hochchristoph

SEEKING WORK

Experienced Frontend Designer & Developer.

- You are a backend developer and your stuff looks "functional", but not very pretty

- You don't want to deal with any frontend tech in your perfectly engineered backend system

- You want to build your product on an extensible design system for the long term

…I'm here to help.

Location: Austria

Remote: Yes

Technologies: Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, Storybook, Webpack, TypeScript, Sketch.app

Website: https://hochstrasser.io

Email: christoph@hochstrasser.io

GitHub: https://github.com/CHH

VAT-ID: ATU68701078

To me it's amazing how many of these things have been fixed in the last couple releases of PHP. They worked really hard to fix the flaws, and still there's more coming, like property types.

One thing I'm particular exited about is the "Preloading" RFC (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/preload), which fixes one of PHP's oldest weaknesses: That code that is used on every request has to be loaded everytime a request comes in. Sure, thanks to Opcache a file only has to be compiled once, but the loading of the compiled classes into memory still makes for some overhead. With Preloading, if you use a framework like Laravel or Symfony, all core framework classes could be loaded once on PHP startup.

7 Reasons why WordPress for Your Startup Is Not Your Best and Smartest Option:

1) Self hosting stuff is always a major time sink, especially for small companies. Backups of files and DB, server OS updates, and security are all your problems. Shared hosting has incredibly old versions of software, like PHP5 or still MySQL 5.6.

2) WordPress will never be really secure, the way it's built prevents that. You will always worry if your site is susceptible to hacking and have to keep up to date with the latest security disclosures and update your site.

3) Prebuilt themes are a trainwreck when it comes to customization. Hyperspecific CSS selectors, inline CSS in style tags and attributes, shoddy PHP in templates without any real separation of template and business logic. That matters, because you don't want your site to look quite the same as everyone elses.

4) It's 13 years old and there are newer, more modern, and secure alternatives, like Ghost, static site generators, Squarespace, or Webflow.

5) CDN integration is nowadays a must, especially if you are global. Integrating a CDN into WordPress' media upload is a PITA.

6) Translating content is a major PITA in WordPress. There are newer systems that address that. Every major translation plugin in WordPress has some minor incompatibility with another plugin, e.g. Polylang didn't work well with WP Sync DB.

7) Custom field support out of the box is laughable. WordPress isn't any fun without Advanced Custom Fields.

Wow. That's the typical Medium post in a nutshell.

SEEKING WORK - Europe, On-Site

Your most productive developers are leaving suddenly and without telling you anything about their reasons? Churn eats away any team productivity?

A developer needs about 6-12 months after they are hired to be at their best efficiency. That means that even when a developer leaves and you immediately rehire, you do get at least a 50% productivity loss for more than 6 months — while paying them the same wage.

It doesn't have to be this way. Keeping your developers happy and reducing churn in your team makes you more revenue, increases the quality of your product's code, and improves your product's user experience. But it needs more than free food and pingpong tables.

I'm here to assist you. With 10 years of experience working as a senior developer, team lead, and product lead, I know what makes a developer happy and what doesn't.

---

Christoph Hochstrasser E: christoph@hochstrasser.io T: +436649228651

SEEKING WORK - Austria, Europe, On-Site

Your most productive developers are leaving suddenly and without telling you anything about their reasons? Churn eats away any team productivity?

A developer needs about 6-12 months after they are hired to be at their best efficiency. That means that even when a developer leaves and you immediately rehire, you do get at least a 50% productivity loss for more than 6 months — while paying them the same wage.

It doesn't have to be this way. Keeping your developers happy and reducing churn in your team makes you more revenue, increases the quality of your product's code, and improves your product's user experience. But it needs more than free food and pingpong tables.

I'm here to assist you. With 10 years of experience working as a senior developer, team lead, and product lead, I know what makes a developer happy and what doesn't.

---

Christoph Hochstrasser

E: christoph@hochstrasser.io

T: +436649228651

I think sometime next year when the A10X is released the question of MacBook Pro or iPad Pro will come down to the following:

“What device of, which both have the same performance and storage, do I choose? The one with the USB ports, the inflexible keyboard, bloated software and costs 600$ more, or the other one with a touchscreen, optional keyboard, and much much simpler software?”

Also I think that Apple won’t do any ARM MacBook at all. If we consider a RICE scheme for gauging priorization for such a feature like ARM CPUs in MacBooks:

Reach: Modest, there aren’t that many Mac users compared to iOS

Impact: Positive impact on Mac users is limited. Performance won’t be that better, mostly equal. Software availability could be limited for a while during a transition.

Confidence: Apple has made a couple architecture transitions on the Mac before, so they know how it works. But they don’t know how app developers will react. Will Adobe, Microsoft etc. get onboard, or jump ship?

Effort: Rather high. It’s one of the things where 10% of the implementation will need 90% of the effort. Mostly it’s just a recompile to run. But optimizing software for x86 is different than for ARM. The performance critical parts of many system frameworks which have no existing iOS port have to be rewritten to be efficient on the new architecture.

It says available starting October 26th here in Austria for Prime customers.

Gitlab users: How many hours per year do you spend on doing maintenance for your setup? (servers, updating, backups, troubleshooting, etc.)

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224723

€30K for 6 months works out to 5k per month. That's really not bad by our standards, at least in Austria.

If you make 5k before taxes you're already way above average here, because your employer usually pays around 7k per month then.

Edit: Yes, I admit it is quite low when compared against typical contracting rates in urban areas.

> Google, through V8, Chromium, Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and Dart, has a large say in the future of the web platform, browsers, apps, the future of Javascript, etc.

> Time and time again, Google has used their substantial influence and market share to make unilateral decisions affecting the web platform [1][2][3][4][5][6]; the individual merits of each decision notwithstanding, Google can do just about anything and it will affect enough of the userbase that others must compensate or follow suit.

Funny, that 15 years ago you could say the exact same thing about Microsoft. Google's increasingly like the old Microsoft.

Dear TC: The word's "knockoff" not "rival".

High-res edition [25MB]: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHa...

Let's not forget that in the US your shareholders can sue you, if they think you are not acting in their best interest.

I've started a small WordPress cheatsheet for myself here: https://github.com/CHH/cheatsheets/blob/WordPress.md/WordPre...

More tips always welcome :)

I don't think that it will take this long. They pushed out Safari 9.1 this year, which saw pretty significant changes. I think they could release the things from the tech preview with a 9.2 release for El Cap, maybe a month from now (WWDC coincidently?)

Probably at WWDC, between June 13 and June 17.