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innomatics

87 karma · joined April 12, 2018

Kiwi developer in Australia
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innomatics··on Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
Good on you.

I've always thought that the preparedness of employees to boot seniors out of their booked meeting rooms was a bellwether of good corporate culture. Places that values everyone's time and leaders follow process by example.

innomatics··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)
The Volte | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (must be Australia, NZ, or UK resident) | Full-time

Help us to scale our P2P fashion rental marketplace, enabling people to enjoy the clothes they want, but more affordably and sustainably than by filling their closets.

Work will be a mix of data and platform engineering + feature related tasks. The right candidate will enjoy a high level of autonomy to optimise and innovate with our modern web stack (Elastic, Django, GraphQL, React / Next.js).

Enjoy working in a fun and growing industry. We promote a culture focused on learning together, whilst building features our customers love to use.

Salary: AUD140K+

Read more here: https://thevolte.com/page/jobs-senior-software-engineer Apply link: https://form.typeform.com/to/HYZvyc3i

innomatics··on Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
Ok I'll bite.

If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that.

If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle.

I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter.

If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.

innomatics··on Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
I love Django but think this is a pretty sensible stack for a single developer who is strong at JS.

You are still going to have to make a lot of correct library decisions to implement key features like auth and a DAL. Nest JS is an interesting batteries included approach (haven't tried). TypeORM had a lot of issues few years ago but might be getter better.

Disagree re: TypeScript though. Most libraries worth using have types or are TS native these days. I find myself much more productive writing TS on solo projects with less foot gunning.

innomatics··on Lichess gets a big upgrade. It doesn't go as planned
Yeah despite being an interesting post about Scala, I came for the harrowing tale of a big deployment gone wrong. Downtime, angry customers, seat of the pants debugging and straight to prod gambles to save a sinking ship.

Instead, a smug tale of a huge upgrade that went unexpectedly smoothly - with a performance problem swiftly solved. Still a good story, and kudos to the team. Just not the horror show I came for.

innomatics··on Opinionated products breed passionate customers
The examples of strong opinions are really poor in the article. The one you've quoted isn't an opinion at all - nobody would prefer a nuisance over collaborative scheduling!

It's a shame because I do agree with the premise. Opinionated software is easy to use and therefore quickly carves out a niche with like-minded users.

We often hear about unpopular opinionated product decisions, but would love to read some good real examples where the PM has gone out on limb and it paid off.

innomatics··on Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept
Mine has a 'Staff Only' badge on the door that I got at the hardware store. It gets a few laughs from visitors to our home.
innomatics··on Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS
> why was this not a continuous thing?

We had the likes of Netscape Composer, Front Page and Dreamweaver. They produced mountains of un-maintainable and not non-compliant html code.

When HTML5 came along there was a big push for compliant sites. Also it made sense to have a developer use the power of CSS3 to handle layouts and responsiveness elegantly. So the WYSIWYG editors fell out of favour.

innomatics··on What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
Months 12-24 is commonly a sweet spot IMO. A year is often enough to understand the domain and problem space well and be empowered to enact complex changes. It might taper off then a bit for some as they get bored or burn out, but a 2+ year tender is going to cover that very productive period and hopefully more.
innomatics··on In Test Tubes, RNA Molecules Evolve into a Tiny Ecosystem
That's a nice explanation.

If I were him I'd ask why not just print the spikes at the vaccine factory and inject them?

TBH I'm not sure if it's easier/cheaper to use the 3D-printers in our cells, or its more about accurate delivery to the right places, or something else.

innomatics··on In Test Tubes, RNA Molecules Evolve into a Tiny Ecosystem
I read thinking it is was just RNA molecules in the test tubes, but they added ribosomes (protein-based enzyme translation machinery) to the mix.

You could think of ribosomes and other cellular proteins as the system hardware and DNA/RNA the software.

Whilst this experiment is nonetheless interesting, even more so the 'RNA world' theory of how life evolved from just RNA molecules, functioning as both enzymes (ribozymes) and genetic material - code that _is_ the hardware, and built itself!

innomatics··on When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code
I agree with you in the sense that I only want to work places that recognize and value great code.

But everywhere has code that stinks. And it's hard to find people with the skills and experience to get rid if it. Before it can be gotten rid off, it must be understood.

In a sense it might be valuable to use the poor code in a reading screen. Firstly so we can agree it stinks, and the reasons why. And secondly, to find people with the attitude required to clean up messes that they didn't create (good scouts).

