8,324 karma · joined March 18, 2008
https://dn.ht
http://dhotson.tumblr.com
https://twitter.com/dennishotson
dennis.hotson@gmail.com
ssh paint.dn.ht
..and for more fun:
ssh ski.dn.ht
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&...
You can see the demand peaks around 12pm and 6pm.
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
We've found that inevitably AIs have some error rate and customers want to escalate to a person.
Our strategy has moved to:
- Let humans do the things that humans are good at: judgement, decision making, high novelty situations.
- Let AI do the things that computers are good at: repetitive tasks that require persistent effort
We've seen a lot of clients turn on these AI tools in their helpdesk.. hope for the best.. and get crap results. The tech isn't the hard part, the AI needs access to high quality context to answer questions accurately. But that requires more than just connecting your google drive or scraping your website.
We've found that a skilled human operator + AI is the best way to engineer high quality context to get the most out of the tools.
Doing it like that (especially if you can do it as slowly as possible) can help get you strong enough to do one normal pushup.
- WordPress code is open-source.
- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.
I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?
If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?
If it's getting more complicated, I'll abort and upgrade to rails to use layouts etc.
The middle ground of static site generators are a trap in my personal opinion.
If I need to add a feature, I've found it's easier for me to implement it directly rather than try mess around configuring a static site generator with plugins etc.
Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.
It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files. It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.
I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though—I don't recommend it for everyone.
The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder.. pretty easy upgrade path.
I don't ask this question because I want to know the answer.
The questions I'm trying to answer are:
- Are you intelligent?
- Are you diligent and well prepared?
- Are you self-aware?
- Have you put any thought into what you want and why you're here?
To find out the answers, I can't just ask those directly unfortunately!
I ask this question to every candidate I interview. My expectations for this question are very low.
I find it's a very effective screener for low effort applications. A lot of candidates I interview haven't even looked at our company website.
If you're the kind of person that's doing zero preparation for a job interview, I've already learned something about you.
Many people I interview just answer the question very directly:
- "I got laid off"
- "My current company is returning to office and I want to work from home".
- "I've been working at X for 5 years now and I'm bored"
- "I want to make more money"
- "I want to work with an international team"
.. honestly, that's all totally fine.
I agree that there's no need to pretend about your motivations—I'm not expecting a lot of enthusiasm about writing boring business software at my company.
On the other hand, if you've done some basic research about the company or the role and can ask some good questions—I'm learning something about your intelligence, conscientiousness and self-awareness, which are actually the things I'm testing for.
Job interviews are full of latent variables like this. As an interviewer I want to find out if you're good at X, but I can't just ask "are you good at X?". I need to test you out by asking other questions that demonstrate X.
- Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy.
- Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day.
- I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats.
- I think there's something in it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/
- It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time.
My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...
A strong link problem is where "overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is".
In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy.
But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I've ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.
One tiny tip.. :) you can pass a block to `.to_h`, so instead of using `.map` + `.to_h`:
h.map { |k,v| [k, v] }.to_h
h.to_h { |k,v| [k, v] }Influx provides customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to help build out a new team.
Our engineering team is currently very small so we keep it simple and focus on delivering value: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, hosted on Heroku and AWS.
There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Influx provides customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build out a new team. Our stack uses Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. Our stack uses Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Influx builds full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
We're looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
I've been using albumworks because their HD books look fantastic. They're a bit pricy at ~$90/book but it's 100% worth it for me.. plus there are heaps of other alternatives if you're on a budget.
An important part of the process is trimming and curating the photos down to a reasonable number. With digital it's so easy to end up with thousands of picture you never look at.
Putting together an album is a bit of work, but I found they key is not to overthink it. The end result is that it's much easier to show people and it's more interesting for people to flick through.
Also, when I'm on holiday, I got annoyed with sharing on instagram because of how it compresses the hell out of images, so I ended up making my own photo blog for friends and family to follow along.
I've got my workflow set up where I can post-process photos in Adobe Lightroom and then update my site with a Makefile and a folder full of JPGs. It's easy enough to do even at the end of a hectic day of travel—no messing around with blogs and static site generators. If you're curious: https://dn.ht/journal/ :)
More recently, for shorter trips I've also tried shooting with a film camera. Like another commented here mentioned, I find it can help stay more in the moment and you get a nice little surprise when you get your rolls back from the developer.
We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)
Could eliminating previous solutions help reduce the search space meaningfully?
It’s an incredibly fascinating book that runs through all the history, science and politics coming out of the most recent ice age. Highly recommend!
https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/...
Influx is looking for talented software engineers to join our small but growing team.
We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.
Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.
The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.
What we’re looking for:
- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
- Top-notch communication skills are essential.
- Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)