jonthepirate

I see an iceberg ahead, captain.

Tesla is a premium product - if someone is going to use FSD they know its a luxury feature and should pay for the most comprehensive safety features available which in my mind would of (of course) require lidar

I'm a former Lyft & DoorDash engineer exploiting a talent loophole.

Mission: get startups access to senior & principal big-tech engineers at a 90% discount and without hemorrhaging equity.

The hack is that I'm tapping into a hidden supply of people hiding in plain sight: top engineers that are already full-time employed in big-tech with benefits who enjoy helping smaller startups, and, recently retired people who want something to do.

The name I'm using is Low Touch Advisor because we are selling what I call "low touch" help in the form of async Slack based guidance. By having access to senior people perfectly matched to your team's needs, you can use your actual engineers to do the hands on and majorly reduce the likelihood that a major rewrite is needed after 6 months of effort on new projects.

Basic model: - Our customer (an early stage company) pays $1,500 / month with no long term commitments to get async Slack help from a vetted senior/principal engineer perfectly matched to their needs - Of that, we ACH $1k / month to the engineer who provided the Slack-based help

Within the first 3 months of operating, I have $27k of monthly revenue booked in my sales pipeline.

So far I've done everything by hand but once I'm a bit further ahead, I'm going to look to begin automating this.

If you want to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanblockengineer/

seems it.

Low Touch Advisor The dream: “click a button to get a senior engineer added to your slack.” It’s a side hustle for awesome engineers.

My first customer has me looking for e6+ or cloud architects to be paid advisors to review cloud migration RFCs. (No coding) Comp is $1k per RFC you review. There are at least 18 RFCs per month to be reviewed.

Here’s my site I scaffolded for this: https://www.lowtouchadvisor.com/

I'm on the build team at DoorDash. We're in year 1 of our Bazel monorepo journey. We are heavy into Go, already have remote execution and caching working, and are looking to add support for Python & C++ soon.

If this sort of stuff happens to be something you might want to work on, our team has multiple openings... if you search for "bazel" on our careers page, you'll find them.

In my experience:

Ruff is great because you need to lint your code all the time and you could save maybe 1 minute per CI.

As for Python package management, my team is migrating to Bazel which has its own way of locking in the Python dependencies and then pulling them from a remote cache. Under Bazel, we are only re-examining the dependencies when someone proposes a change to produce the lock. It's so rare, that having a new+faster thing that does this part would not present a meaningful benefit.

Somehow, ruff is linting my entire codebase 350x faster than pylint did.

People are saying that one of the founders sold $150m+ of their equity and the vc's couldn't stop them... and proceeded to get a 70 foot yacht. With no remaining incentive to build the business, it's no wonder they are out.

How could this all happen? Is there no regulation?

Former Lyft engineer here. I'm convinced they will go out of business or sell the scraps to someone... however smart acquirers like Elon wouldn't go near it. Rideshare sucks.

16 years ago, my first Bay Area engineering job was at Reputation Defender. I helped create their first product - the EXACT same thing it looks like Optery is making. Make no mistake, the company was named "reputation defender" but it was optery.

Even in 2006, the problem was the same and the solution seems roughly the same.

Reputation Defender rebranded a few times. I don't think they have this feature anymore. Might be worth asking them why they got rid of it, if that's what they did do.

Working there on the tool, I always felt like it was pointless because it's an unsolvable problem and scrubbing your info from a few hundred of the top data collection sites wouldn't SOLVE the problem... it just makes it a tiny bit less terrible but the effectiveness is not measurable. I think the TLDR is that people want solutions to things and programmatically unsubscribing only "works" in well lit neighborhoods and those too often aren't the causes of consumer pain.

Trying to solve the problem by deleting records is sort of like contract tracing coronavirus. Efforts to solve the problem by stomping it out wasn't viable and we now know we just need to learn to live with it in the endemic phase.

I've been dealing with Python for 8 years at 2 big tech companies in the Bay Area.

The main advantage in Python is that it's easy to learn. It just doesn't scale. Once things start taking off, there's always a migration to something more scalable like Go or Kotlin.

Gunicorn is probably the "best" tool for making a Python based website or API for Python users.

I believe there might be a hidden message in the decrypted text itself. The reason I think this is that there seem to be filler words added to otherwise ordinary language. Example "I hope you are having fun in trying to catch me". Nobody would use the word "in" at that location in the sentence. If you ask me, something slightly more advanced still remains to be uncovered.

(prior to Dave solving this, I was also taking a crack at trying to solve this puzzle https://twitter.com/BlockJon/status/1292555925564395521)

RH is blatantly rigging the system in favor of the hedge funds. Not good.

Solution clear text:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

20 years startup/internet engineering here. I have "failed" roughly 50% of my interviews usually as the result of failing the coding rounds. Almost all of fails were conducted by someone with nearly half my years of experience who were interviewing for something from the CS academic curriculum. When I am asked to conduct an interview, I don't do anything much more complicated than a glorified fizzbuzz. I prefer doing architecture interviews.

