krschultz

The backend for frontend pattern is exactly why I got sold on GraphQL. We had a pile of relatively low value server code that could be replaced a GraphQL resolver and the client got all of the advantages of that pattern. The move to GraphQL genuinely freed up a lot of our time to work on more important problems. This was on a smallish team so that time mattered.

The US federal government makes tons of military investments all over the country - I worked for one of them for years and it was not in CA. There was something specific about Silicon Valley. I think Stanford has a lot to do with it personally.

Every major tech company is grappling with the balance between their leadership and employee base right now. It may not look exactly like the UAW in Detroit, but that tension definitely echos into our time. It's quite a bit different than 5-10 years ago.

Interesting experiment, and I think this effect can quickly get reinforced by parents (or grandparents / other family). Your kid picks a book a few times, next thing you know the parents are emphasizing IS THIS YOUR FAVORITE BOOK? There's a themed birthday party with the characters. That becomes part of the child's identity.

I've found it helps to not hold any of your kids preferences static. If they like something now, don't assume they will still like it 2 weeks from now. Consciously give them the space to change their mind.

It's still significantly less expensive than OnShape, which seems like its closest competitor. Unfortunately it's hard to actually differentiate between "hobbyist" and "small company" without cutting some really critical features. Most people, even professionals, just don't use that much of the overall feature set.

This is like the "how hard would it be to clone Dropbox" comment. Everything looks easy at first glance, the devil is in the details. Boat manufacturers work on relatively small R&D budgets too, there are usually only a few engineers involved. I'm sure there are hundreds of startups that are going no where but spend more on engineering than these guys.

Your price seems off. My parents bought a decent 28' center console with twin 275hp outboards that was 2 years old and it was well over $100k. I was just looking for a boat in the 24' range yesterday and $50-60k seems like the minimum for anything built within the last 5-10 years.

I agree that's an insane price for a boat under 30 feet, but new boats are stupid expensive these days.

E.g. https://www.boattrader.com/boat/2019-pursuit-s-288-7560060/

I don't think you have the same risk of stalling a powerboat foil like you would on a sailboat. You have much more predictable power at your disposal and something like a sharp header is irrelevant.

I did all the medium & hard ones in there and was getting through them pretty consistently. I also don't have a CS degree so prior to that book I took the online Stanford algorithms class, I'm not including that in the 40 hours of work because I think most people reading this probably have more formal education in the field than I have.

Absolutely. I went to the local library every Saturday for a month or two and did practice problems without distractions. Total prep time was probably ~40 hours.

My compensation increased by at least $150,000 a year.

Best ROI I've gotten on anything I've done in my life.

I tell that stories to people considering doing it all the time, you'd be amazed how many people hear my experience and say, yeah, naw I'm not going to spend that time.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Second—people who had spent the last month memorizing the “Cracking The Coding Interview.” They will pass as well, but you will have no assessment of whether they can apply their knowledge. That is, until their first deployment to your production environment.

Everyone criticizes this, including me before I decided to capitulate to the system and do it myself. But it's actually kind of fair? Everyone knows the game. Some people will choose to train hard enough to play, some people will not. That is a signal in of itself as to whether the candidate will work well in the big tech company environment.

It sounds to me like you had the emulator setup incorrectly TBH. It's bad but not that bad. Make sure you're using an x86 image, have hardware emulation enabled, have the virtualization drivers installed, etc etc.

The activities / fragment portion of the SDK is not owned by the team that builds Android Studio and the broader toolchain.

Someone that has at least passed the fundamentals of engineering exam, preferably with a PE. Then we could guarantee a minimum understanding of the relevant fields.

What's the difference between "mandatory unpaid leave" and "laid off"?

If you are trying to work a full time job and then do side work on top of that, it won't happen with kids. Your full time job is even more important when you have kids because that's all the time you are going to devote to your career. You have to be in a place that's interesting and where learning happens at the office.

As for whether you have no life, well, I think this is life. It's far more fulfilling than when I spent my time outside of the office futzing around on somewhat productive hobbies that were ultimately not life changing.

The hardest part has been staying close with friends. I'm lucky there in that a bunch of my friends had kids at the same time so we all made the transition at once. Suddenly instead of going out to bars we all want to hang out on a Saturday afternoon with our kids. Without that I genuinely don't know how we'd keep our adult social life going.

It's more like 27% rural, 43% suburb, 29% city.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/18/americans...

Does it? I cook almost every night and managed to survive without a car for 6 years in Manhattan. Yes, you go to the grocery store more often because you can only take home what you can carry. But the grocery store was a block from my apartment, it took less time to do a round trip there on foot than anywhere I've lived in the suburbs with a car.

