epynonymous

have used swift since version 2.x to create several mobile apps so i consider myself proficient, for the record, i have also used php, nodejs, c/c++, java, ruby, python, and golang quite extensively. i consider myself a full stack developer.

regarding swift, i am not a fan of the language at all, i use it more out of necessity, when i started to write ios apps, swift was available and i had already gotten used to not having to deal with memory management and such so chose the language, i also thought objc as a language for ios apps was a bit too verbose after looking at some tutorials, i had been used to using interpreted languages and syntactically concise languages like golang so thought i'd give swift a try.

somehow, over the years, i've managed to write a few apps with swift, so it does the job, the 2 things i dislike the most is the "as/as?/as!" statement, e.g. when i have a dictionary like object [String: Any] and having to "as" that is annoying to me, and you can't cast which to me is more direct, you have to first "as? Int" and then de-convert the optional with an !

The second thing i really hate about the syntax is the whole thing with "let" constants, i'm fine having to check for NULL first, but to do if let apples = fruits["apples"] as? String {...}, i guess this is kind of related to the first issue.

my swift code is such a spaghetti mess of these statements, i imagine a lot of it has to do with me, but this doesn't seem to be a problem with other languages. it could also be that i'm just trying to plow through the code so that i can get functionality working asap.

agree with your point, but i don't see any performance comparisons, at the end of the day, i'm looking at performance and stability as a leading factor for why i choose a particular library over another. obviously there are other factors like documentation, how well a library is maintained (i.e. any checkins in the last few weeks because there are bound to be bugs), popularity (i.e. github stars), and generally the interface of the library, is it methodical or cumbersome?

i manage a lot of teams in a remote site, here are my thoughts, it starts with leadership at the remote site, make sure this person and you are aligned, to build alignment, trust goes a long way, but in the absence of trust, since that takes time to build, make sure your goals (short and long term) are clearly stated and known to him/her and that they can convey that message to the team. at that number, also make sure that the next level managers are getting the right message.

face to face is always best, zoom is great, wiki pages, etc.

Thanks for the note

and dolce & gabbana a few months ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-07/dolce-gab...

i live in shanghai and have ridden in many byd's, basically the compact car model is very popular for didi drivers which is the equivalent of uber/lyft here. I'm not 100% certain if that compact byd is 100% electric, but it seems to drive quiet. There are government incentives to buy electric cars, less tax, lower price, the license plate is also a lot cheaper. In shanghai a license plate costs 100k rmb (15k usd) and you have to compete with tens of thousands others in a lottery system to get the right to buy one in the first place, for electric cars it's less than 100 usd. Some workarounds are to purchase a license plate from out of shanghai, but that means you can't drive on the highways and expressways during rush hour traffic (7:00-10:30 and 15:00-20:00 mon-fri), if you're caught by any of the millions of cameras, that's a 3 point fine and 200 rmb (you get 11 points per year which means you need to retake drivers ed. And re-test).

The byd's i've ridden in seem ok, quite underpowered, but good for city driving, i don't know how good the mileage is for one charge, but it's comfortable to sit in for a small compact, never had an issues with it as a passenger. Then again, i would never buy one of these myself, it's about 280k rmb, this is for a domestic car, there are a lot of other choices at that cost point for foreign cars even.

I just test-drove a model x tesla today, much nicer, but not the same price point, about 790k rmb.

I think warren buffet or someone invested a lot in byd, they have an suv version, too.

41yo, no debt (mortgage paid off), decent savings, investments, good job, but i'm nowhere near fu money or retirement. family came during my mid-30's which has been a high point for certain, but i think from a health perspective, body's not like it used to be, gained a lot of weight, recovery from working out is taking longer, stamina is deteriorating, libido is weakening, deaths in family are becoming more commonplace.

overall i think each decade has had good and bad moments, i dont necessarily think collectively any decade has been better or worse than any other, just different types of good (and bad) and different experiences.

having a family has been a blessing for sure so perhaps that's one of the reasons why the results are such.

one thing i do think about, more often than i'd like, is when i get to a certain age where health has declined significantly, teeth have all fallen out, cartilage in all joints have worn out or thinned to the point where it hurts to walk, taste buds have recessed, risk of a heart attack or stroke increases, aside from having grandkids, quality of life has gone down the drain, i wonder if it's still worth it, somewhat morbis, and probably wont know until you get there.

i think the point is to enjoy the ride to eternity, every decade is a blessing so take the good with the bad

the pricepoint is good, relative to the jetson tx1/2 (299-749 usd) and xavier (1099 usd).

some of my notes, there is a massive heatsink on this thing, probably for both the a57 cpu and maxwell gpu, this will make your case a bit larger than say the rpi.

not sure how the a57 compares to rpi’s a53, i assume both are armv8, quad-core.

