justinram11

My intro class was taught in lisp (and had been for the previous decade or more), but I learned that about 2 years after I graduated that they also began offering it in Python.

Several of my class thought that was a very "useless" way to kick off the degree, but I really liked the immediate introduction to recursion (blew my mind when it clicked) and felt it leveled the playing field quite a bit for everyone entering the course.

As someone who has very casually self-studied Chinese over the past 6-7 years and gotten to an "intermediate plateau" (started as a digital nomad in PCR, then Taiwan, and then married my Taiwanese wife).

Since you've already learned many languages I'm assuming you are already familiar with what works for you -- for me I really resonated with the "fluent in 3 months approach" of basically just forcing yourself to consume as much content and use as much of it as you can (which I was able to do in Taiwan, starting with ordering coffee and working your way past the "where are you from" conversations).

I've always struggled with Chinese characters, however (I also struggled quite a bit with English spelling). I picked up https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/products/how-to-learn-ch... over black friday and have really been enjoying it. I'm not sure if it will resonate as much for a complete beginner, but with my limited experience it's actually making characters "make sense" for me.

ChinesePod has been fantastic for listening comprehension, and is also highly recommended.

I've always found that it's the act of actually "processing" the information that helps with my retention and understanding.

Most of my notes (especially in college) are short sentences / random words with arrow to other rows (with most of my notes being incomprehensible to even myself after some time).

There's something about S.U.N. Project and Infected Mushroom that really gets me in the zone.

I also really like most of Aim to the Head Mixes[1] on YouTube

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWykzoREYA

I've been using Retool recently for most of our team's internal dashboards and it almost feels like a super power -- able to stand up a usable UI for our non-technical customer success team in an hour or two

Have been running a 14" M1 Pro w/ the 10 core processor and 32gb of ram since the beginning of the year (I use a lot of tabs and docker containers, so wanted to get the extra ram).

Overall been extremely pleased with it, after coming from a 16" i9 model that ran at close to 100 degrees almost always.

Docker performs pretty well (or not noticeable difference from my 16" i9). Usually hover around 40-50C for my usual workload, and sometimes will get up to 60-70C during a heavy compile (but fans are still whisper quiet).

I personally like a smaller form factor since I occasionally travel, but don't know that it really makes _that_ much of a difference to me and probably comes down to personal preference more than anything else

I'm a US Citizen and have been working remotely from Taiwan for the last 6 years. The first 3 I was working mostly on "solo" projects and pretty much only did async communication except for the occasional once-a-month meetings late my time / early US time. I thought it worked great.

The 4th and 5th year I was working full-time as an IC an actual US-based team from about 3pm - 12am Taiwan time. Not great, but still manageable and allowed for 3-4 hours of overlap with CST.

Now I'm working in a Tech Lead role (small company w/ 5 person dev team) with a split schedule of 10am-2pm and 7pm - 12am. I've noticed at this stage that I'm struggling a lot more with the time zone difference and it's really starting to have an impact on my family now that my son is 2 years old and wants a more "natural" schedule.

Personally, I'd target small companies on the east coast if you enjoy working nights, and west coast if you enjoy getting up early. In your soft interviews, stress your great communication skills beyond anything else.

This. Currently hiring and if I can tell they took the time to read the job post and ask an interested question I'll usually do an intro interview

Not an answer to your question and only tangentially related, but I've had a terrible time getting a U.S. immigration visa for my wife.

Around 2017/2018, the National Visa Center (NVC) took their "document review" process digital. Previously you would have to mail in all of your documents, wait 2-3 months for your documents to get to the front of the line, they would verify them, and then after they were verified would send the "okay" to the actual embassy in the country you are applying from (in our case Taiwan).

If you had an issue with one of the documents, you would repeat the process including the 2-3 month wait. This makes sense, since when receiving mail you'd have to actually "process" it first to see if it was for an existing application or not (instead of just putting it in a giant bin for "July 15th").

When they moved the process online, however, they kept the same queue process. You wait 2-3 months to get to the front of the line, and if there is an issue, you have to resubmit the document and wait 2-3 months for them to review it again.

It's fairly easy, however, in an online format to tell _who_ each document is for. What _should_ happen, is you are put in a queue and have to wait your turn to get to the front, and then they work on helping you get through. If you have an issue with a document, you resubmit and it's looked at next to get you "moved on through".

