jconley

This is an interesting business decision. To rewrite such a large app must have cost a fortune. Going full native is probably going to increase the cost of future development as well. Aside from the costs of writing/maintaining the code, pushing more work to the servers is an ongoing cost. Realtime, always-connected, apps are costly to run even when you push the majority of the state management to the client and just route packets around. They must really want eyeballs in their messenger app! There must be some future plans for this app that warranted such a major effort. Taking on Tik-Tok, perhaps?

Interesting service. Have built things like this a couple times. How is the on-premise version priced? Didn't see that on the site anywhere.

Brava (https://www.brava.com) | Redwood City, CA | Full-time | On-site | https://careers.brava.com/

Brava is a leader in home "smart" cooking appliances. Our novel heating and power control technology is married with machine learning, computer vision, and a myriad of web/mobile/platform software systems to help make cooking great food at home easier.

We were recently acquired by a multi-billion dollar public company (Middleby) that owns other premium kitchen brands such as Viking and TurboChef. The whole company is staying together and we have some exciting projects planned in the near future.

Our career site isn't up to date yet but we are hiring various web, mobile, platform, machine learning, embedded engineering, and Linux engineering roles. We are primarily looking for Mid to Senior level Engineers with at least two years of experience. If you have less than two years of experience please provide references to projects you have completed (boilerplate coding school projects don't qualify).

Extras: 401k, free lunch, cash bonuses

Email: jd+jobs@brava.com

App, Web, IoT device send realtime events to a fluentd system with many events going to Segment. Web front end also loads Segment for various ad trackers. IoT device also uploads telemetry and other logs in both realtime and asynchronously and those end up in some Postgres databases.

Segment syncs our event data periodically to our data warehouse (Redshift).

We have a readonly replica of the eCommerce DB for live stats (Postgres).

And there is a time series db for system/IoT telemetry (InfluxDB).

Most of our BI queries are done in Mode. Some are done in Grafana (data in our InfluxDB and some live data). Spot check against Google Analytics or FB ad tracker...

Garry just posted a video about the criteria they used in interviews when he was there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTgzA6iKZc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288988

Note: He was one of the partners assigned to us and invested in our company with his VC firm.

They accept founders with a cornucopia of backgrounds. From people with barely an idea to people with running businesses.

I would presume the farther along your business is and the more stuck you are on that particular model the more the evaluation leans toward the business growth metrics.

When we did YC we were accepted with an idea, a landing page with some email signups, and almost a customer. They asked hard hitting questions in the interview. We did have industry connections, some unique insights, and previous startup experience.

After being "inside" (as a company founder at least) and seeing everything they write about on the "outside", I take what YC says at face value. They earned trust.

YC is looking at this from the VC/startup perspective. "Does this group of people with this company seem like they can make a billion dollar business in the next ~10 years?" They want founders that target a huge (or growing / potentially huge) market with stars in their eyes and some insight as to how to own it.

If you're content with a small business and growing slowly then you are not a good fit.

You might have a great business in the end, but still not be a fit for the model. Like others have said, YC partners miss big hits. They're not perfect. Keep going and if you have a relentless focus on month over month growth and keep your churn down then you have a chance to get VC-style growth capital. But, if you just want to bootstrap a profitable business you'll be better off doing that on your own and getting bank loans or other risk-adverse capital.

Same experience here. Been writing code for over 20 years. There's a reason we don't do big Waterfall projects any more. No amount of research uncovers all requirements. In the real world, with the ease of refactoring in powerful IDE's these days, there is no reason to spend too much time thinking about a small problem like those presented for whiteboard coding.

In practice, in an interview, this is the wrong approach. I've failed interviews for this as well.

Most of what differentiates a Senior Engineer is communication, mentorship, ability to compromise on product requirements, set realistic expectations, design solutions to big problems, think in the large and hold the whole system in their head, design API's, things like that.

I no longer do interviews that require me to write code. They're just ridiculous for the type of skills I'd hope a company would value in a Senior Engineer.

Highly recommend checking out Glenn Fiedler's stuff for a modern, standalone, take on game networking/physics code.

https://github.com/gafferongames

Brava Home | Full Time | Mobile & Web Software Engineers | Redwood City CA | Onsite | https://www.brava.com

At Brava we want to help you make food at home faster, easier, and tastier than you do today. Our oven takes the stress out of cooking with hundreds of presets to automatically cook anything from Salmon with Broccolini and Tomatoes to Hot Pockets. It does this using directed energy from infrared lamps separating the oven into three distinct zones. This allows us to cook multiple foods differently, but at the same time, by controlling the power to each zone with software. Various sensors in the oven provide the algorithms with feedback.

