decrease their risk. When they see 10 completed jobs with 5 star reviews, all mentioning the exact type of work they need, they can be pretty sure the 11th will be successful. It's possible to charge $125 or more an hour on UpWork and have to keep your settings updated so that you are not spammed with invites.

I agree that a small team of engineers can do big things. But 15 engineers to run Uber ride share in maintenance mode? That's insane. I would love to see a breakdown of each engineer's responsibilities in that scenario.

Heroku is my tried and true. I've likely done thousands of deploys over the years and have never had one go bad or leave my app in a bad state. I have rolled back an app a few times due to bad configs and it was always quick and left me with a huge sigh of relief.

That being said, they are very stagnant on features. A dyno has operated the same way, at the same size, at the same price for like 10 years now? The main features I would like to see are auto-scaling for all dynos and IPs that allow you to restrict database traffic. Render looks promising in that department and could likely get business from me if Heroku doesn't change in the next couple years.

That's great. They make good points on securing databases as well. Everything has to be open with Heroku's basic dynos. It would be nice to secure PostgreSQL or Elasticsearch so the IP is not publicly available.

I'm excited to see a solid competitor to Heroku. While I trust Heroku due to using it for so long, they have become complacent with pricing and features. For example, affordable autoscaling looks awesome.

Anybody else prefer Google meet over zoom lately? I feel like it's a cleaner layout.

This is a great idea. There are well-documented ways to undo things on stack overflow, but almost every way:

1. Has three competing ways available to complete the 'undo'

2. Every way has a scary caveat that the user must be aware of

It would be awesome to simplify the process for new users.

Location: Omaha, NE

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, Elasticsearch

Email: casey@pycare.com

I specialize in the upkeep and growth of python web applications (website or API) built with Django or Flask. Hire me and my team to add features, improve performance, and keep your web app secure.

My service is best for applications that can be maintained by a single developer at around 10 to 20 hours per month.

See more at: https://pycare.com

Maybe he can close out this 9 year old feature request to add custom domains to cloud apps: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

  Location: Omaha, NE
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python Django and Flask
  Résumé/CV: https://pycare.com
  Email: casey@pycare.com

I specialize in the upkeep and growth of python web applications. I can help you with:

- Content updates - Performance improvements - Security updates

My service is proactive and designed to keep a Django or Flask web app running in tip-top shape.

I was thinking the same thing. I used Doordash a while back and figured they were making good money based on the fees they were adding in, such as delivery fee, service fee, tips to the driver, maybe a markup on menu items. But then I discovered they are also charging commission to the restaurant for up to 30%! I've been driving to restaurants for takeout more often because the apps seem shady to me.

My favorite book on this topic is the DevOps Handbook. The author lays out a very clear and easy to follow path that gives you the same result: secure and reliable systems.

I freelance and agree that you will command higher rates with another language or speciality. Yes PHP is widely used and can get the job done just like a lot of other languages. However, I worry clients do not appreciate a professional PHP developer the same way they do a python or javascript developer.

My recipe for being a successful freelancer is to write clean, tested, maintainable code, PLUS specialize in some kind of niche. I mean specialize like crazy. I feel that employers like to hire polygot programmer employees because they envision them doing different things over a long period of time. But clients hire freelancers for very specific purposes and they only care about the immediate need right in front of them.

For example, my speciality is improving existing web applications written in python with Django or Flask frameworks. I can talk all day about monitoring errors in production, reducing response times, adding features, or improving app reliability, etc. But if someone asks me to support data science, build a new app from scratch, or an alexa skill, I decline.

You can definitely do well with Javascript, but again, I would be really good at one framework, such as Angular or React. Then I would focus that skill on a particular industry.

I'm in the same boat as a solo developer. I recommend subscribing to Safari Books Online (https://learning.oreilly.com/). As your first action, watch the video series for Clean Code. It's just incredible and has helped me grow as a developer more than any other resource.

I agree security issues are the main drawback. This can be mitigated by using managed hosting providers. I've had several wordpress sites running on managed hosts for years with little oversight and no issues.

One of the many reasons I let my Amazon Prime subscription expire last month.

Amazon is selling convenience. But it's not convenient to:

1. Filter out products full of Vine program reviews, which I believe are completely skewed due to the reviewers receiving the products for free

2. Read between the lines to filter out paid/bias reviews that are NOT part of the Vine program

3. Research to ensure the product itself is not fake or counterfeit

Feel like I'm shopping at the shadiest flea market in town.

PGAdmin 3 was simple and worked flawlessly. PGAdmin 4 is basically broken and unusable. I was forced to look for alternatives and ended up with PyCharm/Datagrip. It works great but is missing one key feature in that it can't list all the databases under a single server, something they are working to resolve.

PgAdmin 3 throws all kinds of errors with Postgres 9.6.