They also shut down the phone line that you can call to talk to an actual human being about what needs to be submitted. Instead, you can submit an email that has a wait time of 2 months to get your question answered.

Overall one of the most frustrating experiences of my life

I currently live in Taiwan where there are hotpot restaurants everywhere.

This has always been my thought for why it would be harder to do in the US (how do you handle the liability of having boiling pots within a toddler's reach). Same with "self cook BBQ" restaurants that put a hot thing of coals in the center of your table.

[Suggestion] Use conventional comments[1] to flag how important the comment is.

Most of my comments end up being "suggestions", but then when I put a [blocking] on it, it clearly communicates that I think this should be fixed before merging in.

1: https://conventionalcomments.org/

I did from ~2016-2018 around most of Asia.

Towards the end of that, however, I was getting pretty tired of traveling and just wanted a home base. I had also met my now-wife, and so settled down in Taiwan (which at the time was still friendly to visa runners). I then got a marriage-based visa not to long before the country locked down due to COVID.

I'd be curious to know if any of the previously-visa-running-friendly countries are still that way? Around Asia, at least, my impression is that travel is opening up but is still quite a bit more scrupulous (and I'd certainly hate to get denied entry or get stuck in a quarantine hotel somewhere right now).

Definitely an experience I'd recommend for those who are interested and able to make it happen -- changed how I understand myself and I don't think is something you could easily replicate in other ways. Need to get the timing right for after you are capable of making money online, but before you have a family and need roots

I realize that I'm probably the outlier here in the US market, but absolutely I'd rather have a 3 month trial period (not only so you can evaluate me, but so I can evaluate you to make sure it's mutual).

I'm fairly confident in my ability to deliver value in the first couple of weeks on a project, so would much prefer this to having to spend time grinding leetcode puzzles that I'm not innately good at.

Note: a large part of this perspective is the privilege of feeling like I could get another job pretty easily, and having a sizeable emergency fund that I could draw from to continue the search if things didn't work out. So you may be filtering out people who are not in such a fortunate position.

I did the digital nomad thing for about a year back in 2016 before settling down in Taiwan (2017 - present) with my now-wife.

If you have any desire to travel the world (post-pandemic), I'd strongly suggest that you take the plunge and do it. It's eye-opening and totally changed the direction of my life -- as someone else mentioned there are long-held beliefs and values that you start to question after you see people living life differently.

The main thing that I was surprised about is that travel is _exhausting_, and this is doubly so if you are also tied to regular employment with semi-fixed hours. Finding decent accommodations, reliable internet, food, and a data plan with google translate starts to wear on you after awhile. I'd personally suggest doing the slower travel route of 3 - 6 months in a place and really getting to know an area.

I've been using a 27" 4k monitor for the past couple of years at 125% and I'm completely sold that my next monitor will be 4k or above (can fit so much on the screen and everything is so crisp).

Though 125% is pretty rough on integrated graphics in both windows and linux, so I'll likely be looking to get a bigger 4k monitor (32"?) that I can just run at 100% in the near future.

60hz is fine for text editing and web browsing (and the extremely light gaming that I do 2-3 times a year with friends).

A keyword that should pull up quite a bit of related information would be: "Digital Nomad" (though I'd think covid is still throwing a wrench into much of that).

The most "stereotypical" answer is Thailand, which offers cheap internet, food, month-to-month accommodations, friendly to visa runners (hopping over the border for a day and coming back into country every X months to reset your visa), quite a bit to do, and is also pretty safe.

Perhaps I'm a bit naive in my mid-20's, but I actually don't think that I'd hate working 15-20 hours a week (at a low-stress company) for the rest of my life. Or at least until I was physically unable.

I've recently been wondering if I should instead be trying to view life as a "sustainable marathon" rather than trying to cash out quickly (FIRE).

There are many countries in Asia that fit the "decent internet" requirement if you are able to put up with the timezone difference: SKorea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia (and I'm sure many more). Quite a few of them are also pretty cheap (SKorea would be on the expensive end of the spectrum)

I've been living in Taiwan for ~5 years now and have 1GB/down 40MB/up internet to my apartment that costs around $40USD/month. Total living expenses for a family of 3 are around $2kUSD a month.