the inputs seem identical to rpi 3 model b+, hdmi, ethernet, 4 usb (seems 2.0), mini usb, there’s also an additional usb looking port on top of hdmi.

storage seems the same as rpi, except that it’s built in 16G mmc flash whereas rpi you need to separately plugin a microsd card.

overall this has potential if you need to do more gpu intensive work, i like the form factor.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...

totally agree, the main gripes are the first generation pencil and the screen bezel, only the cpu and screen were upgraded, such a small incremental change.

i meant from a reliability/stability perspective, i guess you partly answered it in that wireguard requires you to run your own vpn servers, i assume wireguard's just a client. and how stable you can maintain your vpn servers is under your control.

also use expressvpn, close to 4 years now, it’s typically quite stable and i live shanghai, the updates are quite frequent, i suppose it’s to circumvent or make the service more available and the locations are plentiful. the cost is pretty high, 99 usd a year, but if you refer enough users, there’s a 20 usd discount.

the speeds are not great, but it just maybe because i’m in china, i couldnt watch hbo go or stream netflix at the time, i use it generally for programming.

anyone use wireguard? i hear it’s extremely lightweight and can be used between containers, but curious if it’s beneficial for common use like netflix?

fyi, i thought about creating a product to automate officiating of sports, but it’s quite complicated to get right, especially for extremely faced fast paced sports, like basketball, you basically need to take video of different angles and process that frame by frame. sportsvu was technology that is able to track things like whether the shooter is behind or on the three point line, but hasnt gotten to the point where it can monitor fouls and such.

this is exactly the reason why i feel the nba getting into gambling is such a problem, it’s true that gambling on the nba happened before the nba decided to get involved, but i dont see how the nba can totally regulate match fixing.

regarding his point about separating the login process in multiple pages, not only does spotify do this, google, outlook, they all do this, i think it’s because there’s enterprise custom single sign on which requires a different flow, so they commonize the parts from enterprise and consumer. i’m not saying that i think this is a good workflow or not, just saying that there’s reason to it. and it probably breaks password managers, but for enterprise, there are a lot of different password managers like vmware workspace one, etc which may be different from 1password

This was back in 2010, now that same place to buy is around 8m, at its height it was 12m, i think it rents for 10k now.

several corrections, apartments are typically leased for 70 years, 40 is for commercial property which are sometimes inhabitable.

some apartments are finished, these days it’s more likely you’ll find a fully finished apartment, ready for move in, but they do have the unfinished apartments, but it’s too much trouble and trending down lately.

you’re right about the investment aspect, i believe in early < 2012, there was no limit to the number of houses you could own or mortgages you could take so the extremely weathly purchased apartments in batch as investment, never considered living or renting these out, many of these back then were unfinished, so you pay off the downpayment, get a mortgage, and leave it as an investment to sell later without having to deal with the complications of outfiting the apartment with drywall, hardwood floors, appliances, fixtures, paint, etc, and having to deal with rental hassles. basically what they purchased were these concrete enclosures with basic plumbing and electricity in place.

i used to rent an apartment in downtown shanghai, 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, roughly 100 sq m (1000 square foot) new apartment, fully furnished with 60 inch led tv, furniture, etc, that cost me about 6k rmb a month (1000 usd a month), to buy would have cost me about 4m rmb (670k usd), i had pretty good relationship with the landlord, her father owned about 20 similar apartments in the complex, they were from a small town.

golang backend restful api, websocket service, frontend some client side SPA or static pages. database + redis for k/v and queuing, for heavy duty stuff rabbitmq.

the nice thing about golang is that i don't need containers because my runtime package is basically a binary, golang is great about cross compiling for various platforms, too. when i used ruby or python, i'd have to package up all the dependencies and even get the runtime interpreter installed while using some tools like rbenv, etc. really, really annoying.

i will be referring myself and others, thanks!

i checked out your jobs site, that is the coolest thing ever, a command line terminal with links as directories and files, very nice work.

personally, i hate having to drag an ipad and mbp along everywhere i go, ideally if i could carry just my ipad, that would perfect.

from all the marketing for the latest ipad, i think they’re moving more towards this vision, from the ipad page:

“Like a computer...” “A12X Bionic is the smartest, most powerful chip we’ve ever made. It has the Neural Engine, which runs five trillion operations per second and enables advanced machine learning. Translation: It’s faster than most PC laptops.“ “It’s all new, all screen, and all powerful. Completely redesigned and packed with our most advanced technology, it will make you rethink what iPad is capable of. And what a computer is capable of.”

either their marketing team doesnt know about this breed of developers that need to compile software and are just trying to get the masses to replace their laptops or they know about us and are looking to truly replace the macbook pro with ipad.

i develop typically 3 types of things, backend rest services, web apps, and mobile apps. for me to truly rid myself of my macbook pro, i would need the following, or equivalents:

1. the ability to start vm’s, preferably locally, i use these to run persistent services like redis, rabbitmq, databases, etc. i have this philosophy where my dev env needs to get as close as possible to the production env (at least from a software stack perspective) which means linux, yet it cant cost me as much as a production env. homebrew is great, but i try to stay away as much as possible because it’s a little different from my production env. accessing an ec2 instance or rds instance to access my postgres database is a bit overkill, i want things fast during development, ie local. sometimes i’m in places with no wifi or 4g coverage is spotty, this would be a nightmare.

