johnnyg

CPAP.com, Stafford, TX (SW Houston): FULL TIME LAMP Web Developer

Why work with CPAP.com? We help people breathe. We are profitable and growing. But mostly, for our teams and day to day project enjoyment.

Drive projects relating to code organization and coder happiness

* Code Refactor and re-org (OOP, REST)

* Source control and ease of code push integration tools (Git)

* Sniffer and code styles/standards enforcement (Jenkins)

Our toolset and areas of interest:

PHP, MySQL, Angular, Meteor, Knockout, Geo/Gis/Mapping, Queue software like RabbitMQ or real time db like firebase, Metrics data design metrics boards like Dashing

Benefits: http://bit.ly/1lAbxkP

Apply: github/resume to johnny.goodman@cpap.com

Questions: johnnywgoodman on skype or 832-413-2462. No need to schedule, your call is welcome anytime.

PS. Full Job Desc As A Google Doc: http://bit.ly/1HiR4da

"I was unable to comply with this request"

He was unwilling to comply, not unable.

Supply and demand is a thing.

What do you think of Regan's "trust by verify"?

How do you define "a real test of their capabilities"?

While we start the hour long skills test off with some fizzbuzz weeders, we quickly move into harder questions pulled out of issues we've resolved in the real world that are likely to be of the same shape of future work.

If people are offended by fizzbuzz, they don't express it often during interviews/employment/exit interviews. The most common reaction from someone who can solve it is a bit of a wink and a nod as they slay it and move on to the "real" stuff.

I've never had anyone ace our test. No one is a 10 everywhere. I think there's a lot of value in how you approach things and react to a blocker or limitation. We watch this closely too. It isn't just about saying "Every answer is correct, so hire me".

Lastly, we're out of Houston, TX. I'm guessing the culture is very different in CA and perhaps that's the mismatch.

Yes. While I mean no disrespect the pass to fail ratio on them is 5:1 or worse. I've got to check so that when I pay for an hour of work I get an hour of value.

I read blog posts to the contrary. They say how awful it is that these "dumb HR people" ask these basic things. Well, I've probably done 200 technical interviews, mostly from HN, and unfortunately this is my experience.

If I must choose between unpopular and ineffective, then bring on the fizzbuzz. If you do pass the screen, I guarantee you those you will be working with are smart and effective too. So effective and so enjoyable in fact, that I keep doing these interviews in order to find them!

@jacquesm - You are internet famous, I love your blog and admire your work. I know we're on different sides of this. If you care to pick this apart, I will read it with an open mind and respond as factually as I can.

We're a LAMP shop that is doing more and more angular. I contract with many HNers. Please email johnny d0t goodman @ cpap d07 com if interested in discussing further and setting up a fizzbuzz.

I think that's harsh. Education is expensive, necessary and completely inaccessible to those people.

We say "the fish has iron in it, you need iron" because we have a basic level of education. They say "the fish is lucky, I'll put that in the pot if the community says to" because community and tradition are good proxies for safety if you do not have that education.

Also, if we miss a pay check or a grocery store trip, we're fine. If they zig when they should zag it can mean death or deprivation. We should not lightly mock choices made when the stakes are so high and the known and understood information so low.

I don't have the answer here but I know that "well, Darwin will get them" isn't it.

Good points.

I think the jury system works so well because 12 people in a room eliminates the need for web speed to a large extent.

Court cases should not be decided but facebook upvotes.

On the other side, I work in the medical field and I see decades of lost progress because "this is so important it should be heavily regulated" which has the opposite effect.

So...what's so important that is shouldn't be facebook upvote decided and will the "super important issues" system we replace it with be scalable and transparent enough to do the job?

I'll think on this. It seems like both answers aren't good enough.

And even more on this.

We citizens are abstracted from the process of making law now. There is no meaningful way through the hole to participate as it stands today.

The barrier of a pull request would be high, but it would be like water breaking over a dam. What we need is a punch through and then iterations and use to smooth the edges and make participation easier and available to an ever wider group.

We basically need what has happened with OSS to be what happens in government.

I'm worried about the barriers too, but I'm even more worried about today's impossibilities of meaningful participation not changing.

I'll try.

I think the founders got an impressive amount of the "free and open nation" concepts right.

I think the Sears and Roebuck Catalog was an effective tool in its time.

I would rather order from an online store than the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. It'll be faster, more responsive, more transparent experience. The store owners intend it and the internet as a medium allows it to a greater extent than was previously possible.

I wouldn't want to run a company without the internet and I think the core and true functions of our government are not run at web speed or with web transparency.

I feel very disconnected from my elected representatives. I suspect this is a shared feeling. It is hard for me to see them "put out work" and hard for me to understand how good a job they do at anything past staying visible.

