dlowe

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can get things done across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 10 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can get things done across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 5 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can get things done across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 5 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can get things done across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 5 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can get things done across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 10 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK | Portland, OR | Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can solve problems across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code. Most recently I've been working in Python and Rust, but over the years I've also done tons of work in C, Perl, Clojure, Go, Ruby and more.

I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 10 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

SEEKING WORK - Portland, Oregon or Remote

I'm David, a programmer with over 20 years' experience. Most of my career has been back-end focused, and that's where I'm at my best, but I can solve problems across a full stack.

I like to solve problems with code, and I particularly enjoy the challenge of working with legacy systems; if you need someone on hand to troubleshoot and maintain (or even migrate away from!) an abandoned-but-still-important system, maybe I can help.

Currently looking to fill roughly 10 hours/week.

Contact in my bio. Hope to hear from you soon :)

The limit has since been bumped to 4G. We don't have a way to change this per-customer yet, but we're not as tightly constrained for RAM as we used to be, so we could probably negotiate something if you really need more.

I'm not sure if I can do any better than "troubleshooting can be hard", frankly. The actual details are all tangled together in a way that resists summary.

Piping it in allows the build driver to be agnostic about the physical location of the container.

Thank you!

I've been telecommuting for 10 years. When I'm the only remote employee, and there isn't a culture of remoteness, I believe it's my job to have the discipline and do the extra work to stay connected, not the rest of the team's. It's a challenging dynamic, but it's not impossible, and I just don't think it's reasonable to expect the entire team to adapt to the exceptional case, instead of the other way around.

I'm the aforementioned employee hired off a who's hiring thread... and I'm having a great time :)

Fantastic. Thanks :)

I don't know the official policy, but anecdotally, I won with an entry that used libperl back in 2000: http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2000_dlowe

How did you record that?

More-or-less yes. I started compressing and obfuscating the code after https://github.com/dlowe/death/blob/7fcbcabb9f69bf0cdfff4651...

Sorry about the commit messages. Think of them as part of the obfuscation ;)

FWIW, if anyone is curious to see the process of building my entry ("Conway's game of death") I just made the repo public: https://github.com/dlowe/death

This contest is great. I'm so glad it's happening regularly again :)

San Francisco, CA / Montreal, QC or REMOTE

Xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/) is looking for someone who loves to build for the web and is happy owning projects and products from detailed definition through implementation (front- & back-end) and maintenance.

We're a 25ish-person, largely technical company with small offices in Montreal and SF. We're very open to remote hires.

We're using python/django, mysql, javascript/jquery, flex, VB.Net (!), and so on and so forth. Specific technical aptitude is far less important than a willingness to learn and a desire to build great stuff on the web.

Contact me by email (in profile) to chat about it!

Thank you for reading & responding.

I think I agree that yacc wasn't a great example for my purposes, but hang on. My point isn't that learning specific technologies isn't valuable, it's just that it is... specific. Even something as general as graph traversal is still not as ubiquitous as lines and pages of code. There may be more generalizable knowledge in learning yacc than there is in learning the Ruy Lopez, but either way, it's not as general as tactics.

Your fourth paragraph is a bit alarming to me, because I agree completely, and I hate to think that I wrote the opposite. I am most emphatically NOT trying to suggest that abstract knowledge is more valuable than practical work. What I do suggest is that being able to reason about code in general is more valuable than expertise with any one specific technology. Consider two coders who have both written AST generators with yacc: can they talk about the low-level, tactical design decisions they made in their code, and the implications of those decisions, and alternatives that they considered?

Thanks again.

I don't suggest just reading code, I suggest reading code critically, with an eye to how it can be improved.

You're right that casually reading 10 blog posts doesn't help one's writing. But reading them carefully and critically, trying to concretely identify how the author has crafted the language to support their goals? I believe this absolutely can improve one's writing; indeed, I think it's an important part of improving.

Yes, of course, you still have to knuckle down and do a lot of writing at some point, too :)

Your point about studying code & improving it in isolation is good. The weakest part of the analogy, in my opinion, is that in tactical chess puzzles there's actually a right answer.

On the other hand, if you have a chess puzzle but not its answer, you can still practice recognizing the tactical situation (hung pieces, checks, forks, pins, etc.) That's closer to what I was suggesting, and I still think it's useful: learning the jargon first, and then reading code and taking the time to describe it in terms of that jargon. The purpose isn't to "discover things you don't know", it's to concretely drill and internalize things you do know.