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jplahnon Steve Yegge Joins as Head of Engineering of Sourcegraph

I'm the manager for the team that owns our code host integrations. You're correct that we support non-git code hosts via a conversion to git.

We're currently exploring what it means to support non-git VCSs natively in Sourcegraph, but we're not there yet.

jplahnon Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

All of our Sourcegraph docs are public, including our architecture overviews and a myriad other docs linked from there.

https://docs.sourcegraph.com/dev/background-information/arch...

jplahnon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)

My biggest endorsement of Sourcegraph is that on Sunday nights I look forward to getting back to it on Monday morning to work with my amazing team and solve hard problems. I struggled with Sunday scaries at my previous job and I've had nothing like that at Sourcegraph.

I highly encourage you to apply if you have even a passing interest in Sourcegraph. Check out our handbook (https://handbook.sourcegraph.com) where we answer most questions you'll have. Or send me an email and I'd gladly chat with you about the company and how we operate.

jplahnon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)

I'm an EM at Sourcegraph and happy to chat with anybody who thinks they might be interested in helping us grow. We're stacked top to bottom with high quality people that truly care about building a great place to work and leading with empathy. This is the place to be if you're tired of experiencing Sunday scaries every week and want to enjoy what you do and who you do it with.

Please send me a note if you have even a passing interesting in any of our roles! You can find my info in my bio.

jplahnon How I negotiated a software-engineering job offer in Silicon Valley

I don't know if this really qualifies as TL;DR, but they seem to have captured the high-level points: https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm/sdr-sales-developm...

jplahnon How I negotiated a software-engineering job offer in Silicon Valley

I recently finished reading the book Never Split the Difference and I would highly recommend it. It's a slightly different take on the traditional negotiation tropes we've all heard.

I've managed to employ many of the techniques in my day to day as a PM with success, but his discussions on salary negotiation resonated with me. I'm sure you can find some notes on the book to derive 50% of the value, but the author's stories and explanations drove it home for me.

jplahnon Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation

Giving a plug to https://truelayer.com/.

They have a great team and they're making a big push to bring PSD2 compliant banking integrations to Europe. I haven't heard of many other offerings within Europe.

jplahnon RIP the Broccoli Tree

This is tangentially related to something I've been struggling with for the last year. I began getting into photography about a year and as an attempt to surround myself with inspiration, I followed many of the top landscape photographers on Instagram. While their images are beautiful and they tend to position their photographs from the perspective of "environmentalism", I can't help but feel like they've done as much damage as anything else.

Two examples come to mind. Last year, the USFS extended the lottery permit season in the Enchantments by six weeks due to increasing popularity, no doubt fueled by the incredible pictures of it littered across Instagram. Iceland is a top destination for photographers (for good reason) and I traveled there two months ago, no doubt influenced by the pictures I've seen. But it felt like the country was beginning to get ruined by me and my fellow tourists.

It feels like we're beginning to lose the hidden gems as more and more photographers rush to be the first. But even the non-hidden gems are beginning to get exposed more and more often. But I see the same spots being visited by all photographers and I don't see how they'll handle the continued influx of people:

  * Banff NP
  * Dolomites
  * Iceland
  * Lofoten
  * Greenland

It's great that people are interested in seeing the world, but I'd say the set of people that love photographing amazing locations and preserving them is much smaller than the set of people that only care about the former. That said, I'm probably more of a contributor to this than I'd care to admit.

jplahnon Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences

I know Amazon gets a generally bad rap around HN, but my organization at least pays for all SDEs to attend one conference a year. While not everybody takes advantage of it, those that have typically provide several brown bag sessions to disseminate their learnings to the team.

I've found it very useful both to attend and to learn from those that attended, particularly when I can get the highlights (and potentially new ideas!) of a conference I'd never attend personally.

jplahnon Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service

You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday alone would count for something..

jplahnon How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.

jplahnon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)

I can't disagree. I love Gitlab but it would be hard to take a > 50% pay cut if I were to work there.

That being said, I have full confidence in Gitlab and know they'll continue to improve these things!

jplahnon Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was a good move

A lot of people ask why Instagram took off and get a lot of different answers; I think that's the beauty of it.

I wasn't much of an Instagram user for a long time until I started getting into photography. I'm still a total photography noob, but now my feed of pictures is a combination of friends and amazing photographers that serve as inspiration. I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Whereas I spent time on Facebook scrolling through vitriol, my time on Instragram is a constant stream of friends lives and beautiful pictures.

I've realized a shallow social network is all the social network I need.

jplahnon Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

It's the standard in vim.

jplahnon Show HN: Hire an Oldster

This is tangentially related (and wholly anecdotal), but one thing I've noticed is that when dealing with other engineers or managers, it's often very easy to tell who has kids and who doesn't. I find myself drawn towards those who have them because they have a knack for understanding people better and can approach mentorship on another level. Easily the best engineer I've ever worked with had a couple of kids, only worked 30 hours a week, but did more to grow team members than any other engineer has done in 20 hours more per week.

