plasticbugs

Before the age of real smartphones I created a Rube Goldberg-like workflow that listened for emails from my Nokia phone. The subject needed to contain a song and artist. Then the script pasted that subject line into iTunes. Then it would call my phone back via SkypeOut and as my phone was ringing it would press play in iTunes so I could hear my song through my phone. I called it Dittybot. My original blog post is gone, but here’s an Engadget article about it: https://www.engadget.com/2005-06-17-dittybot.html

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Humor columnist Dave Barry's original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/19...

I highly recommend you meet one or two folks with experience who can review your take-home stuff before you submit it. I know my job search would have likely gone smoother if I had some feedback. Things like: where things go, how things should be named/structured, what is conventional in the language/framework you're working in etc. are key for take-home assignments.

Noted and actually had a co-worker introduce me to RTK Query yesterday! Thanks for the work you do! I'm going spend some time this week and next looking more deeply into RTK Query.

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired.

I found my current gig through another person in my bootcamp cohort. Honestly, cold applications through job boards was just awful - I did about 10 per day and got one hit a week at best. If you can, attend some meetups to meet other engineers and get the word out that you're looking for work.

If you can swing it, try to attend a reputable bootcamp to get up to speed with the finer points of JS, data structures (stacks, queues, binary trees, linked lists, etc), hooks-based functional components in React, and the coding interview. I doubt much has changed with regards to the coding interview in the past four years. Pick up "Cracking the Coding Interview" - my current employer did not put me through hellish whiteboard algorithm nonsense, but it's still pretty much the standard with many employers and I was asked more than once to traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard in JS.

You can learn most of what you need to know on the job, so I advise on specializing and really becoming competent with a few tools and technologies instead of diversifying this early.

Redux is slowly going out of style it seems, but it's still used widely and is one of the more difficult things to pick up as a beginner. So if you're going to add to your repertoire maybe start there if you haven't already.

Keep applying to jobs and learning on the side. Get out there and meet other web developers. Consider a coding bootcamp if you can swing it.

I learned by tracing a complicated clip art raster image of a flower using the ‘pen’ tool. You eventually get a feel for how to space your points for each segment of the line you’re tracing.

If using Illustrator, it’s important to use the keyboard shortcuts so you’re not diving into the menu between points - clicking a menu or tool will cause you to switch out of ‘drawing’ mode forcing you to awkwardly restart your line from the last point you made.

Important keys: alt/option, ctrl, space for moving around the scene without breaking your line, shift, and A and V for toggling between selection types (point/line). Play around with alt and ctrl keys while dragging handles - you can create corners by ‘breaking’ the straight bezier handle that controls the curve shape.

Good luck. Find an interesting piece of clip art and have at it. Option clicking a point with handles will turn it into a corner. Option clicking that same point while dragging out will recreate the bezier handle.

Photoshop’s path tool works the same way with the same shortcuts. However it’s primarily used for making a selection and not for drawing per se. You can export paths out of Photoshop but I highly recommend using Illustrator and not Photoshop for learning the pen tool.

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I have a medium-sized collection of vintage 6502 assembly language books. I pick them up whenever I see them cheap. Some of the more sought after ones (like for the Atari 6502-based machines) are quite pricey.

Yep, I haven’t exceeded the reporting amount yet. Hopefully my tax situation doesn’t get overly complicated. If it does, I may need a new side project.

Funnily enough, the digital scale I use for all my shipments was a thrift store find! I don’t know about discount shipping supplies. I sourced nearly 100% of my supplies from Amazon. I did have to invest in some nice vinyl album mailers after adding vinyl records to my repertoire. There is definitely a large up front cost for shipping supplies to avoid using those pack and ship places and their high prices.

Probably somewhere around 13,000 I would guess. I haven’t been keeping track as it is still just a fun hobby-ish venture. I enjoy the thrill-of-the-hunt more than the money-making aspect. Though if the tax situation makes it complicated I may have to reconsider. It did net me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine!

I just make sure that I will net $20 before I commit to purchasing an item from the thrift shop. This is:

  final eBay sale price
  - eBay fees
  - shipping // unless you have the buyer pay actual shipping 
  costs
  - the cost I paid for the item
  --------------------------------------
  my net profit (hopefully more than $20 for my time and effort)

last week this happened:

two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - selling on eBay for about $40 each - retail for about $50 each. My total sale price was $69.95 for both (I undercut the lowest listing by a dollar or so and offered 'free' shipping)

My shipping cost was about $5. My eBay fees were about $10 - they take quite a chunk. $70 - 25 = $45 profit

I probably could have held onto them longer, charging a higher price and not offering 'free' shipping, but sales have been slow because I haven't been buying much so I made them too good to pass up.

