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rcavezza

1,060 karma · joined February 14, 2010

http://twitter.com/cavezza

http://ibuildmvps.com

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rcavezza··on Ask HN: AI Calendar Tools – Opinions?
I would give Motion a try. I used them for their trial and really enjoyed it. I'm considering paying for the product now. It's at usemotion.com

I'm sure it's flexible and if I put time into it, I could solve all my issues, but the thing I didn't particularly love was that you needed to remember to mark a task as done when you completed it. If you didn't it would keep showing up at other open calendar times. Other than that, it did a great job and making sure I prioritized my most important tasks.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: React, Vue or Angular?
I think it usually comes down to Angular vs React for most legitimate decisions for longer term, maintained projects. I prefer Angular because all the major modules are built-in and you know what to expect when you open a new project. React reminds me of PHP sometimes because you never know what you're walking into. And two different React projects can look drastically different.
rcavezza··on Show HN: I made a site that automatically unsubscribes you from unread emails
Looks cool! I remember when I started easyunsubscriber.com. Unsubscribe.com was a competitor and later unroll.me also came around. Both eventually were acquired, I stopped running easyunsubscriber when I couldn't monetize. I think all of these companies had trouble monetizing and had different plans, but eventually weren't able to and got acquired and put into a larger toolset or shut down.

Let me know if you want to chat. rcavezza [at] gmail.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: How do I get fit and healthy as a software engineer?
On the injury topic, I used to pull muscles all the time. I would probably pull a muscle every 3-4 months that would sideline me for a month or two. This seemed to stop when I started doing yoga once or twice a week. I don't do it as much as I should anymore, but if you're getting injured lifting weights, I highly, HIGHLY suggest you give yoga a try.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?
I'm very unfamiliar with this, but is there additional ongoing costs in terms of extra energy consumption? Do you know if this rig is changing your monthly energy costs?
rcavezza··on Square buys $170M worth of bitcoins
I'm not sure I've ever seen a one sentence news story before.
rcavezza··on Bumble S-1
They also have a "Bumble BFF" mode where you can try to make friends in a new city on the app.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: How Sound Is the “Teach Yourself CS” Learning Resource?
It's fantastic. I loosely followed it for a few years to get better at interviewing (Note: For interviews, you generally need data structures and algorithms knowledge).

Now I'm following it pretty closely while selecting classes for my software engineering master's degree.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: How to design a fair bonus system for software engineers?
If you would take a bonus and make it part of my salary, I could deal with that. However, when there's a bonus that makes one company's offer $35K more lucrative than another, that tips the scales.

I've never seen bonuses lead to poor work environments. Can you elaborate on some of your experiences?

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Promoted to Management, but Have Doubts
In trying to frame this question, I would suggest having the end in mind. What do you want to be doing in 5 or 10 years? I don't know if you have an answer to that question, but you should give it some thought.

Once you have that answer, I would think about what decisions you will need to make in the short term to get there. Do you want to be an architect? Do you want to be a CTO? Do you want to be a team lead? Do you want to start a company?

If you have (or can get) clarity on where you want to be, I would suggest keeping the end in mind in order to make decisions today. Let's say you want to be an architect in 5 years. Maybe the management route is taking away from you gaining the expertise you will need to succeed in that role. However, if you want to be a CTO in five years, then you are probably technical enough and need to improve as a manager.

There isn't an answer that someone can give you for this specific situation. It really depends on you and where you want to go in your career.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier?
The mom test a million times over! When people hear the name, they assume it's about usability (i.e. make something easy that your mom understands it), but it's not - its' the best book on customer development that exists. I recommend it to every startup person I meet.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: What do you dislike about your RSS reader?
I use other sites to curate content for me. Mostly HN and the people I follow on Twitter. I try to stay on a news diet.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: What are some more authentic online forums?
A lot of people still communicate on messageboards - especially in specific niche communities. A fantasy football website I frequent has a messageboard and so does my favorite football team.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: I cannot stop pursuing ideas and it’s ruining my life
I love the advice and idea, but this reminded me of an excerpt from The Third Door by Alex Banayan.

“Mr. Buffett, I’ve heard that one of your ways of focusing your energy is that you write down the 25 things you want to achieve, choose the top five and then avoid the bottom 20. I’m really curious how you came up with this and what other methods you use for prioritizing your desires?”

Buffett chuckled, responding, “Well, I’m actually more curious about how you came up with it.” The audience erupted in laughter.

Buffett proceeded to explain that both he and Munger live very simple lives, and are not disciplined enough to approach decision-making in that way. “I can’t recall making a list in my life,” said Buffett.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Any good online CS / CE / etc. bachelors that's arent scams?
That's pretty cool! I'm also going through the graduate program. I'm two classes in and I'm taking two this semester. Any chance you'd want to grab coffee and talk about the program? I'd love to hear about your experiences and the project you presented.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: Any good online CS / CE / etc. bachelors that's arent scams?
I would start with these: https://thebestschools.org/rankings/best-online-bachelors-co...

Scroll past the ads that mention the "schools" you mentioned, and take a look at the list that starts with the University of Florida's program at number one.

I'm not personally familiar with the schools on the list above; however, I am currently going through Harvard's extension school for a graduate degree in software engineering. This has worked out well for me thus far. They also offer an undergraduate degree. You can find information about that one here https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...

rcavezza··on Ask HN: I don't like front end anymore. What should I do?
We all feel this way from time to time. I’ve been writing software for ten years and I still feel like an imposter. I feel like someone will find out I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t have all the answers.