Even when the job is greenfield, or extending great code, I'd rather have engineers with the battle scars of doing tough maintenance.

innomatics··on GitHub Actions Has Overbilling Bug
Yes I was billed 5,554,439 minutes overnight for an action that never run!
innomatics··on Ask HN: Share your personal site
Awesome! I just ran out of time chatting to the cyborg! I wanna come back later. Thank you for this!
innomatics··on Write plain text files
It was sync specifically, and four years ago. Maybe it works now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17732912

innomatics··on Write plain text files
I switched from dropbox to mega years ago when the former removed Linux support. TIL mega have version support so I need to enable that and try it out.

First thing I do on a new device is setup my mega shared drives - and there is a lot of plaintext files there!

innomatics··on Hoppscotch: Open-source alternative to Postman
As a small dev team we have a workflow to rapidly author tests integrating our internal and external graphql + rest APIs.

These tests can be run, tweaked and parameterized in various environments from the GUI, and then imported into our CI system with Newman. Its a low code approach that's saving us time so I'm grateful of the features we are getting (for free) with Postman.

innomatics··on Show HN: Budibase – An open-source low code platform
Is your landing page and hosting dashboard all built and powered by Budibase?
innomatics··on Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro
Thanks for that.

For me there's a trade-off, depending on how often I setup a new machine. Value of automating with a procedural script vs taking the opportunity to try a leaner (or more modern) toolchain.

Currently upgrade about every 2-3 years, so I do tend not to need a bunch of things each iteration, and might upgrade OS. But I'd like a backup in case e.g. hardware failure, laptop lost or stolen.

Some declarative workstation config like terraform or Ansible would be interesting.

innomatics··on Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro
That sounds really neat is it some thing you can share? I recently setup a new machine which didn't take very long, but I have run into a few things I forget so would like to set up something similar.
innomatics··on I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
Thank you! I agree with so much in this, it really strikes the right balance of clean code vs productivity.

One of my peeves is a review that points out a bug/incorrectness without offering proof, or suggesting the fix/correct way. The reviewer might observe a code smell, but it's so much better dealt with a question-comment, e.g. "did you try?" vs "this looks wrong".

I generally aim to make every comment a question ("can we..."), and not make assumptions that the author didn't think of something already. Unless I just stating an objective fact that is clearly unknown e.g. "this duplicates library function x...".

innomatics··on The Complete GraphQL Security Guide
I was surprised there was no mention of whitelisting.

If I know the queries that client apps are going to be running it would be useful to lock the API down to those. It sacrifices flexibility, but if you control apps and server, e.g. a startup then you still get the benefit of flexibility in development. Just need a system of add to the whitelist before deployment.

I have been looking for a way to achieve this with graphene but looks like there isn't a library for that yet. I'm wonder if other platforms offer this?

innomatics··on API Tokens: A Tedious Survey
This very good practice and I am pleased that the one time I got the dreaded message from GitHub and AWS, that I'd done the unthinkable (on a public repo), the keys were only for accessing a single junk dev S3 bucket - phew!

But no amount of layering makes the problem go away. Sometimes god-like keys are unavoidable. Those needed by Terraform etc are an example that comes to mind.

innomatics··on API Tokens: A Tedious Survey
> Woops

Could require a POST or maybe even HTTP DELETE to guard against woopsies. The latter has semantic niceness about it.

innomatics··on Patterns in Confusing Explanations
Should these be anti-patterns? Perhaps calling something an anti-pattern is also a confusing way to explain things, or maybe that term has gone out of style now.
innomatics··on Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups
>A stack is spawned from a database backup and once it passes tests, replaces the previous one.

I like this approach, although risky if you mean you routinely replace the production db.

My preferred setup is to automate restores into a pre-prod environment, apply data masking and run tests there. It's not a replacement for full DR exercises, but at least it automates the backup verification process as part of your build system.

innomatics··on Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?
I can also recommend serverless.com framework for local development and running lambdas offline.

AWS provides a docker image for emulating DynamoDB which works great for local dev and will commonly be paired with lambdas.

Another option I have used recently for implementing node web services is https://github.com/apex/up which also has a nice local dev experience.

innomatics··on All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Nice. I liked the trick in the article, but was wondering if it might confuse the next admin who needs to figure it out.

Was also thinking of customising the login greeting to mention the file (/etc/motd).

innomatics··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
This is great idea and I love the name.

Like some others hear I'm more interested in the carbon cost of purchases. How long it takes to earn the cost is something my brain automatically calculates! (maybe younger folks don't do that).

I recently worked on an idea to try and build a movement to rally people around taking action to benefit the CO2 problem during a specific month of the year: https://march2zero.com

innomatics··on mRNA's next challenge: Will it work as a drug?
Thanks for the Kary Mullis story. I performed thousands of PCRs and even made some batches of taq many years ago but never knew about its ideation! I knew some pretty out there biochemists though.
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