jtolj

SEEKING WORK | Richmond, VA | Remote Contact: jesse@objectfactory.io

Hi! I had pretty good luck in this thread last time I participated. I was able to connect with a few great people and work on interesting projects for them. The world has changed quite a bit since then, so we'll see how this goes.

Last October, after ~4 years, I left an Engineering Lead role at a small podcasting software company. Previously I've founded/sold a solo startup in the web accessibility space, worked in digital agencies for ~7 years, and built software for TV/Radio operations.

Since October, I've been working on building a suite of desktop software with Tauri and am just now at a stage where I have some flexibility to take on client work again.

To be clear - I do not sling slop or sub-contract work. If you are looking for +100,000 line PRs daily, I'm not the person you are looking for. If, however, you are interested in well considered, resilient code and thoughtful advice informed by a wealth of experience in a lot of different industries and technologies feel free to reach out.

Some of the areas and technologies I can help with:

Laravel, JavaScript (Svelte, React, Vue, NodeJS), Rust, Tauri, DevOps (AWS, Containerization, CI/CD), improving legacy codebases, human processes / team culture (particularly where they intersect/conflict with LLM usage), and more.

I'm open to ad hoc feature work or greenfield projects. Both discounted rates based on the client's ability to pay and flat rates are possible for the right client. Agencies are fine, and I'm open to retainers.

I'm booking projects now to start in mid-August. Reach out via email to schedule a call.

Thanks! Jesse Tolj / Object Factory, LLC

I'm a bit late to this thread, but also wanted to express my thanks to Jeff for mise. I have a lot of different projects in my ~ directory in various languages and with various task runners. Migrating dependency management and wrapping tasks in mise's task runner has removed so much cognitive overhead getting spun back up on projects I haven't touched in a while. Great work!

I've had good luck with Keepgo (no affiliation) for low-cost backup eSIMs. Once you add the initial data, it's good "forever" as long as you add something to it once every year. I bought 10GB just over a year ago to have a backup on a different network than my primary plan. Recently added $3 to keep it alive for another year.

https://www.keepgo.com/collections/prepaid-esim-data-bundles

I left my job (Senior Developer at an Agency) a little over a year ago. I did have a plan in that I've always wanted to build a SAAS product, but I knew going in that it was very unlikely to be successful enough to make a living at.

It's been overwhelmingly positive experience for me. Caveat is that I have no children, no debt outside of student loans, and had several years of living expenses saved if I needed it.

The peaks:

- I built a SAAS product I'm proud of that a few companies are using and paying for. This has been on my bucket list for a decade or more.

- I have total control over how I spend my day, which has mostly (see valleys) been a tremendous boon for my mental health.

- I've had a healthy amount of time to spend with my partner and loved ones (although Covid obviously complicated this pre-vaccine).

- I've had more time to focus on my hobbies, and have made more progress on music in the last year than ever before.

- I've managed to contract with some great companies and individuals to cobble together a meager living while still having a lot of control over my time.

The valleys:

- Some days can feel directionless. Sometimes I can turn this into a positive and take a meandering walk and think about things, sometimes it makes me feel unproductive and down on myself.

- Even though I've barely tapped into my savings, I'm frequently concerned about money / unplanned expenses.

Was just about to post this. I've been using it from the beginning for all of my "pre-launch" domains and it has been flawless.

Definitely a possibility, as it not a route I've tried. As I mentioned I'm terrible at marketing and sales ;).

My own experience working in a digital agency was pretty much the same though. If a client was sued or received a demand letter, they came to us asking about accessibility. When we brought it to the client, they often just saw it as us trying to upsell them.

In the end, we just shot for WCAG AA on everything whether the client asked for it or not and built the additional testing into our costs.

#1.

I run a SAAS product that helps digital agencies scan/monitor/remediate sites for accessibility issues, and unless one of their clients was recently sued I have a pretty low success rate getting them to start a trial.

