108 karma · joined July 29, 2020
previously https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgunsch, new account corresponding with a name change
In this situation we were discarding the HTTP response without reading it before closing, which kept Go from reusing the connection. I didn't dig quite as deep as this post's author, but I imagine the same RST behavior was happening under the hood.
Instead, I started reading through one of their highlighted examples --- the Go repo (https://codewiki.google/github.com/golang/go). This might be the worst high level overview of Go and its repo I've read. Mostly accurate but unhelpfully verbose, spending lots of words on trivia, and not at all making a compelling pitch for Go as a language or toolchain, how to use it, or how to work on it.
I also wrote a more detailed blog about my experiences and advice for a break if it's useful! https://gunsch.cc/2024/04/06/sabbatical-review.html
He was already getting into this kind of art spectroscopy at the time, and the things he'd showed us at the time that they'd already discovered were wild. IIRC, they had laid out many Rembrandts on the same large "scroll" of canvas, identified where they were painted relative to one another on the scroll, and even identified some paintings of unclear authorship by thing them to that same scroll.
It was not at all surprising to see him move to Amsterdam and keep working with the Rijksmuseum. I smile every time I see this work pop up.
One of the "open secrets" about OpenAPI's history was how Smartbear spun out the OpenAPI spec to be a community-managed spec, but with the requirement that there wouldn't be official tooling offered with it --- arguably to protect Smartbear's investment in Swagger. (it's been a minute so specifics are hazy but IIRC it was something like this). The tooling ecosystem feels pretty disjointed as a result.
Compare to gRPC/protobuf, where the specification and tooling have been developed together. Parsers, static analyzers, code generators, documentation tooling all happen in lockstep with spec development, and the ecosystem feels much more cohesive.
Location: Seattle, WA
Remote: open to remote, hybrid, or in-person in Seattle
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: backend, frontend, infra/ops, client devices
Résumé/CV: https://gunsch.cc/assets/img/resume-2023.pdf
Email: andrew.j.gunsch@gmail.comClosure brought modules, requires, compile-time type checking and optimizations to JavaScript years before TypeScript was on the scene. I wouldn't dare start a new project with Closure. But it was such a spiritual predecessor to what we have today in TypeScript, and has a special place in my heart too.
Couple stories from memory:
* What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back".
* I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know
* Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community.
* I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since.
* Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?
My best managers weren't ones who knew every detail of each project and could give unsolicited effective advice. They were ones to whom I could tell what was going on on my project, could ask for help, could tell them what I needed, and then rely on them to follow through on helping make that happen. Sometimes that was needing more time for a deadline, sometimes it was needing a mediation in a complicated relationship with another team, and sometimes it was using manager clout to go escalate a request for compute resources.
In any case, two-way communication is going to create a more effective relationship than expecting your manager to simply _know_ what you need.
It's been a looooong time :-o
edit: aaaand it's back
It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement account balances.
I've got a friend who went through the Code Fellows program last year. They advertise 93% job placement within six months. Based on conversations we had through his program, it seems like they're generally teaching a well-rounded set of skills, though tbf it's still a bootcamp, not a full CS degree.
Six months later, only 2 out of the 10 members of his cohort have gotten software jobs. He's still applying, but he's getting very few interviews and so far no offers.
Source: I was the VA.gov engineering lead for awhile
Helping people who need it _now_ rather than in ten years helps _them_ start contributing more effectively to their communities, or blunts negative effects of them _not_ having that help for the next ten years.
Sure, it's a bet you can make that you'll grow your money faster than it would have impact being put into the world --- but it's one that takes a certain amount of hubris.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
Ad Hoc is trying to make federal government better by fixing its tech from the inside. We work on Healthcare.gov, VA.gov, and many other public web services, and focus on bringing product and technology best practices into government agencies. No defense or intelligence work, just civic services.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
Ad Hoc is trying to make federal government better by fixing its tech from the inside. We work on Healthcare.gov, VA.gov, and many other public web services, and focus on bringing product and technology best practices into government agencies. No defense or intelligence work, just civic services.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
One weird thing we've discovered working on VA.gov for the last five years is that we on the contractor side actually have retained a lot more institutional knowledge than the VA has. It's a problem! We think that knowledge should be on the government side, but the structure isn't there yet: USDS and 18F have rotational term limits that keep people moving through, and at the VA (not sure about other agencies) they're just in the last couple years building out an organization to do that long-term product ownership and institutional knowledge retention, even if implementation teams come through. It's moving in the right direction but it's slow, large-organization change, with a lot of extra slowness that's unique to government.
I work at one of the contractors in the space (Ad Hoc [1]) and get to work with people from USDS every day. Like others have commented here, the government salary ranges are a problem for them to hire enough. Our last COO had been an administrator at OPM, and would say things like "on the government side, I couldn't ever hire the kinds of software developers that we're able to here on the contractor side."
[1] https://adhoc.team/ -- we're hiring, full-time remote!
I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
Open-sourcing hasn't cultivated much in the way of public engagement with the projects, but it's done a lot in terms of making development easier for the range of contractors + VA employees we have, and (IMO) nudged toward better decision-making with the underlying knowledge that everything we do is publicly viewable.
Other federal agencies routinely come to VA asking to learn from their digital modernization efforts, and I suspect the open-source stance has been a big part of that.
(I also work at Ad Hoc. It's great!)
[1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-team..., repository links at the bottom
However, it's _also_ ambiguous with respect to quantity of people it refers to (singular or multiple), i.e. the "Sally and her friends" example. Does "they" refer to Sally, or the whole group? Having a a separate "singular-they" word available would disambiguate.
One interesting thing we've run across is that Public Domain source code is not considered "Open Source" in terms of OSI licensing [3]. This isn't usually relevant, but has blocked use cases like software services offering free use for OSI-licensed projects.
(To other readers: If you're interested in chatting about working on modern, open-source projects in the federal space, drop me a note! Email in profile).
[1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-team..., repository links at the bottom