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phektus

211 karma · joined April 12, 2011

I'd like to better at what I do (programming). Right now I'm fascinated with javascript and its good parts.
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phektus··on The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
"Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database."

The scientific community will disagree with this. The whole culture of independent peer review process assumes there is no centralized control over scientific conclusions, whose rigor stems from decentralized feedback. The time when centralized database (source of truth) became the basis of mainstream science was during the dark ages.

phektus··on Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
> Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realises that ! Well, that's the key thing in many places: it's management that decides whether to hire and how much to offer, not you :)

The first instinct would be to put 'resources' that costs little into a project, and that usually means people with less experience that requires less pay and are easier to drag around. Imagine the difficulty they will be having trying to grok your line of reasoning for respecting and going after these older devs.

phektus··on I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
Even in a team of specialists, some of the work they do can be off-loaded to a full-stack developer to free them up for tasks that require more of their expertise.

For example, a front-end specialist would be better off optimising the slow page response times of the product's news feed or implementing a new application page altogether than, say, adjusting css that break on a few view ports. In a big team, you can push the CSS fixing job to a junior; but in a lean team, it's better if this goes to a generalist in your team.

If your backend dev is busy on implementing OAuth, he can off-load fixing a bug that has a small fix but is hard to test like a minor refactor. You compound this "minor" jobs and you will need a lot of junior staff to help on the load, or you could hire a full-stack developer to help with the whole team.

Eventually this generalist gains a good understanding of the full stack, as his title implies, and can contribute good ideas that affect all parts of the system. They also make good tech leads because they can interact and empathise with all members, and can call out decisions that may seem good on one part of the stack but could have horrible implications on the other end. Some progress to Architects simply because they have the bird's eye-view of the whole system.

Lastly, if you are a fledgling web startup, it would work against your business interests to hire an expensive specialist right away.

phektus··on Ask HN: How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?
Find the entry point of the program then go from there. Use grep for function calls or event listeners. Get some background of the framework used, if there's any. Skim the issue tracker to add more perspective.
phektus··on How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
Strangely reminds me of learning :P
phektus··on Ask HN: Confused software developer
"I do not have experience due to which I cannot find a job and I cannot get a Job as I lack experience. Its like a dead-lock situation"

Nowadays, whenever a programmer says this a cat dies in the other side of the world. We developers are almost immune to this, because we have what we call open source software and free cloud services doing very specialized tasks. What I mean to say is that if experience is your problem, you should be glad to know that there are ways to gain experience without a job. This is quite easy to do in our field - contribute to open source, do some personal projects for portfolio, or even help out some startup in need of manpower. All these things can be done right now, and reaching out to HN is a good start. Relax, my friend. Just head out and continue on, say, the Python web development path, and pretty soon you will find some arrangement or gig that will get the wheels rolling for you.

phektus··on Kurzgesagt Information Design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
phektus··on Ask HN: Devs, what career would you have chosen before the computers existed?
NBA star player.
phektus··on Ask HN: How much JavaScript do you know as a back end dev?
Try Express or SailsJS. You'd be surprised.
phektus··on Ask HN: Yet Another Software Engineer; Help?
"I tried to learn Python for a bit, and wasn't successful"

Kindly define not being successful. If you mean you gave up, then next time don't. Also, quit your job if you have to.

phektus··on Somewhere in the Philippines, there are roads named after countries
Filipino here. I used to live somewhat near that place, and we used to joke about going to Germany or Australia when what we really mean is going to one of those streets instead of the actual country. These are suburbs where the real estate developer would follow a certain theme for the nomenclature of the streets. We call these suburbs "villages". In my parent's village, the theme are bird names, and our street is called Sand Piper Drive.
phektus··on The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory
Whenever I wait for Xcode to build I doodle random stuff on my notebook. It helps me relax throughout the day.
phektus··on Ask HN: How to stop learning and start coding?
Since you have been reading a lot, you may want to try the old method. Just start a new project (with new technology) and learn along the way instead of picking up a book first.
phektus··on Show HN: Career Finder – A quiz that gives you career recommendations
I got recommended into the medical fields. Interesting, as I've always dreamed of being a doctor when I was young.
phektus··on Great Programmers (2004)
This is gold. I remember a quote from a prominent game programmer, I think it's John Carmack but I'm not sure, that when thinking of an approach to a new game engine he would start on the basis of an imaginary computer with instant CPU calculation and infinite memory. I can see the parallels here.
phektus··on Debugging Asynchronous JavaScript with Chrome DevTools
Well, HN itself is a poll.
phektus··on Ask HN: I can't do this anymore, I need help
Get a 9-5 job, take a breather, save some money, then try again after two years.
phektus··on Show HN: My new JavaScript MVC framework
>> Mithril allows developers to support browsers all the way back to IE6 and Blackberry. > Wow! This should IMO be on the home page.

Agreed! I'm in!

phektus··on How do you deal with office politics?
You accept the fact that life is't fair, and that you deserve only that which you bargained for. Plus the fact that people are emotional creatures.
phektus··on Russia Blocks Access to Major Independent News Sites
Well at least something they and the States can agree about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bea-edwards/the-us-and-austral...

phektus··on Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
Sounds great, can you share what ]helped you become a top earner?
phektus··on Why don’t software development methodologies work?
Because they only really affect the dev team. The clients are virtually exempt, which destroys any process.
phektus··on Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”
>Jobs was good at recognizing when the right time to bet on a technology was. When you are filthy rich, you can turn this talent into a license to print money. When you aren't already rich, it just makes you the average person on HN.

Hahahahahaha. Yes.

phektus··on Ask HN: What programming language will you learn in 2014?
I was surprised to have used nodejs in my work throughout the year, so now I'll skip the advanced (functional) javascript and go retro with c/c++/c#.
phektus··on Ask HN: How do you deal with being burnt out?
Then just release it. You will never reach 100% anyway, unless you totally quit the project.
phektus··on Looking for Real Problems/Examples to Help Learn JS
Project euler then implement in javascript.
phektus··on Ask HN: What could be the next technology boom like bitcoin?
A 3d printer for food. Now that would be disruptive.
phektus··on What Are You Going To Stop Doing in 2014?
Facebook(ing)
phektus··on HTML: font color=”red” becomes green
Oh, nice explanation

http://jsfiddle.net/pPCmG/

phektus··on How to Become a More Valuable Software Developer
I got touched by this. I used to spend a lot of time coding (already graduated) and never felt the need to do shortcuts on finding gigs. Once I went overseas I got overwhelmed by the old employment culture and suddenly became comfortable and 'recruiter'-friendly. Now I realized that it's not working, and being a well-rounded programmer means spending a lot of time programming outside work while still keeping a balanced lifestyle.

Felt good to have finally closed my linkedin account. Can't say the same for fb though :P

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