It’s normal. You’re early in your career. The big thing to realize is that googling is your best asset. People have done this before or asked questions about how to do it on Stack Overflow.

Just keep learning. If you’re like me, you won’t have a specialty. You’ll know a little front end, a little backend, a little bit of design and photoshop, a little bit of devops. It takes time to learn and be proficient. Lean on the more senior engineers on your team. Ask them to start a weekly lunch and learn.

You’re on a journey, not a sprint. It takes time, but you’re gonna be okay. Don’t panic. Just keep learning and growing.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Do you still support older browsers? Or do you use latest web tech?
To piggyback on mooreds - you need a baseline to see what your target market uses (if you’re making the business decisions)

An easy answer is to add Google Analytics to your site and support browsers that account for greater than 0.5% of your visitors

rcavezza··on How do founders create mobile apps fast for their startup?
There’s two ways to build faster: more people or cut scope. For startups with limited resources, cutting scope is usually the answer.

When you say “extensive app”, that is a red flag for me.

I would focus on cutting scope and having the app do one simple thing really well. You don’t need an extensive app - you should build something smallerish quickly and iterate on it.

To answer your specific question about the platforms without code, I’m not sure.

Hopefully cutting scope can help you launch quicker (maybe on thunkable) to give you a product to help convince mobile engineers to join your team.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Server-side web apps – is the database still a bottleneck?
Based on my experience, it's the most typically seen bottleneck. But bottlenecks change over time. You notice slowness somewhere in a website action and you dig into it. Sometimes, it's a new database table that isn't optimized with correct indexing. Sometimes, you end up doing an n^2 or n^3 operation on the backend (sometimes it's on the frontend). Sometimes, you're data is growing at a speed that your single monolith database isn't cutting it and you need to shard or consider a different type of storage.

Bottlenecks change all the time. You fix one, and now suddenly, the bottleneck lies somewhere else. There's almost always a bottleneck somewhere. A database bottleneck is relatively common, though.

From my experience, the bottleneck is mostly at some type of Big-O relevant scale in the code or database that using java vs ruby vs python doesn't make a huge difference.

However, if you're in a situation where speed is absolutely crucial - like high frequency trading (where milliseconds mean millions of dollars) - well, that opens a completely different can of worms.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: How do I ask for a raise?
“Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.”

― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/835238-indeed-the-ratio-of-...

rcavezza··on Book Recommendation for Interns
In a CS program, you learn a lot about algorithmic efficiency and theory, but you don't learn a lot about software construction. Here's my list of must read software books related to this:

Clean Coder by Uncle Bob Martin

Clean Code by Uncle Bob Martin

Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Design Patterns by the gang of four

rcavezza··on Ask HN: How to learn best practices when you have no one to teach you?
Refactoring by Martin Fowler is a great one https://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Existing-Addiso...

Design Patterns is also very well known https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Obj...

rcavezza··on Speedy Web Compiler – A Rust port of Babel and Closure Compiler
Can you elaborate more on this? I've worked with very large codebases in React and Angular and have not seen this issue. I'm guessing it's either because all of my applications were able to hot-reload or we're not thinking of the same thing.
rcavezza··on Show HN: Bubblin – Bandcamp for books
What does "bandcamp" refer to? Is that another webapp or are you comparing the bookreader to a summer camp?
rcavezza··on How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
This is so interesting. I have met many people that others considered "geniuses" because they solved hard problems and got things done fast. And then 3 years later, people still complain about having to deal with "[Name of Developer] Code". I guess if you move fast and write code that others can't read, it's easy to get labeled a genius.
rcavezza··on Ask HN: What are some hacks of real founders who did things that don't scale?
This is 100% true. So, so, so true. In actuality, A.I. will not ever 100% solve all problems and some sort of human intervention is typically needed to serve as a QA purpose.

AI can get you 80%, 90%, 95%, and 99% of the way to solve a problem. When you first start out, a human element will be doing most of the heavy lifting and creating training data for you. As you iterate on the model and improve it, the human intervention element will be less and less time consuming over time. As you near 100% accuracy, you will probably still want a human intervention element acting as QA because all models have some rate of error.

rcavezza··on The Evolution of Reddit’s Architecture (2017)
I just watched the entire video and it was very informative. Fwiw most of the comments on here did not watch the video and seem a little uninformed. The node apis were built by a small group of front end developers and most of the pulled out services they're building are in python .

There were also a lot about message queues, cacheing, and ops related things in the talk.

I definitely recommend watching the entire video if you're interested in high traffic architectures.

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2018)
FINCURA | DevOps Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Principal Software Engineer, Business Analyst, Business Development Representative | Boston, MA | Full-time | ONSITE

FINCURA is a Techstars company that helps deserving businesses grow by enabling financial institutions to make faster and smarter lending decisions. We completed Techstars a few months ago and are ramping up as we close deals.

We're currently hiring for a number of technical and non-technical positions as we grow. Fincura is an awesome company and I'm proud to be here. We're building an amazing team and a solid culture. I love coming to work everyday.

Tech Stack: Python3, Postgres, Angular

Send an email to bob@fincuratech.com if you're interested. All up to date available positions can be found at https://venturefizz.com/fincura

rcavezza··on Ask HN: Solo founder and MVP. New co-founder equity split?
https://blog.ycombinator.com/splitting-equity-among-founders...
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