It's not a perfect 1 -> 1 to between kids and age obviously, but working with older engineers (and managers/TPMs) has been invaluable for the growth early in my career and I wish we had more of them.

jplahnon 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience

Yikes. That's a pretty heady classification of myself and my coworkers. The funniest part about your response, though, is that you said we'd "do anything for whatever else Amazon has". Looking past your assertion that we're in some way desperate, I'd say yeah, the whatever else Amazon has is pretty nice. I'm by no means a kool-aid drinker, but working with really smart coworkers, having accomplished mentors throughout the company, and working on genuinely interesting problems are nice perks to have. Amazon has its warts no doubt, but that's true of any company this size.

You can have your beefs with the company, that's fine. But I'd avoid the wholesale characterization of over 200k people -- it's not a good look.

jplahnon Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

I have two questions: 1) What's the problem that's being solved? 2) And what's a good answer?

I'm genuinely curious because I've never considered Markdown anything more than a way to more easily render text -- which it seems to do fine. But, maybe I've just exposed myself as an average user..

jplahnon Skip the Soylent, Make a Meal Instead

Soylent (or more particularly Coffiest) has been perfect for filling the 3pm spot at work when I'm both tired and hungry. I used to head out for a $5 coffee and stay hungry, but now I can use Coffiest to do a decent enough job of satisfying both cravings while saving some money.

That being said, I would never replace any of my other primary meals with it because I love cooking too much. I typically spend an hour or two on Sunday making two meals of 4 - 6 servings that will last me through the entire week and then I take off Friday and Saturday and eat out.

jplahnon How Fujifilm’s cameras and lenses are Made in Japan

I feel you. I'm not a huge fan of the X-T10 if I'm honest (I think it's a decent camera, but not one I would personally get). Fuji is definitely targeting a certain segment and many people may not care for the features that appeal to that segment.

There's something hard to explain about the top X series cameras. In terms of actual "camera stuff", they're comparable to other cameras in their price range for the most part. But there's something transcendent about the products themselves that makes it hard for me to switch. I'll put it this way: I'll take my X100T with me on any trip, no matter how small since it's such a pleasure to use and handle. I wouldn't do that with virtually any other camera. It's definitely a different strokes type of thing, but it's made it so much easier to photograph everyday life and not feel like I'm slogging around a DSLR.

jplahnon How Fujifilm’s cameras and lenses are Made in Japan

Great timing for this post! I'm an unabashed Fuji fan and have been scouring the used market for a new lens or two. It really is incredible what Fuji has managed to do in a couple years with building out their X Mount Lens series. I have yet to find a single one that has garnered even remotely negative reviews (other than a few isolated reviews). The fact that they are still pushing such high quality products on a very fast timeline is testament to the people they have working for them.

If you're a photographer and have never dared venture from the Canikon world, I'd urge you to rent an X-T2/X-Pro2 or, my favorite camera, an X100T and see how it feels to enter the mirrorless world!

jplahnon Show HN: Primitive for macOS

That Rainier picture is incredible!

jplahnon Show HN: Primitive for macOS

Two comments: 1. The original photos are beautiful. What equipment are you using? We're extremely spoiled here in the PNW! 2. Have you considered printing any of the Primitive forms out and displaying them?

jplahnon The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-all' email hell

Ah. This reminds me of a great story in Amazon of a conference room booking email gone wrong. The email was inadvertently sent to the entire company, so that employees in Japan, China, Scotland, France, etc. all knew of this fabled booking. At its peak over 280k emails were being delivered throughout the company.

Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.

jplahnon Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

Or so Newt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

jplahnon Google Trends Electionland

A 100% increase in searches for "voter intimidation" in my city (Seattle) is interesting. I'd love additional context on who is searching for that (i.e. is it the intimidators or the fearful?)

Nonetheless, this seems like the beginning of an interesting tool. What would it take to do some sort of fuzzy matching on related searches, like broken voting machines for voting machine problems? I suppose you could wait for a related term to breach a threshold and begin tracking it with related terms.

jplahnon Udacity the new ITT Tech?

That's a pretty big accusation with no justification. Care to contribute some detail as to why Udacity is a scam?

jplahnon Mega Commuters in the U.S. [pdf]

Curious where you were living in Seattle that the commute was so bad?

jplahnon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)

I've seen posters for the Edinburgh DC throughout some of the Amazon offices in Seattle and it looks like you guys are doing cool stuff :). I'm not looking to change teams right now, but I'll probably get in touch sometime in the future since I lived in Scotland for 7 years (Aberdeen) and I'd love to get back someday.

Out of curiosity for myself and others, is there a preference for local candidates over moving US based people over (whether internal or external)?

jplahnon Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?

http://aprilzero.com/

When I first saw this site I was blown away. Sure, the level of detail may be off putting to some people, but even from a purely engineering standpoint it's impressive.

Shoutout to Anand for the incredible work.

jplahnon Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?

I'm a bit of a David Beazley fanboy and Python lover. I've watched all of his keynotes and lectures at this point and I have yet to find one that wasn't incredibly informative. You can watch the video for whatever the main topic is about, but finish the talk having picked up a wealth of other bits of useful information.

In addition, I have incredible amounts of respect for people that are willing (and capable) to live code what they're teaching. For one of the best examples of how to effectively live code, look no further than when he implemented a concurrent system from scratch at PyCon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4

Channel (with some of his videos): https://www.youtube.com/user/dabeazllc