This is because we still use the best system available to us 150 years ago. What is the best system used today to collaborate? Git. What's the best place to use it? Github.

Look at the crazy stuff we are able to build using that tool. Truly we're living the buzz words and "harnessing the internet".

I'd rather have 100 OSS project leads deciding government policy than our current 100 senators. I value the culture and medium by which they arrive at decisions so much that I'd make that choice "blind", meaning if I didn't know how red or blue they were, I'd still do it. I think the process/medium/culture is strong enough to override any level of partisan feelings.

Were this to occur. Were laws github repos on various topics and proposals were pull requests and amendments were patches we'd have a few core changes.

1. We'd move from fixed terms to respect based terms. Instead of power brokers and entrenched incumbents it'd be about output and the share of a community that continues to be willing to line up behind your vision.

2. Forks. Governments as currently implemented don't allow iterations. Wouldn't it be interesting to declare your county a fork of the "MIT Common Government License" or to yearly declare which license you will abide by. Too hard? Depends on the delivery medium.

3. Education. I increasing hear leaders calling people "folks". I'm a citizen. You're a citizen. I'm obligated to be educated for our democracy to work. When the medium changed we got Khan Academy, CodeSchool and 100s of similar things. I think the impact of this great good is yet to be felt but it gives me hope that these new medium skills can be learned to an extent where they form a basis of participation.

Right now a political party is strong if it can get people out to check the right box or out in the street to yell. Wouldn't it really be something if strength was in number of upvoted feature pushes? Number of accepted patches?

4. Voting. It is hard to vote with your feet. It is easy to vote with a +1. I trust upvotes for my products (amazon), jokes (reddit) and computer news (HN). We can't evaluate new ideas on a technical and work flow basis the same way? Seems like we can and should. Seems like checking one box every 4 years or even every local election seems grossly slow.

Today I'd like to upvote the "stop torturing people" pull request. I feel like this is reasonable and we could get traction on this. I feel like tomorrow morning the draft could be ready and public viewable. The patch could be vetted and merged next week. In public. At the speed of OSS.

Instead, this will be today's news item. Tomorrow it'll fade into the next one. The senators will ultimately decide behind closed doors and the decision will be the wrong one, influenced in the wrong way - not because they're evil or even ill intentioned, but simply because we work in the wrong medium.

This is a serious and important idea.

Caesar's Commentaries, by Julius Gaius Caesar

Teaches that while technology will change and political systems will be distinct and nuanced, the human animal is just about the same.

When I see something that people did then that they still do today, I find that I can predict what a group of people is likely to do in a given situation in the future.

This both blows my mind as things "click" and makes me sad. In either case, I'm better prepared.

Houston, TX - Senior Code Base Quality Developer - Full Time

CPAP.com sells CPAP equipment for the treatment of Sleep Apnea. We help people breathe.

We are a LAMP stack shop rolling out and integrating git and jenkins to our code base and work flows.

We are more broadly wish to have dedicated positions focused on code base refactor, re-organization and cleanliness in the pursuit of coder happiness.

If you have done this before in another organization and can help us avoid common pitfalls and false starts, we would like to speak to you.

About Us: http://www.cpap.com/cpap-web-employees.php

About Me: http://www.cpap.com/about/johnnygoodman

To talk further and fizzbuzz johnny .dot goodman @at cpap dot. com

I did not say that clearly.

I mean if you like breaking things for fun, work for a digital security company and get paid to do it. Be the guy who is paid to do penetration tests and the like.

That's "Black Hat" work turned to the good.

I think it is funny that the YC crowd points to "naughty" when it benefits them and says things like "Am I supposed to feel sorry for someone that got caught exploiting online games?" when it doesn't.

When someone will take apart a game for fun, for better or for worse and often both, it is intrinsic. We praise capncrunch and damn this guy?

I'm sorry you lost your parents Scott. Congratulations on your child and marriage. YC is a mixed bag but I feel home here too.

There are a lot of ways to hack the world. I'm not sure if you've picked inconsistent/risky ones because of personality type/thrill or because it is where you landed. If its where you landed, move toward the center.

Sounds like you've got the basic small business skills to sell many things and you don't require permission or motivation to do so.

Consider hacking on your life instead of the games. What do you know that's inefficient where you are and could be interesting?

I hear heavy equipment auctions are big and profitable in rural areas and I know from experience it is a space software hasn't touched.

Pick a product or set of products (wave energy harvesting equipment?) and niche it via PPC. See what the market is like for them on eBay.

Go with the black hat and get picked up by a security consulting firm. I've rarely seen them be degree choosy with people who have the chops.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the only interesting things are on the fringes.