I was really hoping this would simply mean enabling a "deprecated" flag for a repo.

Doing this analysis by SKU (device model) makes the picture look far worse than it is. You should be looking at users. Ideally you'd be looking at your own app's users which may differ from the general Play Store usage quite significantly.

The most representative public data for a US centric app is Mixpanel's [1]. This has lined up with most of the apps I've worked on more closely than Google's own dashboard [2].

If I were starting an app today with no data, I would set my minSDK to Lollipop (21). If I had an existing app I'd be dropping support of any version used by <1-3% of my user base.

[1] https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/android_os_adoption [2] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards

GraphQL the language does not specify those features in a rigid way, many GraphQL implementations have those features. It's best to look at the spec as the minimum to expect not the maximum you can get from GraphQL.

I'd say that that you can generalize fulfilling the queries and making them secure. It's not easy to generalize making them performant. But you can be more reactive on performance, when a query becomes a problem you break out of the general system and write something optimized.

Well, the "real" (read: design) engineering work has always been done by contractors. I literally walked out of an interview for the Navy (NSWC Carderock) when I realized that. I went over to General Dynamics and got a job as a mechanical engineer designing nuclear submarines. NASA is the same way, the design work is done by subcontractors. The government agency conducts oversight. So we, the contractors, sent our plans to the Navy for review & approval. Their job was to ensure we didn't screw up and that our plans would meet the contract requirements.

In my experience NAVSEA (the actual Navy side) were all former senior engineers at the subcontractor. They were good engineers and could smell bullshit easily. But that kind of work is very different than the creative side. Some people like being the reviewer better, and the government benefits are generally better, but otherwise I never saw the appeal.

1) Do this analysis for your own user base, universal stats may not be relevant.

2) It's more helpful to look at aggregations on cuts that will impact your product and codebase. e.g. % of devices above API level 19, % of users with each screen size grouping, what % of our users are on tablets, etc. These answer questions when you should drop support for an API, when you should start using new features, how many different UI mocks you need. Those are the relevant questions.

3) Do test your UX across a couple different phones categories. Samsung & vanilla Android have different button placements and icons.

4) There are plenty of libraries and tools available to handle this problem. I won't say it's not something to think about, but it's usually pretty low on my list.

It definitely contributes to a lack of social mobility. If you are competing with others for zero-sum access to the upper reaches of society and they get substantial assistance from their parents then you don't have as much of a fair chance.

The question becomes - how much of a factor does it play? I would think less than the intangible but non material benefits of having higher income parents (your upbringing, the lessons learned from your parents, their professional connections, a safety net that lets you take risk) but more than I would like to have admitted to myself a decade ago.

This is 100% accurate and not how things were even 10 years ago. The market today is basically bi-modal. When I first started out in startups (2008) that didn't seem to be the case. The result is obviously worse for you financially if you join the startup, but it has also weakened the teams at startups. Many top engineers are just staying at the big public tech companies. Meanwhile large startups that would have IPOed years ago stay private in the current funding environment, dragging out the lockdown period for engineers. It just doesn't make sense to work at a startup like it used to.

I truly don't think most people that argue to work for a startup have internalized the compensation at the big tech companies. $400k+ really is total comp for senior engineers. Not $200k + some lottery tickets for later, it's $400k on your W2 each year, with some of that fluctuating based on stock price and delivered in quarterly increments.

All the hiring processes I've been involved in are primarily driven by individual contributors. The manager probably makes the ultimate hiring decision, but engineers are better suited to do the technical portions of the interview anyway.

I appreciate that this article doesn't just end with the complaint but follows through on a recommendation on how to do handle this correctly.

How would a restaurant be in any way analogous to a yacht? I own a boat, it is not a place of public accommodation. The neighborhood is not better off because I have a place to hang out with my family and friends. The point being, this article is not one person complaining that they can't "follow their passion". It's someone pointing out that the economics make running a restaurant untenable in SF. Restaurants have always been run on razor thin margins, but the piece makes a compelling case that it's tipped beyond that.

Ideally when you are getting up (from either side) you don't need your arms at all.

When sitting (front side downhill) pull your heel side edge as close as possible to your butt (more knee bend, how close are your calves to your thighs?) Dig the edge in hard as if you were carving. Lean your chest forward between your legs, including arms downhill of the board, so you center of gravity is close to over the board. Now stand UP with your legs. It's actually about flexibility more than strength. Your legs will be plenty strong if you have the starting position right.

You can practice this by sitting on the floor at home (no board, boots, snow pants, perfectly level floor) and just stand up without using your hands.

One nice thing about this way of standing up - if you slip you fall on your butt again instead of jamming your hand / wrist / arm.