There could be a lot of other factors at play (I'm terrible at sales, my landing page isn't good enough, etc), but my sense is that it's not something that is on the radar for most small/medium agencies and freelancers.

These are the folks that are building a whole lot of the web, including the local businesses that people using assistive technologies would really like to be able to access easily.

SEEKING WORK | Richmond, VA | Remote

Contact: jesse@objectfactory.io

I'm a senior developer with over a decade of professional experience building things for the web.

I spent the last 7 years at digital agencies, where I had the opportunity to work with an extremely wide variety of technologies and companies. Late last year, I left to build a bootstrapped software company and have been filling out time with consulting engagements.

Primary Technologies: PHP (Laravel, Symfony, Drupal), Python (Django, FastAPI, Flask), JavaScript (Vue, React, Back-end Node), DevOps (Linux, Docker, AWS, nginx, etc)

Strengths: * Application architecture. * Working in legacy codebases. * Strong UX instincts. * Bridging the communication gap between technical and non-technical people. * Teaching and mentoring junior developers.

Most recently built/designed everything you see at https://tidydom.com/ (Laravel & Node). Additional examples of work I've done for clients is available upon request.

I have up to 20 hours a week available starting June 1 for either retainer or ad hoc work.

This is what I did on mine, I haven't confirmed that it is no longer sending anything to oneplus but it did remove the package.

To clarify:

* Make sure adb is installed (https://www.xda-developers.com/install-adb-windows-macos-lin...)

* Run "adb shell" (you should see a prompt that says OnePlus)

* Run "pm uninstall -k --user 0 net.oneplus.odm" (you should see "Success")

A cost effective API into whois data that doesn't come across as sketchy or fragile.

Hope this isn't considered spammy by anyone, I certainly have no incentive (financial or otherwise) to recommend it, but there's a company called "Life Extension" that allows you to order blood tests online.

They email you paperwork, you take that to a local lab and then get your results online. It looks like Vitamin D is $47.

I used it for a while when I was suffering from a health issue that required regular blood tests, since it ended up being cheaper than a doctors visit + co-insurance for the lab fees.

The biggest downside is there's nobody to explain the results to you, although the report they provide does show if you are outside the normal range of whatever they are testing.

http://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/blood-test...

I'm in Richmond VA as well and in my late 30s.

I do worry about aging out of this industry and my long-term plan is pretty similar to the path you have taken. My hope is that I can participate in the agency/startup ecosystem for another 10 years before I have to find something else to do. Hopefully that will still be in technology, and will probably be in Higher Ed or at a Nonprofit for a less money but more intrinsic rewards.

I haven't observed specific instances of ageism towards me or others (people being passed over for promotions or treated differently than younger employees), but I also haven't worked with many people 50+ since I started in this sector. I'm not sure how much of that is that people in that age group are looking for a more balanced lifestyle and how much comes from the companies that do the hiring.

I'll third the Asus RT series.

I just replace my FIOS router with an ASUS RT-AC66U running AsusWRT-Merlin (I understand the stock firmware is based on Tomato). It is very fast, stable, has great coverage and is extremely configurable/hackable. I think I paid $75 for it from Amazon Warehouse Deals.

There's a $500 bounty for this [1], but it doesn't look like anyone has taken it on.

[1] - https://www.bountysource.com/issues/972735-proxy_cache_use_s...

Fair aesthetic criticism. I don't find it to be an issue or distraction for my uses.

Curious, what do you see as the major flaws of the Pebble Round? My brother bought me one for my birthday a few months ago, and it's been fantastic. For me it's the perfect size (no larger than a normal watch), amount of functionality (get/dismiss phone notifications, control music, track steps) and battery life (days).

via http://neurosciencestuff.tumblr.com/post/127620493009/could-...

I had some warning. Mine had shown up in an x-ray and CT scan for an unrelated issue.

Every nurse I talked to seemed to take sadistic pleasure in describing how painful it would be when it came out.

Still nothing could have prepared me for that amount of pain. It was truly horrifying.