Lastly, ignore the rest of the noise of this thread. Keep your head up. Stay interested. Stay playful.

It sounds to me like you are getting worked. The way you have been approached is not how someone with good intentions does it.

Reject the "joint launch" proposal. Put together a Memorandum of Understanding with a break up fee that will cover you.

If they are serious, they'll take you up on this and if nothing red flags they'll buy you.

If they aren't serious, you'll see them show their teeth pretty quickly as you are now denying them what they sought for free.

I suspect you'll see their teeth. In that case, launch your thing, get traction and force them back to the table.

I own breastpump.com and am interested in a deal with anyone interested in the space or anyone looking to commercialize a product coming out of the hackathon.

This article looks at supply side but ignores the demand side benefits to the sharing economy model. It works from an assumption that someone else other than the business offering a service and the contractor willing to work it knows best.

Boiled down - full time jobs good, contract jobs bad. Reasoning? We talked to this guy who has a cute kid he is struggling to protect. We also talked to a regulator who gets ink for saying it is awful, just awful.

If contract is undesirable then apply for work at a traditional cleaning service. He now has the experience through HomeJoy, seems doable.

Should he be making what the coders and web devs who built HomeJoy make? No. He doesn't have those skills yet.

Society owes him:

1. The opportunity to learn the skills to compete in our economy. (With our education system, I fear he's not received what he is owed here...and if so, injustice.)

2. A free market to "find your wage" or "start your own" based on the extent to which you can build things others want.

This guy is a hard worker. Software is eating the world and changing the rules. When that happens, many opportunities and new niches are created. I hope that the regulators realize this and let it continue. I hope that this guy finds a profitable place in the changes.

He mentioned that his pitch ratio to new clients was 10:1 over his co-founder.

If he's doing all the code AND most of the pitching, I think that his fear is justified.

If he's thinking that the code is more important than the business early on...maybe. Both need to be there in spades but there are probably more good business people floating around than there are coders.

What he probably wants is a business unicorn who can either code or at least understand data normalization - and why not, higher success rate that way and lower co-founder friction.

At first, I blasted everything in sight.

Then I noticed that if it wasn't going to hit me on the pass and wasn't the smallest size, that was bad.

I started waiting on the first big with a direct line, taking that guy down to basic and repeating.

Zen Astroids. :)

Nice reply! I love HN sometimes.

What impact does this have on contracts in general?

When I give my word, I keep it. When I sign a contract, I honor it. There's a social contract that assures me that the counter party will too. There's a court system setup to ensure they do. There is force behind that if it is taken even further.

If I should instead shape every contract with a 20% hedge that assumes the counter party will not keep their word, doesn't that introduce a significant amount of inefficiency in the entire system.

Isn't it long term better and in fact just that those who give their word, spend all of their money and then run out take the consequences of it?

For systemic risk to be properly moderated, the individuals or even individual counties must suffer the consequences of their actions. You can opt to not allow this, but you ultimately suffer as a whole when you do.

I see no better way through. Do you?

Wouldn't it be more fair to say endemic corruption and decades of misguided plans that swung too hard to socialist, then capitalist and then again socialist policies created this?

The idea that the root cause of this is that a group of investors come along, buy debt on the open market and then expect that debt to be paid seems overly simplistic.

So 25% of the time it is a joke? That is 1 in 4 times...

This is a joke right?

This is short on details but nothing like this exists today that I'm aware of. I read HN for stuff like this!

I've emailed our team internally and said "this exists...how do we plug in?"

We shall see.

I contract with HNers frequently and see nothing wrong with what you've written...have an upvote.

My mid-sized business does not support visas.

I look at it as something so hard and complex that only the Googles and Amazons of the world can play.

Are there resources or professionals in the HN community that lay out the process and the costs?

DDG has been my primary search engine for nearly 2 years. I love you guys for both your service and your mission.

You've struggled in the past with local searches and map inferences to non-address searches (think "Godwin Park Houston").

I threw those at next.ddg and the result back were very good. I don't see having to !g a query for these in future.

I'll edit as I use the beta in the next few days but first impression is "Hot damn, it works! Good job!"

Edit 1: There are still dot coms and business I search for that I don't get the "map this for me" option. Examples:

https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=cpap.com

https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=men%27s+warehouse (do I want a wiki article or do I want to find the ones close?)

https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=whole+foods

Edit 2: The UI is so clean and nice.

If you click a poster's name, they often list their email in their account profile. In this case, they did:

"csg@tekeeper @t gm@il dot com".gsub!('@','a')

Your sign in/sign up doesn't offer an option to sign up...

"I made enough to live on, but only because I had moved back home with my parents and didn’t have to pay for rent or groceries."

No, no you didn't.