jmvoodoo

This is absolutely true. Ive been lucky that the last 17 years of my career have been spent reporting to the CEO and have had a large amount of leeway in my position. That's not always the case and a bad leadership team can't create a good culture.

First off I hate the phrase "Rockstar dev" because it gives the impression that someone can be successful without the support of the team, which is wrong.

Second, I hear this extremely often: Rockstar devs don't like to mentor, Rockstar devs don't like to write documentation, Rockstar devs don't like to write tests.

At what point do you need to reevaluate your definition of a rockstar dev?

The hiring filter is a powerful thing. It allows you to find very special people if you know how to look. It's also a feedback loop. Getting momentum with a program like this is the hardest part. Once it's going it practically self sustains. The biggest part of your role becomes quickly firing any mistakes.

My "standard" team typically has two jr engineers, and two Sr engineers. When we hire Sr engineers we hire people that like to mentor others and see it as part of being Sr. Jr engineers know that in order to become Sr one of the skills they need to master is mentoring.

This is 100% a management issue, and it starts at the hiring filter.

Hiring Jrs btw is its own skill as you are filtering for potential not skill or knowledge. Identifying the person who is passionate about learning, has dedication to the craft and pride in their work, and has a natural talent for software is hard. Figure it out though and you have a competitive advantage for life as a manager.

Also, half of the Jrs we hire are women. We could never do that if we only hired experienced talent. Not enough women even apply for those roles.

As a Tesla owner this logic seems very strange to me. I hardly ever use the superchargers at a location like a mall unless I'm stopping at the mall specifically for the charging station. So it's clear to me that the mall has the supercharger to drive traffic to the mall, not because people at the mall need to charge their cars. When I'm just doing day-to-day driving I always charge at home, and don't even do so every day.

In fact, the beauty of owning an electric car for me has been the fact that my home acts as the "gas station" and I almost never need to think about charging my car elsewhere.

I think the focus, instead of being the mall or on-street parking, would be apartment buildings/multi-family homes. Having a parking spot per unit with a charger, or at least some equitable way of sharing chargers within a building, will be a necessary step to electrification.

That's how a win-win works. If Wal-Mart can make a profit by getting people to save money there's nothing wrong with that. Especially when compared to the banks that make significant money fining you for being broke.

Just a single data point, but my parents bought their single family home in sf in 1972. It's currently worth about $2M. They pay roughly 400/yr in taxes and as a result there is no incentive for them to ever leave.

Granicus | Multiple Positions | Denver, CO

Granicus makes local and state government more efficient and transparent. We are the leader in our space and serve over 1000 government organizations including the US House and Senate.

We are looking for talented and passionate polyglot (or interested in becoming polyglot) engineers to join our team. We use a number of languages and frameworks, including Rails, PHP, .NET, Java, ReactJS and even some Go. We are passionate about engineering practices and the craft of software development. If you share those values, and want to learn with us, we'd love to meet you.

Email me personally, javier at granicus dot com.

The best way to solve a problem is not to have it in the first place. Great programmers aren't better at dealing with complexity, they are better at reducing non inherent complexity and finding ways to break inherent complexity down into pieces that are easy to reason about. That takes experience and dedication to the craft. The latter I think is a huge difference between 10x programmers and others. The simple desire to be the best you can is a powerful force.

This. And get any skeletons out as early as possible. M&A people love to use them during DD to knock down valuations. If you've already disclosed them, especially before entering exclusivity, then you have a much stronger negotiating position during the process.

We converted from Heroku to AWS+Chef (we use hosted chef from opscode). We even wrote and open-sourced a application_procfile cookbook that lets you do heroku-like things with Procfile web and worker processes.

If Netflix really wanted to turn this around on AT&T, they would just have different prices based on how much each provider extorted from them. Comcast customers would pay more for Netflix than Cablevision customers. Netflix would pay the tax, then pass the cost onto the customer, but not onto each customer equally. It would then publish this data for all to see.

By removing the scheme from the url, the browser will use http/https based on the scheme of the containing page.

Fair enough on the straw man. I definitely work closer to 70 hrs a week at the moment.

This entire piece is written from the perspective of someone who sees their job as only a way to make money. That person might look at me and say something along the lines of "look at him, wasting his life away spending time at work." To me, though, he is the one wasting his life spending even a few hours a day to do something he would not do for free. If you don't absolutely love your job, quit. And if you absolutely love your job, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay a few more minutes?