The oven took over three years to develop and is on the market. Customers love it. We are now heavily investing in mobile and web products to complement our great product and fuel our growth.

Join our user experience focused software team and work with world class engineers, product managers, and designers. Current needs are in react-native, responsive web, and nodejs. Looking for flexible engineers that love to build great customer experiences.

We offer competitive benefits, equity, and free lunch. As a bonus the R&D kitchen is steps away and they bring out amazing food all day long.

If you love food, it's worth a chat. On site interviews get a high class lunch on us made in the Brava. :)

Contact: jd+hn@brava.com

Check us out on Instagram @bravahome

Note, we have more positions than are currently on this page: https://careers.brava.com/software-engineer-full-stack

Sounds like your company is in a tough spot. Almost out of money? Regardless of the other issues you probably need to cockroach-up and get profitable right away.

Assuming you are a C-Corp, the rest is going to depend on your equity structure, board structure, etc. I hope you have dotted i's and crossed t's, legally speaking, to cover situations like this. Not enough info here...

brava | Mobile, Embedded, Computer Vision, and QA Engineers | Redwood City, CA | Onsite | https://brava.com

Food is at the center of everything we do. We’re going to empower you to make delicious meals at home, any day of the week.

Brava is in stealth mode, but we have been hard at work for years on an exciting new home cooking technology. We are near the finish line. Yes, we are IoT, but we didn't just slap wifi in a blender and call it done. We brought together a team of engineers, scientists, designers, and accomplished business people to create a really great product.

If you love food, or would just love to have a large impact on a consumer product at a pre-launch startup, give us a buzz!

We have a number of roles available: https://brava.com/careers

jd+hn@brava.com

Based on this study's conclusions it seems that the ability to easily retweet (or re-share on facebook) combined with social networks surfacing our engagement (e.g. JD liked this post) to our first degree network is really at the root of all of this.

I wonder how/if rumors used to spread on Twitter before retweet was a first party feature.

It really depends on why you washed out...

If you just crave variety, then doing short consulting contracts might be interesting to you. Recruiters are always looking for people to do 6mo contracts.

Redwood City, CA | Full time | ONSITE | http://brava.com/careers

Brava is stealth, so you won't find much on us. We're very close to launch. All candidates that come onsite for interviews will receive product demos. We are a team of about 65 people consisting of chefs, scientists, engineers, designers, and everything in-between. It's certainly the most diverse set of skills on a product development team I've had the pleasure to work with.

We’re an IoT company focused on elevating and simplifying the in-home food experience. Our team consists of IoT and consumer hardware rockstars who have shipped products like the August Lock, Kindle and iPhone, as well as product, marketing and business trailblazers who have led multiple companies to high-profile exits.

We have an open and transparent culture, get shit done attitude, and free lunch. Oh, and random acts of kindness (food samples) throughout the day coming out of our test kitchen.

There are a number of openings. On the engineering side we have a need for:

Build and Release Engineer [0] - We're already running a half dozen Jenkins slaves and nearly 100 jobs. We build a custom Linux system for our device, iOS, web, and various tools in-between. Work with all of our product teams to maintain a seamless build/test/release process.

Embedded Systems Support Engineer IoT [1] - We are ramping up our customer care and triage teams in preparation for launch. This role is an integral part of a team consisting of customer care professionals as well as electrical and software support engineers.

Software Engineer Mobile / Full Stack [2] - Jack of all trades? Like to be involved in all aspects of a software product? We are looking for someone to join our mobile project that can also build the API's they need on the back end. Our team is made up of all full-stack engineers that are highly flexible and work across a range of technologies.

And in marketing:

Growth Marketing Manager [3] - Be at the heart of our online marketing efforts. Work with the creative and product teams and own every step of our funnel. Run A/B tests, ad tests, user segmentation, re-engagement/re-marketing, and more.

Love food and tech? Any of this sound good? Ping me. jd+jobs@bravahome.com

Check out our careers page for more info.

[0] http://www.brava.com/build-release-engineer

[1] http://www.brava.com/embedded-systems-support-engineer-inter...