$45 for about 20 minutes of hustle isn't terrible. It took me all of 3 minutes to list them on eBay. I plopped them on my kitchen table, snapped a picture of them, searched for the same item in the 'sold' section of eBay. Clicked 'sell one like this' link, filled in a price, selected a shipping option and clicked 'post'.

I believe they just get a commercial rate from the USPS and they add a small percentage onto each transaction for themselves to make their money.

Yep! Definitely look them up when you see them. There are lots of rare and hard to find ones... I focus on things like Criterion, box sets and anything that looks 'odd'. I picked up a five disc Anchor Bay set of WWII movies for $4 and they sold for nearly $15 each.

Don't skip on CDs, VHS, Cassettes or vinyl records! Though be sure to check the condition and that the correct disc is definitely in the case before you buy it.

Vinyl records are difficult to grade, so I would avoid them unless you can play them and reliably grade them OR they're sealed OR the surface on both sides appear immaculate. Sadly, they usually just add to my already overstuffed vinyl collection instead of winding up on eBay.

VHS and audio cassettes are hot right now as well, so if you see some classics, definitely give them a look on eBay before you pass on them. They usually have a barcode.

Typically someone will drop off their whole collection at place, so consider buying items to sell in a 'lot'.

A complete hardback Harry Potter book set is $100+! (usually $2 a piece at my thrift shop) I almost have a complete set from my many trips to the thrift store, so pick them up when you see them!

My 'side project' is pretty conventional, but it surprises people to learn how much I've earned from it with very little effort. At least once or twice a week, I use my lunch break to walk to the local thrift store. I look up items on eBay as I browse and buy anything that would net me $20+ (basically to cover my lunch). I stick to the 'hard goods' section (things like electronics, games, DVDs, home appliances, books, etc). I avoid clothing which is difficult to browse quickly, difficult to list and difficult to find comparable items. I also avoid anything that would be unwieldy to carry home or ship.

The first year I started doing this, I grossed about $20000. Last year was bad. Our thrift stores shut down because of Covid. In late June of this year, I started back up slowly because our thrift stores came back. My gross for the last six months is $3,238.63. And again, because of Covid, I've stopped going daily like I was which cut into my fun money.

Last year I bought a brand new pinball machine from my thrift store finds.

Some tips:

If you can go every day, you only have to look at the 'new' stuff which saves lots of time.

The eBay app has a barcode scanner so you can look up anything that's in its original packaging by just scanning it.

Don't pass up anything vintage looking that's still sealed (even if it looks worthless). I sold nearly $100 worth of new in package vintage incandescent bulbs a little while back. I got the lot of them for like $10.

Save all the boxes you have coming to your house in advance of starting this. You can't sell stuff that you can't easily box up and ship.

Never use the post office or UPS/FedEx store. You can get a significant discount through pirateship.com (free to use, offers steep US Postal and UPS discounts) or even eBay's own shipping.

EDIT: A few more tips...

Once you're shipping at least one thing a week, buy a label printer like a Rollo Thermal Printer. It will save you lots of wasted time and energy in printing out, cutting the shipping label to size, taping it to the package securely, etc.

Invest in a good industrial shipping tape gun (not those cheap little plastic ones), get good brand-name shipping tape and a couple of large rolls of bubble wrap... also, start saving the packaging that comes into your house from your online purchases to be reused.

Get a bunch of 'newsprint' packing paper for packing up your stuff.

Basically: don't cheap out on supplies.

Stay organized. I use a set of plastic bins in the basement to store my items once they're listed.

They did not really offer ‘placement’ per se, or anything like a job fair with companies lined up to hire new grads.

They do focus on interviewing skills and the job search in the last week of the program. After that, they offer job search support/counseling for up to six months after graduation.

We had daily check ins with a job search counselor to keep on task and could use the HR support network of instructors and alums for feedback on take home coding challenges and general interview prep. It’s as good as it could have been.

After three months, I would guess about 80% of my cohort had been offered positions. But don’t count on being in that 80%. You’ll need to budget for six months of job searching.

I understand they now have a whole other course just for dealing with the coding interview, but that was not available to me at the time.

Hack Reactor was excellent and most of my cohort was hired within three months.

The amount I learned in the compressed time frame was everything I needed to do the job as a jr. front end dev.

Unfortunately, the coding interview is a whole other beast and HR spends the last week of the session focusing on the job search and interview skills. They do offer job search support for up to six months post graduation. The job market was competitive in 2018 and I also believe I, a 40-something white man, was demographically challenged in the marketplace. I was also looking for work in the Bay Area, the most competitive location possible - where others of my cohort could be more flexible with regards to location. That, plus my interview skills are weak and I was counting on getting lucky or a fair interview.

Now that everything is remote, I think you can widen your search net to companies outside of SF, leading to hopefully better odds.

I would still highly recommend Hack Reactor but expect your job search may take up to six months (in my case eight!)

