halper

SEEKING WORK | Europe ‣ Sweden ‣ Stockholm | flexible time and place

Founding engineer, team lead, technical consultant, manager ────────────────────────────────────

Relocation: no, but some travel

Tech + skills: software/architecture design/development; performance-critical code, distributed systems; Rust, Node.JS, RoR, Python, Java etc; custom data structures, algorithms.

With a background as a founding engineer, team lead and manager, I bring the expertise and experience you need to go from concept to production. While I have worked in organisations ranging from tiny through huge, my forte is working in smaller teams with meaningful technical challenges, where I specialise in delivering robust high-performance minimal-dependency solutions that operate unattended for months and years. I have built teams from the ground up, creating productive and inviting teams with clear goals and well-functioning processes.

In short, my experience can be summarised as:

   ◆ 20 years as a programmer, developer and architect;

   ◆ 10 years in roles leading and mentoring teams and individuals; and

   ◆ 5+ years in 100% remote mode.

I work best in small teams where communication paths are short, where there is—by necessity—minimal overhead and where responsibilities are clear. You are primarily concerned with what we can build together, and not with the technical details. While I am looking for interesting technical problems, you are looking for someone to take responsibility for the whole solution.

I am open to discussing part-time contracts and/or non-standard arrangements.

My CV is available on request.

comics-nitrate3w@icloud.com

I can relate to that, having not always been in such fortunate circumstances as I am now. I hope that your situation improves!

I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life.

During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group of scouts: a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch (beginning with walking to fetch the relevant supplies). Now when I am back to work, I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym, because there is not time to do both.

I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.

We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.

I find myself using the phone on the desk, placed between my keyboard and monitor. I do this because I find having stuff in pockets less comfortable than not, so I put things on my desk. I sometimes want to communicate with my wife about domestic logistics and prefer typing short replies without lifting the phone every time. My work laptop is not logged into my iCloud account, so cannot reply there. Happens a few times a week.

I have made a learning and it is that one could have an ask.

Maybe I missed something, but those are spelt "ordnance".

Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).

In my (only 2 decades of) experience, almost all "processes" and "methodologies" exist to compensate for lack of skill, care and/or understanding. As you say, what/how you do may sound outdated to others but it works because you care about what you do.

I think this applies to many "best practices" and "standards" as well. I could mention many examples of old systems/apps written by single/few deeply committed and skilled people were replaced by "better" and more "modern" alternatives that worked less well and that took a team of people to maintain. The latter used all the right tools, processes and practices but they were just not artists, for lack or a better word.

In short: in some, yes. In my country, one's private insurance company may pay damages for injuries caused by medical malpractice. This may be included in the home insurance or some health/injury/accident insurance. Otherwise and in addition, you are covered by the provider's malpractice insurance. Private medical providers must have malpractice insurance. There is also a national scheme, regulated by law, that covers all public providers, which in practice would be all the emergency departments etc.

I hear it most often with "real": it is real bad, good or weird. The Offspring wants you bad.

Since ICQ shut down, I have stayed in the right mood by using the uh-oh sound as my phone message alert for high-priority people.

I do not quite understand why these "blue books" were feared by anyone? I took exams in school/university and sure, sometimes we were nervous and ill-prepared but I do not think anyone feared paper. "Worst nightmare" seems rather hyperbolic.

Started working for a new client (which does not require me to use any particular reporting tool) just yesterday, so will give it a spin!

Edited: I can give more useful feedback after I have actually tried it for a while. I found some quirks/issues while testing it, and I post them here.

• I sometimes get 00:00:-1 during the first second when starting a new track.

• Being able to manually C(R)UD things could be useful. I already have a "break" I do not want today, just after testing how it works. Or maybe a call cut my break short, threw me back into work and at the same time prevented me from using the app. Then I end up with two hours of break instead, even though I know exactly when the interruption happened.

• I would like if the date format could equal the system's, or at least if I could set it to YYYY-MM-DD :)

• Can imagine defining one's own track names would be useful, for example if one works for several clients or has other types of activities. Seems like properties are name, colour and whether it is a type that should have a note.

Interesting. My adventurous child (soon 10) has been under thrice and generally remembers nothing unpleasant, despite it being a bit worrying for the parents. She has been a bit confused and weird upon waking up, but whatever they have given her to ease her transition into waking life appears to have made her forget it. She tends to remember talking to me (or watching Bluey) in the OR and then she is talking to some doctor in another room, wondering why they are not putting her to sleep. The experience has been quite smooth despite one of the times taking place in more of an emergency setting after an accident.

I subscribe to a magazine that publishes tests and reviews of everything from lawn fertiliser to spices, via vacuums and mobile phones. It costs money and I trust that they are not bribed.

It seems rather certain an end to advertising would mean the death of lots of low-quality "media".

A picked nit, perchance, but you may have meant "trawling". Not sure how much trolling the NSA does :)

I was right-leaning when I was young and then I saw where the policies of the last three decades have taken us and I do not like it. I have earned a top-percentile salary in a rich western country and paid lots in income tax, and I would happily give more away to make sure people who make different life choices are taken care of and get more chances in life. The rich need no more money.

But is the point not that the person who needs to pay this tax, if they accept the free gift of land etc, still gets to keep 55%?

There are cases that can be imagined (a child inheriting an old house in a high-COL location) where it feels unfair, but in this case it sounds like free money. Surely the government is not asking for more money than the land is worth, or something like that?

For me, there are a lot of applications that I want to be able to load regardless of whether I have a connection to the Internet or not: calendar, notes, mail etc. They can sync/send/whatever whenever I am next online.

I have noticed on some smaller ad delivery sites that they use fake seconds. The "seconds" are actually 1.5–2 seconds long. If anything can be made worse, let's do it!

While there is more talk about emails, programming is addressed toward the end: "[…] this will affect computer programming languages as well. Right now I can open a codebase, […]"

I absolutely hate complexity, and will work very hard to avoid it. So hard, in fact, that it can seem that my productivity is zero for long periods of time. I will think for days or rewrite the same thing several times if the code is important enough and then—sometimes—out plops some small piece of code that does the right thing.

Most people I have worked with get very impatient with me. I tend to work best with things that actually have to work all the time. I have written code that sits forgotten doing its thing for many years, while more visible contributors get kudos for solving disasters on weekends. Not bitter, of course ;)

That is definitely one measure, but it is also an economy where someone working at the restaurant in a hotel in Miami earns about one bottle of water per hour. If the bottled water is expensive or if the salary is low is a matter of perspective.

A more important question: is there a printer that can be bought for money that is good, lasts long and is made to actually delight the user?

While I was not able to read the article, my circle of friends seems to agree that (anecdotally, without much science) aging happens in bursts. It is at least how it feels like when you get kidney stones just after a herniated disc, or when you one winter just stop being able to handle the cold.

With all due respect to your experience and with sincerity, I must ask: did you miss Trump's first presidency? Surely that was the time to become disillusioned with the USA, if not before?

1 small node is a 100 drives. So the small circles represent 100 drives each, I think. Not sure what they … do, though.

It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules …

I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.

I concur: was a very good read! Can wholeheartedly recommend.