I've got a 2018 i7 mac mini that I upgraded the ram to 32GB myself and it's a very capable little machine (got it when I needed to do Unity Mobile Game development, but it keeps up with pretty much everything).

I do wish I would have gotten a bigger internal SSD (I bought it with 256GB, but have now moved most of my files to an external SSD and it's a constant struggle).

I've also now purchased an external GPU to drive my 2 4k monitors at home (it can do 2 4k monitors of text editing itself without struggling _too_ much, but it does run about 15C cooler with the eGPU), so it's hard to say if an iMac wouldn't have been a better purchase, but the nice thing about the mac mini is I can easily throw it in a backpack when I need to travel every couple of months.

While I think that there is definitely a worry of it turning into a big old mess (especially if they start depending on and talking to each other), I don't really know that I'd consider cron-job style independent one-off tasks any more maintainable in a monolith. I also don't know that I'd consider that specific to serverless (it's easy to create a ball of mud in anything).

All of our serverless projects are located in a single repository, and each little service gets its own little google doc that explains what it does, what functions it has, and any resources that it uses.

As mentioned below, as soon as an ETL gets multiple steps I agree that pure-lambda is not the right tool for the job (Airflow would be my preference, though we've also successfully used Step Functions)

I generally agree that if you're setting up multi-step or "enterprise grade" ETL processes that it's a job better handled by something like Airflow (we've done a few smaller ones with Step Functions which hasn't been terrible, but Airflow is still better).

Our use of AWS Lambda for ETL is usually just one-off small processes that don't have dependencies.

As soon as you start getting into "This ETL depends on X, Y, and Z being run first" I think you're out of "small utility" territory.

Mostly it's about the maintenance costs of owning and managing a server -- on Lambda most of these tools are "set and forget".

I don't want to have to manage security updates, disk usage, or any of the other multiple things that come with owning a server.

I also could probably debate on the friendly-ness of just dumping all of these one-off services onto a single server (seems like it could get messy pretty quick), but I think you could probably go either way on that.

We are also an AWS shop for our "production" stack already, so there is no added overhead for owning an AWS account.

As someone on a two-man-team who runs a lot of little "utility" functions in AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework[1] to support our DevOps / Build processes, it's been one of the most productive tools in my toolkit (after the initial learning curve, of course).

It allows me to stand up a practically maintenance-free endpoint in a matter of hours (usually to glue separate services together):

* Want to run a quick ETL process to refresh some tables or pull some data down from a third-party endpoint?

* Want to expose a quick usage report for the project manager?

* Want to send a slack message when a build finishes from TeamCity so QA can jump on it?

* Want to monitor the rate of Crashlytics logs and send a warning to slack if it breeches a threshold?

There are tons of "one-off" little processes that now just automatically run and don't require server upkeep. Most of them are functionally independent, so having them as separate functions makes sense (when we do need to coordinate, that's done through Step Functions).

Note: I still don't think that they are a great fit for production services (and more fits one-off and cron usage patterns)

[1] https://www.serverless.com/

I think it can go both ways (as shown by OP's situation of severely underestimating the work required).

If you have: excellent project management skills, can correctly estimate the required work, and have good clients who don't try to add "free" features half-way into the project, fixed-bidding 10-20% of the business value add can often work out better for you.

* Often that requires the client to have a good idea of how much they are willing to spend on the project, and how much additional revenue it's going to bring in (which is harder for smaller clients to do).

If any of the above is false, time-and-materials based pricing is often the better way to go in my experience -- it accounts for any "unknowns" in your estimation, and allows the client to add/change as many features as they want at any point in the project (it's easier to argue about a deadline getting pushed out than having to re-bid the project).

Something that you'll want to help them with is educating them that the software is quite a bit more valuable _with_ you than without you.

Sure, another developer could come in and take over (and the acquiring company will probably want to get their own developers on it if they have an in-house team), but finding that trustworthy developer and getting them up to speed will be non-trivial for them without you.

Being open and transparent has served me well so far in the professional world. Tell them you made a mistake and ended up doing the original project far below your usual rate and that you're now currently busy with other projects. Let them know how long the original project took so they have expectations on how long new modifications might take.