I think this is really down to the few companies that have "taken a chance" on a bootcamp grad in the past and are able to see past the lack of experience after one or more good experiences - which feels like something large companies can do more (and more often) than smaller ones.

It's also a product of my inability to really and truly master interview coding challenges and the pressure of whiteboarding. It's absolutely nerve-wracking and I've choked every single time regardless of how well-prepped I was. At a Google on-site, I was asked to traverse a binary search tree on a whiteboard and then, after doing it successfully, I was challenged to do it without recursion and I was unable to reason about how to do it and I choked completely and utterly. The rest of the interview went pretty well, so I would guess that my whiteboarding fail was the main thing that prevented me from getting hired there.

O'Reilly's interview process did not involve whiteboarding or things like trick questions, toy problems or algorithm stuff. It was a straightforward coding challenge and then a fairly low-pressure conversation about my code, the decisions I made and how I might modify what I implemented if I had more time, or was confronted with a specific challenge.

I think if I now were to enter the job market with the experience I have, I hope that I wouldn't be immediately confronted with things in an interview like traversing binary search trees, or implementing a Fisher Yates shuffle on a whiteboard.

This was very similar to my experience. I had been writing code as a hobby for nearly a decade while working in TV production. In 2017, I attended Hack Reactor, an in-person bootcamp here in SF. I applied for engineering roles while practicing coding interview questions with probably close to 1000 applications netting about 40 follow-up interviews with around 10 or so on-site interviews. After eight months, I was offered a temporary role at a healthcare startup. Five months later that role ended, it was another couple of months before landing a role at O’Reilly Media where I now am a full stack software engineer working primarily in JavaScript and Python. I was elected “class president” by my bootcamp cohort. I was also the last person in my cohort of 30 people to be hired.

Nicely done. I restore and 'upgrade' NES consoles as a hobby. Most of these steps feature good restoration techniques. However, for anyone here looking to do the same, please skip the polyurethane step. While it may impede corrosion, that step makes the system much harder to repair/modify in the future.

Speaking as someone who went through a Bay Area bootcamp (Hack Reactor) it seems to me that it would be more cost-effective to work with a local reputable bootcamp and interview candidates who will soon be graduating. You won't get the top of the class with your salary offering, but I would confidently hire any of the people who came out of my bootcamp's cohort.

You should also consider remote candidates from places where that salary is livable (not SF Bay Area or NYC).

I would say nearly 100% of my bootcamp cohort came in very rough, with little to no production experience and not ready to do any kind of productive work. The bootcamp really started with the basics which we worked on for 10 hours a day / 6 days a week in JavaScript - data structures, algorithms, and many many toy problems. After six weeks of that, we were introduced to Node, then Backbone and finally React and Angular.

I don't think you want to invest that amount of time in developing a curriculum and becoming a bootcamp just to get some cheaper junior engineers. There's a reason why bootcamps are not super-lucrative -- good instructors cost money and there's a ton of competition from other bootcamps so they have to price their product competitively.

I once pushed my Amazon S3 key to GitHub accidentally. Realized instantly what I'd done, and while in the process of feverishly regenerating a new key, my cell phone rings. It's Amazon telling me I pushed my S3 key to GH.

BG Planning Sheet linked from Nintendo Europe: https://cdn02.nintendo-europe.com/media/downloads/games_8/wi...

This was a prank played on both the host and on the show's director. Neither were aware that this wax cylinder was very common and worth less than $10. I worked on TechTV's The Screen Savers and G4's Attack of the Show.

I was able to get a Rails app up and running within 20 seconds of downloading this binary. This is on my work laptop that doesn't even have Rails, homebrew, rvm or RubyGems installed. Very cool.

I'm proud to have backed this on Kickstarter. Best $20 I ever spent. Thanks Yehuda!

Edit: I should add that getting Rails up and running from zero is still quite painful for beginners. I've seen it when helping others install Rails for the first time.

I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. Also, when I put Gimpshop out there, I didn't really know how to code, so updating the source to stay current was a huge undertaking for me. Since then, I've become a self taught programmer. I know Ruby fairly well. I've built a couple of non-trivial Rails sites and within the last 6 months, I published my first iOS app. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.

I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.

I highly recommend Programming in Objective-C by Stephen G. Kochan. After that, a free Stanford course on iTunes U is a great resource for wrapping your head around Xcode and iOS development concepts. The course number is CS193p taught by Professor Paul Hegarty. I think the newest semester is called "Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPhone and iPad". iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-7-apps-for...

I just want to say how much I love Inkpad. I am a heavy Illustrator user and Inkpad was super-easy to pick up and just start using without any prior experience or instruction. The multiple finger gestures are intuitive and the 'outline stroke' and pathfinder features are something I rely on heavily and are not common in vector-based iOS apps. I'm looking forward to reading some of your code!