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fergyfresh

69 karma · joined February 18, 2016

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fergyfresh··on Ask HN: Do senior engineers have a mental model before coding?
In my experience its purely random if/when someone will care about that. You just have to do a lot of interviews and if you're still coming up with near optimal solutions in the allotted time you should be okay.

I also do not think Senior Engineers have better mental models of these code trivia questions than Junior Engineers do on average. Seniors spend more time on architecture and facilitating Juniors to be more productive so I dk.

I have never been in an interview where piecing out the problem solving and debugging outside of whatever the IDE/editor of choice was frowned upon.

Maybe they just wanted to see you solve the solution in the pair programming window and thought you were copy/pasting your solutions from someone that was helping you off screen.

fergyfresh··on WeWork Files for IPO
WeWork does for office space what companies like Just Works does for HR stuff.

We are a small company that works out of NYC and WeWork is great for New York. Most office leases have a 2-5 year minimum and you have you deal with getting office furniture, janitorial services, etc. It's a LOT of overhead for a small company. Also they let you go month to month or sign up for multiple years at a discount.

Also you don't have to worry about overpaying for office space as wework lets you grow from office to office without having to change your whole office setting slash commute. Its also not HORRIBLE pricing wise if you're okay with having a slightly smaller office space, because it does have a common area with free coffee, milk, beer, etc.

TLDR: WeWork is more than just a sexy startup office space. It also gives you flexibility until you get big enough to be able to need a massive office.

fergyfresh··on An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python
Use Flask-Ask and Zappa and deploy to AWS Lambda. I use that setup and have been running for free on AWS infra for about 6 months now.
fergyfresh··on An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python
I recently contributed to Flask-Ask and have been developing apps for Alexa for a while now. The APIs/Boilerplate code for the `easier way` is definitely harder than Flask-Ask is right now.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?
I wholeheartedly agree with what you said. There is a time and a place for leaving legacy code alone. I also know from first hand experience some things are just too far down the hacky rabbit hole and you just gotta cut of the dead stuff and start over sometimes. But on the other hand, the only times I've done that in my career the code was written in a very anti-pattern style pretty much against all language guidelines and had hidden side effects everywhere. It was a mess to figure out how some features worked so I just rewrote some features in 1/10th of the time it took the original maintainer to piece in similar bug fixes in the legacy code.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
Don't write off saleor though. It's basically fully featured OOTB, all you really have to do is integrate payments and your own AWS setup if you don't wanna use Heroku. Probably easier than using Squarespace and def cheaper. I haven't looked into Shopify or Sellfy though.

It has taxes and configurable shipping costs by region. I was going to use Shopify or Squarespace until I found saleor. I definitely agree with using Etsy first though to gain traction before trying to get higher margins by rolling your own.

fergyfresh··on Show HN: Alexa skill for Hacker News that summarizes articles
Is this on github, I'd love to contribute!
fergyfresh··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
I did this for google play music. I have a crude working version of scraping out the setlists from setlist.fm here, https://github.com/fergyfresh/setlist-on-a-playlist/blob/mas...

I'll work on this tonight to make it better at handling errors where it will force to find the most recent one that isn't blank, because if there are no songs in the most recent entry it will return a blank list.

fergyfresh··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
I'd be willing to work with you as I have built a googleplay music version of this a while ago. https://github.com/fergyfresh/setlist-on-a-playlist

I took it a step further to make a playlist out of the bands most recent setlist, so its similar, but not the same. It's currently just a cli that allows you to make a playlist on your google play music based on a band's most recent setlist, provided it was posted on setlist.fm. Most of the bands that I listen to have the setlist.fm posted basically the same night of the show.

Would love to help, leverage, or even refactor some of your stuff so that we could use virtually any music playing platform to do this.