[2] http://www.brava.com/software-engineer-mobile-full-stack

[3] http://bravahome.com/growth-marketing-manager/

Many of these pitfalls can be avoided with intelligent server side rendering, which includes the router on the server, so no using client-only “#” URLs. But, that adds another significant layer of complexity to application development.

As a fun aside, Disney stock has roughly tripled since the acquisition in 2010.... https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADIS&ei=jrzSWcCRD...

I don't know anything about that situation but I, and at least a half dozen others here, were Playdom/Disney employees. I feel I did just fine in the Disney acquisition.

Redwood City, CA | Full time | ONSITE | http://bravahome.com

tldr; - We need an embedded Linux engineer for our groundbreaking kitchen device.

Brava has spent the last few years building a better way to cook food, by combining boundary-defying power with unprecedented precision and automation. We have an embedded Linux-powered user interface running state-of-the-art computer vision and control algorithms developed by our team of in-house physicists, culinary scientists and computer-vision researchers. We’ve recently raised a Series B round and are gearing up for launch.

We need an embedded Linux engineer to join our embedded team who is comfortable with developing for a multicore ARM system-on-chip; who can consider security, reliability and performance while working closely with computer-vision and physics researchers to port and optimize applied algorithms. Other development areas include bootloader tweaks, software update features and logging, telemetry and userspace drivers, collaborating with embedded and application engineers. Kernel hacking skills not required but are certainly a plus.

You would be joining Brava's amazing team of embedded Linux, application and backend engineers, so collaboration and communication skills are important. Learn more about the position on our job description page. [0]

You can email me directly at jd+jobs@bravahome.com

[0] http://bravahome.com/embedded-developer-linux/

Redwood City, CA | Full time | ONSITE | http://bravahome.com

tldr; - We need a DevOps/SRE Lead and a Junior/Mid Full Stack Web Engineer.

You probably haven’t heard of us but we’ve spent the last few years building a better way to cook food. I guess you could call it an IoT device, however, we did way more than just put a screen and wifi connection on an existing technology. We use computer vision, machine learning, various sensors, a completely novel heating system, and applied physics to cook amazing food quickly and consistently. We’ve recently raised a Series B round and are gearing up for launch.

On the technology side of the company we have teams of culinary scientists, embedded engineers, software engineers, automation engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and even a physics professor. We are all working together to build a great product. Our experienced software engineers have built a myriad of backend software to support our device, mobile apps, and web site. We have to scale always-on connections from our devices as well as mobile and web applications, support auto-updates, an eCommerce system, analytics events, device telemetry, logs, monitoring, machine learning clusters, and more. We’re largely using open source software packaged up in Docker images and orchestrated with Kubernetes, running on a mix of AWS and GCP. We want our systems to be hosted cross-region, highly available, and cloud-agnostic.

We must have secure, performant, and highly available backend systems. Right now we have a gap in our team and are in need of a DevOps Engineer to get our systems production ready. As the first hire on our DevOps team, you would be responsible for taking ownership of our deployments/infrastructure and setting the standard of how we manage it going forward.

We also need a Junior/Mid level full stack engineer, ideally with a front-end focus, that can help us create all of the things that DevOps engineer will have to manage. We work in Python/Django and NodeJS/Express, with a largely Postgres/Redis/Kafka backend.

You can email me directly at jd+jobs@bravahome.com

I tend to take a more task-oriented approach. If there is something important that is related to product, that will go in JIRA and scheduled/assigned appropriately. If I need to do something in the future that nobody else really cares about, including what I want to work on tomorrow, I'll just use slack [0] to remind me. Other than that I don't really bother with notes. I've tried in the past but things change so quickly I've never had value in reviewing notes, other than to get the action items. Notable exceptions made for board meetings and other official business.

I've also been using DropBox Paper [1] a bit recently. They have a really cool meeting template so if someone is taking notes they can easily invite the team from Google Calendar and assign simple followup tasks from there using @mentions in a checklist.

[0]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/208423427-Set-a-rem... [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/paper/smart-meeting-notes

Just a warning for everyone from California, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, etc. They do require you to certify for the background screening that you have not done any federally illegal drugs in the last 12 months, and possibly do drug tests. Might not want to spend too much time on it if that applies to you.

https://www.usds.gov/join#who

Back in 2005-2006 we ran into significant issues with the GC and pinned memory related to Windows sockets when building a networked server for XMPP. I believe the GC has improved since then for that scenario, but it was a big surprise when it happened. It was a classic case of a leaky abstraction.

http://blog.jdconley.com/2006/06/how-to-build-scalable-net-s...