This is why when given the opportunity to tell people to drink more water, I do it. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone.

They mention this in the article, but bears repeating - if you don't want to get a kidney stone (and believe me, you don't) 8 glasses a day is probably not a bad idea.

Seems like semantics, since MMS are synced by turning on "SMS Sync" in their app. I'm fairly technologically savvy, and I made the assumption anything going through the "SMS Sync" would be encrypted.

I got burnt by that and now all of the photos in my MMS, including some that the people who sent would prefer not ever be public, are unencrypted on a server somewhere... probably in perpetuity.

That's on me, I took the risk... just wanted to inform others.

I definitely won't be trying PB again.

I was excited about this for a moment, since I was a big fan of Pushbullet before they decided to "evolve" into a messaging app.

I used it simply to send links between my phone/browser and to occasionally send a link via SMS. I would have happily paid for this functionality.

In a recent update, it became impossible to send SMS from the browser without also syncing your entire SMS history (images included) to their server without end-to-end encryption, so I nuked my account.

I just signed up again to test this out, and I didn't get very far before I realized they are still storing all my MMS images on their server un-encrypted.

Here's one from my SMS history: https://dl.pushbulletusercontent.com/KWevdTT0b4Fe92yukWHDKlo...

I just "cleared my history" and deleted my account and the link still works, so we'll have to see how long my data stays on their server. I'm going to assume indefinitely :(.

Thank you for the advice!

Not sure this is relevant in a coffee thread, but for me it started with urinary tract infection symptoms (frequent, burning urination) which is what brought me to the doctor. I started antibiotics, which improved it slightly but it didn't go away completely. When it returned and got much worse, the doctor referred me to a urologist who diagnosed it as prostatitis. After months of various antibiotics and a half dozen specialist visits at $200/pop I finally gave up on going to the doctor, as he didn't seem any ideas outside of pumping me full of more antibiotics.

As fugoogs mentions, non-bacterial chronic prostatitis isn't well understood and there isn't an effective standard treatment protocol. There are theories ranging from it being caused by nano-bacteria that do not show up in normal tests to it being a muscular tension issue that can be resolved with physical therapy.

Rooibos actually contains something called quercetin which some people have said helps with prostatitis (which I didn't discover until after I'd been drinking it for a while). It adds a little richness and bitterness which I actually like.

I did recently find a local office that does pelvic floor physiotherapy for men, and I would like to give that a try. I admit I'm skeptical (or perhaps pessimistic is a better word), but I have seen many anecdotes from people who have had some success with physiotherapy (although nobody ever seems to claim to be completely cured).

But thanks, I'm glad to hear that you are doing better.

To be able to have a painfully spicy green curry and a thai iced coffee again one day would be pretty awesome.

Looks good thanks! I drink this right now, which is good but usually requires a couple of bags to get a strong enough brew - https://www.google.com/shopping/product/1581702390140103849

I had to quit coffee about 7 months ago, after to developing a moderate case of something called chronic prostatitis. Of all the symptoms and things I have to avoid, coffee is still the thing I miss the most.

It's not just the boost, or the taste and smell, although I do miss all of those. Mostly it's the ritual in the morning, and the social experience of "grabbing a cup of coffee" with someone that leaves a big void in my life. Making my rooibos chai or having cup of herbal tea with someone is just not the same.

This condition may not ever go away, so I've sort of come to terms that coffee may have left my life for good, but before I never would have considered cutting it out completely. I didn't find that it impacted my sleep or productivity as long as I didn't drink it too late in the day.

Anecdotally, even after 7 months without caffeine, I find that I'm still much groggier in the morning than I used to be. My sleep at night hasn't improved.

Overall would not recommend ;p.

I think it was Slicehost that pioneered this approach for VPS hosting companies quite a while ago, although it may also have been Linode as I really didn't become aware of them until Rackspace bought Slicehost and I had to migrate.

Good call, added. Might take a few to propogate.

Touche.

I freed that one up.