2. i use visual code for all development, sometimes vi if i dont have a gui env, visual code is lightweight and pretty solid. i’m not 100% stuck on visual code, so if there’s some browser based derivative of it or wsywig for coding then i’m good. visual code is written in electron so nodejs, so i dont think it’s impossible. web development, html, js, css, this can all be done on an ipad relatively well, all the browsers i need to support are available. there’s typically no compilation that needs to happen, unless you’re using nodejs modules on your frontend. i seem to remember some company providing a cloud service that allows you to develop remotely, i think they were bought by github/msft or someone. kind of an interesting area.

3. backend dev, typically i use golang, this becomes a bigger problem, surely i could ssh somewhere and compile, or use some x11/vnc-like tool since i prefer a graphical ide, but that defeats the purpose of my 1000 usd ipad. it’s not really a dumb terminal or thin client per se, i have enough compute power, i want to leverage it. plus i’d need to be spending all this money on ec2 like instances.

4. xcode, this is another major issue, i’m stuck on xcode, sure i could use xamarin, but i dont think that runs on ios yet either. if this were resolved, i could strongly consider scraping my macbook pro.

sounds kind of interesting if there could be a monthly service that could be purchased that provides you with remote dev envs without all the fuss of installing, managing any of it. e.g. i write code in a browser ide, it gets compiled in the cloud somewhere, deployed, and i can access it. i can connect different services to it, and testing is fully automated. i think i’d consider paying for something like this, but it’d have to be relatively cheap because otherwise i might as well do everything myself locally. i’m thinking 5 usd a month max.

i havent used chromebook, but i think it’s closer to a dev env than ipad pro at the moment, i think you can even start containers and such on it.

my guess is that elon musk will leave sooner or later, having to listen to someone with an ego like larry ellison will drive elon insane.

time to switch to aws

Unless you're fluent in chinese, it will be extremely difficult to get around in these tier 3 cities like chengdu. Shanghai and beijing are a bit more international, but even stilll, english is relatively scarely spoken. Just imagine having to go to the doctors', that would be extremely traumatic.

i'd imagine much the same process as working anywhere else abroad, you need to find work so that a company can sponsor a visa for you, to find a job start checking websites of target companies, there are a lot of multi-national companies here, if you speak/write mandarin chinese, that would be helpful.

1. large metropolitan population (1M+) 2. city, urban environment (i.e. skyscrapers, concrete jungle) 3. safe 4. good hospitals 5. airport must be international with frequent flights to major cities like london, nyc, sfo, etc 6. has a great high tech environment with lots of high tech companies 7. speaks at least 1 of the languages that i speak 8. good education environment (elementary - university) 9. not that cold 10. great food (yet to find somewhere where this isn't true) 11. must have excellent broadband (100M broadband) 12. there exists an official apple store and shopping is relatively convenient where i don't have to wait weeks or months to get new stuff i.e. i remember having to wait several weeks or months before when growing up in the suburbs, had to wait a long time for sony ps2's 12. good transportation system (subway, rail, etc)

some others that didn't make the list:

* must know people, i actually didn't know anyone when i moved to atlanta, boston, tokyo, or shanghai, i ended up making a lot of friends in each place, so i don't find this to be a requirement. * family close by, i think this is more important as i get older, i used to want to get as far away from my parents as possible, now, even though i don't live remotely close to my father, i yearn for the days where i could see him regularly. * great weather, meaning warm usually and good air quality. since i'm in the city, the air quality's not that great, so i've come to deal with it, it's important, but i've never prioritized based on this.

i live in shanghai, it fits all of the requirements above, great city, safe, lots of good high tech companies, just that my family is in the states, and the air quality could be better.

China telecom at home and probably china unicom + china telecom for the office. Audio and video work fine for me, even if it's on the 4g network. Note that my company forked over money for enterprise licenses which maybe the difference here, i think the qos is a lot higher with enterprise license.

you should try zoom or bluejeans, it's been extremely stable and consistent for us, we do conference calls from behind china's great firewall to palo alto with little to no lag, even has HD video.

i owned one of these back in the 90's, i remember connecting this to my compaq 286 with a lpt1 port or whatever you call it. no color, but i remember printing nude gifs i had back thrn of playboy playmates.

fyi, in china, when you eat at restaurants or buy things from stores you get these government tax receipts which are typically printed with these epsons, that's almost 30 years since i first started using these.