This is why DevOps became a thing. It's complicated managing systems at scale. If you were using these tools and aren't at scale, well, that sucks.

Unplanned downtime is the main drawback to both hosting your own OS's and using leading edge tooling for your critical systems. It doesn't matter what the underlying system, stuff like this happens. This stuff is complicated. You will find major warts in every new system. Everything will break, often, leaving your users stranded. It takes a very long time for software to mature. [0]

That's why you see engineers with 15+ years of experience patiently waiting for new technologies to mature before putting them in place in our critical infrastructure. Sure, we'll play with them, but putting new tech in production that could easily make your entire system unavailable is too risky. Yes, three year old tech is new.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html

Interesting anecdote. As a father I feel nearly the exact opposite so I'll share my opinion.

On academics, I want my kids to learn how to learn. And to love to learn. I want them to learn to be persistent, have mental fortitude, be formidable, take risks, be collaborative, and not be afraid to fail. They should learn to be productive in whatever aspect of society they end up in. I want them to be happy. Lives are short. Childhoods are shorter. Striving to be the best at math and science academically gets a "meh" sort of reaction from me.

Yes we need those skills, and raw academic achievement is an interesting measurement, but, I'd like to see some convincing stats that it holds a causal relationship to national productivity per capita and GDP. I'm guessing that would be the goal of an education, in terms of the economy.

Matt Tucker wrote a little blog [0] about being CTO. He went from co-founder to public company CTO over 15 years...

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-flavors-being-cto-matt-t...

If you are a software developer, the risk of committing to one year (three months at least partially in Mountain View) doesn't sound that scary to me. If you leave on good terms with your current employer you could probably just get your job back if you failed at your startup.

It sounds like you have a great potential business. The size of the addressable market will determine whether or not you could have a startup [0] as defined by PG. Generally speaking, YC only wants to fund startups in their main program, which would be the one that would give you enough capital to actually make a run at it.

When we did YC (S13) we had three cofounders that all had families and single incomes. We made it work. We rented an apartment and lived/worked together for a few days during the week, and returned to our home offices the rest of the time. You could find a room to rent somewhere if you are a solo founder. Some used credit cards to float things. You'll have to get uncomfortable...

Part of doing a startup is about sacrificing bits of your life for your business. Investors (including YC) want to make sure you are all-in. I would be surprised if you would be able to raise any capital from experienced startup investors while working part-time on the project. They typically want you to have already dove into the deep end.

If you don't have a startup on your hands, but instead have a great small business, there's nothing to be ashamed of there and you can probably find some investment from local high net worth investors if you do some networking. You can test that with pre-orders or LOI's or something of that sort. However, those investments are probably going to be more "Shark Tank," full of onerous terms and potentially much more dilution for you as a founder.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Separating things into components is great, at least in-process where you can enforce interfaces with compilers. Managing deployment, versioning, and compatibility of 10's of networked services (aka micro services) is not a good way to spend time in a young startup...

Of course, one monolith is a bad idea. Probably need a handful of services -- especially separating long running background work from foreground work, glued together with a queue system.

I would say that you should be very careful with putting your Twitter-gained engineering knowledge to use in a startup. In most cases as a startup you should purposely not do many of the things Twitter does. For instance, micro services and an extremely complex distributed architecture will add a lot of overhead and points of failure when a monolith is probably the best route when you have a few engineers. In a startup implementation speed is usually the most important aspect of your development project. Hacking usually trumps engineering in terms of value-add to your infant company. You will most likely throw away a ton of code along the way in the early days as you discover your path to product/market fit. That and you will only have a handful of people actually using it. Most early scalability issues (into the 10-100k DAU range in my experience) can be solved easily by throwing hardware at the problem...

The other thing to be conscious of is the silo you live in on a team at a large company like Twitter as an engineer. You don't have to think about much more than writing code. As others have mentioned, engineering is by far the easiest challenge at a startup as a founder unless you are doing some crazy high tech thing.

All that being said, if your startup is successful and you get past the seed stage, then yes, you will have a good idea of how to build an engineering culture and use practices that are known to work at scale.

Most of the time IT is just implementing policy from the CIO, which is basing it on the requirements of the company's insurers. Insurance companies require some very annoying things like Anti-virus. It's like having a lock on your office. You do it so the insurance company will pay you if someone comes in and steals your stuff.