Tell them that although you like working with them, in order for it to be worth your while and to turn down other opportunities, you'd need it to be in line with your usual rate of 80€/h.

You'll also probably want to get them to agree not to let the acquiring company know what your hourly rate is, as if they are enterprise-y you can definitely increase your rates (which is also warranted, since you'll be dealing with a lot more bureaucracy).

SEEKING WORK | Kaohsiung, Taiwan (USA Citizen) | Remote preferred (can work in any timezone, can travel for limited periods of time)

More than 6 years of experience building scalable and reliable web-apps (full-stack), automating complex business workflows, and building analytics/data pipelines to ensure that companies make the best data-driven decision for their business.

Skills: AWS, Serverless, Python, Java, JavaScript (React), Flutter, CloudFormation, Docker, TeamCity, DevOps, Jupyter Notebooks, Airflow, Kubernetes, (I also quickly come up to speed on new projects/technologies)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-ramsey-a8a5665a/

Contact: justin [at] rflow [dot] io

Location: Kaohsiung, Taiwan (USA Citizen, can work in any timezone)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not soon*

Technologies: Python, Java, JavaScript (React/Redux), Flutter, CloudFormation, AWS, Serverless, Docker, TeamCity, DevOps, Jupyter Notebooks, Airflow, Kubernetes

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-ramsey-a8a5665a/

Email: ramse139 [at] umn [dot] edu

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Top 2% of TripleByte Test

Experienced remote software developer (4 years remote, 6 years total) primarily working in the backend / AWS / analytics space, but have also hacked away at a few front-end projects in React and Flutter.

I consider myself more of a generalist that's able to come up to speed quickly with a new project / technology and hit the ground running.

Open to all opportunities: Full-Time, Part-Time and Freelance/Consulting opportunities

* Currently waiting for my wife's USA immigration application to be approved before moving back to the USA (est 12-18 months)

SEEKING WORK | Kaohsiung, Taiwan (USA Citizen) | Remote preferred (can work in any timezone, can to travel for limited periods of time)

More than 6 years of experience building scalable and reliable web-apps (full-stack), automating complex business workflows, and building analytics/data pipelines to ensure that companies make the best data-driven decision for their business.

Skills: AWS, Serverless, Python, Java, JavaScript (React), Flutter, CloudFormation, Docker, TeamCity, DevOps, Jupyter Notebooks, (I also quickly come up to speed on new projects/technologies)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-ramsey-a8a5665a/

Contact: justin [at] rflow [dot] io

Location: Kaohsiung, Taiwan (USA Citizen)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not soon*

Technologies: Python, Java, JavaScript (React/Redux), Flutter, CloudFormation, AWS, Serverless, Docker, TeamCity, DevOps, Jupyter Notebooks

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-ramsey-a8a5665a/

Email: ramse139 [at] umn [dot] edu

--

Top 2% of TripleByte Test

Experienced remote software developer (4 years remote, 6 years total) primarily working in the backend / AWS / analytics space, but have also hacked away at a few front-end projects in React and Flutter.

I consider myself more of a generalist that's able to come up to speed quickly with a new project / technology and hit the ground running.

Open to all opportunities: Full-Time, Part-Time and Freelance/Consulting opportunities

* Currently waiting for my wife's USA immigration application to be approved before moving back to the USA (est 12-18 months)

I consider myself pretty fortunate to have both:

1) Been accelerated after I had formed a pretty tight friend group with my same-aged peers (jumped 2 years of math in 7th-8th grade)

2) Been born in a time where the internet was modern enough that we could all hang out and game online

I entered University at 16 (the PSEO program in MN that pays for tuition and books your junior and senior year of high school), but was able to keep in touch with my high-school friend group with multiplayer video games.

Even today, a decade later, I'm still able to keep in touch with them almost daily even though I'm living in Taiwan (started the digital nomad thing soon after graduating University at 20).

Academically I did _really_ well in a large University environment with a lot more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility (it's insane to me that we have 18 year olds still needing to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class).

Socially, I'll admit that I struggled to make any college-aged friends, but I think that was more due to still living at home than anything else. Instead of being able to take people up on offers to hang out at night, I had to make the last bus out of Minneapolis to my small town by 6:30pm.