Granicus - San Francisco/Chicago

2 full stack engineers, front-end engineers with a desire to learn Rails would be considered as well.

Granicus is changing the way that people interact with government. From your local city or school, to the US House and Senate, we work with every level of government to bring data to the masses and get your voice heard. In today's disconnected political environment, this mission is more important than ever, and we need great people to help us execute on it.

We are looking for talented people that can demonstrate above average skill at their craft. No degree required, no level of experience required. If you know your shit and can prove it, we want to talk to you.

You will be a member of our "CTO team" a small, agile time within the company responsible for creating our new products, and solving hard problems within our company. This position is not advertised on the website, and we will not work with recruiters. email javier at granicus for more info or to send over your info (resume, github, portfolio page, whatever you feel represents you best)

Seems like this is a possible vector for font based kernel exploits. Didn't Gauss have some mystery font?

Edit: It was Gauss, not Flame, that has the font.

Very cool. I'm still waiting for a phone version of the Tactrix open port though. Would love to be able to do in-depth data-logging of my car and ECU flashing from my phone... the market for that is significantly smaller though I'm sure.

Additionally, you need the skill and knowledge to be able to tell a good solution from a bad one in the many results you'll get back from a given search.

You may be able to sue the state of MA in CA court. At least one person did this to California after moving to Nevada:

http://www.hgexperts.com/article.asp?id=5410

Granted, it was the state of Nevada, and Nevadans hate taxes and probably loved sticking it to California more than anything. (which is one reason I moved there from CA).

I was going to post something on their site, but apparently you have to have enough karma to give a response now.

Use a removable side-loading bean cartridge. The bottom of the cartridge would be mesh, the top open. There would be a spring-loaded door on the side of the cartridge that the machine would open once inserted (or it could be opened via a "lock" lever for a pure mechanical solution) so that beans could flow out. This way it could never be loaded with water, and the beans would stay fresh since once inserted the cartridge would be sealed on top and bottom by the rest of the machine.

Trivial to write the law perhaps, but enforcing it would be another thing entirely.

I accessed a network without permission from its owner, and my actions interrupted the normal operation of the network. That's about all I really want to talk about. I was very young and stupid at the time, and have since learned better :)

I think I got your point. I just approached the problem from the other side. I think limiting a prosecutor's ability to bargain would be easier from a legislative standpoint than getting involved in sentencing, and more effective since the sentence asked by the prosecution is really just a recommendation. Either way, the important part is ratio of sentence to plea bargain, if I understood you correctly.

This. The law should be rewritten to prohibit prosecutors from entering into plea deals of less than X% of the maximum sentence they are prosecuting someone for, with the exception of plea/immunity deals that include providing incriminating evidence in another case or against another person. Not sure what X% should really be, but it should be sufficiently high as to prevent prosecutors from using the large delta between plea and conviction sentences as leverage. My initial thought would be 50%.

This isn't all that out of the ordinary. Back in 1995 I had the SS visit my family's home due to some of my childish behavior at the time. No fun, and luckily nothing ever came of it, but the SS was involved from the very beginning as far as I know. I never heard from any other law enforcement about the issue.

This type of behavior makes me wonder what the incentive structure is (both financially and socially) for these prosecutors? IMO that's what needs to change if we are going to have any sort of real justice in the future. Going after individuals might make us feel better for a little while, but it won't save the next Aaron Schwartz from the same fate.

Much easier to stay motivated with 25% of a growing company vs a larger share in a failing company. Hopefully she negotiated some better terms, and has some protection from being pushed out and diluted. If so, this could end up being a very lucrative first business for her even if she doesn't make her earn out.

Lucky you? :)

All of our EC2 hosts appear to be functioning fine, but they can't connect to their RDS instance which renders our app useless. If you scroll down the page you'll also see that RDS instances are having connectivity issues. Not sure if it's related but for RDS users the impact is far worse.

EDIT: We are also using multi-AZ RDS, so either Amazon's claims for multi-AZ are bs, or their claims that this is only impacting a single zone is bs.

I'm a big believer in the fallacy of Chesterton's fence, so I actually agree with what you're saying. My point is that disruptive businesses serve as the 'reset' button for these industries. The problems get ignored at first, then rediscovered, and finally re-solved in a (hopefully) better way. Eventually, the cycle comes full circle, and the disruptors become the disrupted.

It may not be the most efficient system in the world, and there are definitely casualties along the way, but it does seem to work more often than other approaches (at least that I'm aware of... would love to know about other approaches that have a similar/higher success ratio).