My biggest problem with algo interviews is most of them are trying to determine if you happen to be familiar with one particular algorithmic solution to something - if you don't happen to know that one algorithm, you fail. In the real world, you have to learn as you go. You never know the solution to every problem in advance.

Can you comment on the unsolved zodiac 340 cipher? I'd be willing to try to crack it with time and effort but I'm not sure where to start.

Reference: http://zodiackillerciphers.com/wiki/index.php?title=File:340...

I was Taso's roommate on Ramona st in Palo Alto for 6 months back when he started his company with his founder who was familiar with running a consulting company. It's really the ultimate arbitrage - take a cut of a kagillion foreigner's hourly pay to enrich yourself. Good for him. One day he sort of disappeared and I never heard from him again. Glad to see he's doing well.

I've never liked Fiverr since I heard about how they really screwed over voiceoverpete. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anbBwpoI9TI

Hi - I'm Jon, creator of "Flaptastic" (https://www.flaptastic.com/) and passionate advocate for unit test health.

Having coded at both Lyft and at DoorDash, I noticed both companies had the exact same unit test health problems and I was forced to manually come up with ways to make the CI/CD reliable in both settings.

In my experience, most people want a turnkey solution to get them to a healthier place with their unit testing. "Flaptastic" is a flaky unit tests recognition engine written in a way that anybody can use it to clean up their flaky unit tests no matter what CI/CD or test suite you're already using.

Flaptastic is a test suite plugin that works with a SAAS backend that is able to differentiate between a unit test that failed due to broken application code versus tests that are failing with no merit and only because the tests are not written well. Our killer feature is that you get a "kill switch" to instantly disable any unit test that you know is unhealthy with an option to unkill it later when you've fixed the problem. The reason is this is so powerful is that when you kill an unhealthy test, you are able to immediately unblock the whole team.

We're now working on a way to accept the junit.xml file from your test suite. We can run it through the flap recognition engine allowing you to make decisions on what you will do next if you know all of the tests that failed did fail due to known flaky test patterns.

If Flaptastic seems interesting, contact us on our chat widget we'll let you use it for free indefinitely (for trial purposes) to decide if this makes your life easier.

Last time FB recruiters wrote to me on LinkedIn I told them I'm not interested in working for a scandal factory.

We used serverless/lambda to run our flask app for flaptastic.com. Since the site doesn't see a lot of web traffic, our web costs are roughly $0 per month whereas running any kind of long running web server platform (docker or otherwise) has fixed costs.

What I've seen in most companies is that when a test goes bad (imagine 10k unit tests, and 1 hits stripe's api sandbox which just went down) the bad test affects everybody who's busy working on their respective feature branches. Everybody wonders how their feature branch broke the stripe integration and you have hundreds of developers trying to diagnose and fix the same broken test.

Our solution allows the someone to know the test failed because its flaking out immediately as soon as it flakes, and provides a 1 click option to instantly disable that test across all feature branches so that everybody else can continue working undisturbed.

Without something like this, you have to: 1) Create a new feature branch 2) Commented out the broken test 3) Wait for it to pass CI 4) Gain approvals as needed 5) Merge the PR back to the master line 6) Message everybody to let them know the test was removed and they should rebase

The process above is sort of the industry standard and this means a giant loss in productivity for everybody on your team and is especially painful for monolith codebases.

Companies where I've worked easily hemorrhage $1m per year on this problem in terms of developer productivity losses if you consider the number of hours wasted per year.

What you really want to do is first disable a test you know is unhealthy to unblock everybody. Then, you fix it. After you've reintroduced it healthy, you can turn it back on.

Having been at both Lyft and DoorDash where I've been an engineer responsible for unit test health, I decided to do a side project called Flaptastic (https://www.flaptastic.com/), a flaky unit test resolution system.

Flaptastic will make your CI/CD pipelines reliable by identifying which tests fail due to flaps (aka flakes) and then give you a "Disable" button to instantly skip any test which is immediately effective across all feature branches, pull requests, and deploy pipelines.

An on-premise version is in the works to allow you to run it onsite for the enterprise.

I wrote a flaky test management system called https://www.flaptastic.com/ on AWS Lambda... my first AWS bill was $2.50. I love it. I also used serverless.com's wrapper to deploy it for free. If this gets expensive and I want to raise money to have expensive DevOps engineers setup Kubernetes for months then fine... but I really don't need that and I can easily port this to any other platform if I want to later.

Every time I think of sears I think of this story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHIktR-3Ci4 where they stole someone's wrench design

The reason I am upvoting this is that it is written in a positive tone. Too many people - especially in the world of DevOps, trash everything. (X is the worst, don't do that, etc) and more often than not do not offer better guidance following their whiney tone. We need more "please do's" in this industry. Thank you Adam.

I would love to have an alarm go off every time someone enters my mailroom wearing a hoodie with with hood drawn over their head after 10pm. Do we have that technology yet? I would be your customer.