fergyfresh··on Who Killed the Junior Developer?
I LOVE THIS MORE THAN YOU COULD EVER BEGIN TO KNOW!
fergyfresh··on China’s Tencent Buys 12% Stake in Snap
Not that its computationally hard to say is this a naked person (#notahotdog from silicon valley). It's more along the lines of show me all naked pictures of ME on the internet, is probably more computationally hard.
fergyfresh··on China’s Tencent Buys 12% Stake in Snap
100% related to the Facebook having an algorithm to blacklist photos based on naked photos of ppl. Snapchat has those already for like 35% of its users or something I'd bet.
fergyfresh··on Show HN: Metaballs
That is weirdly satisfying to watch...
fergyfresh··on Thanks, but I have accepted another offer
Clearly the poster was talking about the excessive use of `like` which he deems as the typical vocabulary of a teenage girl which is what you're attempting to be upset by. It had nothing to do with teenage boys being significantly more professional than teenage girls, or anything of the sort.
fergyfresh··on Indie games don't make money
What are some games you have made? What do you typically use to develop them? Are they all of the same genre. I'd love to hear answers to any of those questions. I have made a few that I am not willing to share and starting to get into making FPS/adventure style games now.
fergyfresh··on Git and GitHub Integration Comes to Atom
Many of these features already exist as an optional package.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: What's your working day like?
Fair. I am almost diamond and play like its a full time job when my girlfriend isn't around.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: What's your working day like?
You only play a half hour of Overwatch a day. I call bullshit.
fergyfresh··on The ORM Debate Still Rages On
EXACTLY. You can drop into SQL in many ORMs and you use that sparingly as it is much nastier to maintain nuances when switching between different SQL implementations like MySQL and PostgresQL, for example.
fergyfresh··on The ORM Debate Still Rages On
From what I know about using both it seems like MANY of the benefits were missed. With ORMs you don't really need to worry about database connections or specifying stuff like that. You can also make functions that execute pure SQL in ActiveRecord which I've done before and is in Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial. You can also switch between different SQL implementations without worrying about having to refactor stuff, as its usually just an initial configuration/migration. I am not entirely sure but this is from medium so I usually take anything tech related on medium with a grain of salt. If you don't have your tables set-up right you're going to have to do a bunch of weird table joins and stuff, but you can also look into fixing ur databases. DATA STRUCTURES AND TABLE ORGANIZATIONS ARE KING.
fergyfresh··on To Learn Programming, Do Projects You Care About
Excuses are the nails that build the bridge to failure.
fergyfresh··on To Learn Programming, Do Projects You Care About
I had that problem too. So then I started making things that I thought were humorous. -Very innapropriate flappy bird clone. -An app that makes a playlist out of a bands most recent setlist on google play. -An app that reads articles using tts and allows you to play/pause/save them. -An app that lets you tell people you are on the way (like yo but with location streaming)

Just think of something you think is funny or talk to your friends that are into tech either directly or tangentially. A lot of my ideas come from phone calls my Mutual Fund investing best friend.

fergyfresh··on Ask HN: Should I be nervous about using React?
I'm not one of a bandwagon jumper, but I have been hearing similarly nice things about Angular 2 being equally as un-opinionated as React in many ways. I just hate losing the momentum that I currently have with React/Rails apps.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: Should I be nervous about using React?
You bring up a good point. The biggest point of using React for me was using React-Native which Preact doesn't seem to have. I could definitely use Preact for most of my projects as I really only use React for its ability to make front-end components with ES6, so I will have to look in more detail. Thanks for the reference.
fergyfresh··on Ask HN: Should I be nervous about using React?
I guess the license doesn't cause much pain currently and if I have to sue and lost the license I could always have A2 in my back pocket.
fergyfresh··on Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing
You will get localized date formatting among a few other things probably. I am just saying you could use location from the HTTP header that is meant to tell the server what languages you speak. The VPN portion could really only be fixed by allowing you to select and save an address that is originally defaulted to IP.
fergyfresh··on Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing
[Accepted-Language] in the HTTP header and the location based on the IP address (Google has a super easy API for this) is the easiest way that I could think of. Both are pretty easy to implement as I have done both before.
fergyfresh··on Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing
If you look at your http request headers @stevoski do you have more than one [Accepted-Language]? Is one of them Spanish?

Also, @drusenko (forgot your name on HN)[Edited to add his name], it SHOULD be pretty easy to change your code to switch languages based on [Accepted-Language] and still do localization for payments/time/calendar stuff like that. PM me if you want.

fergyfresh··on Proxy (YC S16) Is Digitizing Your Presence
Do you encrypt the Bluetooth signal at all or it is all out there? That is the only thing that scared me, you obscure user information with a unique-id-key, but if I'm close to your office I can just get your key and get in the building.
fergyfresh··on Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything
Is there another way of immersing yourself deeply in Spanish without going to a Spanish speaking country? Not really. It's the same concept really, it gives you an entirely different outlook on things. There are complex problems out there that a lot of people in big companies still don't know that can be solved with software.

Also to say no apps or games will be able to hit it big... Well, just look at Pokémon Go.

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