ritchiea

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript/Typescript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a popular Ruby billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS and Digital Ocean as well as writing IaC in Terraform.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: ritchiea@gmail.com

CV and references available upon request.

I'm already a freelancer and posted in the most recent monthly freelance thread.

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS, and Digital Ocean.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: ritchiea@gmail.com

CV and references available upon request.

Sort of agree though I would argue "joining an exercise group" is a healthy way to create shallow connections with the aim that one or more of them becomes deeper. Finding deep connections is difficult and requires significant effort from at least one party. You have to work at it. And attempts to create shallow connections shouldn't be dismissed because you generally can't try to create deeper connections in isolation and separately from trying to create shallow connections.

The difficulty of growing a shallow connection into a deeper connection is a large part of why so many people are lonely. We can't just ignore shallow connections because it's unrealistic to only ever aim for deep connections. Connections are experiments that grow.

The post I was replying to asked if he could play against 1800's and gain rating. Players in the 2500s are much more capable of forcing a draw. It'd be unlikely he'd gain much rating playing against them because wins wouldn't move the needle much and draws would be very costly.

Technically he could, I believe FIDE has a minimum rating increase of 1 point for the winner of a game with > 400 ELO advantage on their opponent. But if he broke 2900 by playing in minor tournaments against low rated amateur opponents no one would take it seriously that he broke 2900. Realistically many, maybe even all of the top players could push for record ELOs by only playing against players well below their level. But not only are the optics bad and the records would be looked at as illegitimate, it would take a lot of time playing long classical chess games against inferior opponents. Which is a major opportunity cost since their time would normally be spent playing in and studying for professional tournaments.

Secret Hitler is a board game the writer is referring to. They're not actually talking about Hitler.

Actually right now in Europe most (maybe all?) flights can be rescheduled for free in response to the pandemic. Is that not the case elsewhere?

"World champion" is also a bit of a title.

Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.

The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.

It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.

It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.

Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.

I think it’s subjective. I learned Haskell early on in university and I’ve learned Lisps and it still feels like extra work to reason about programs or model domains in functional languages.

I believe functional programming advocates when you guys say it works better. But I only believe it works better for you. In my experience there’s a minority of people who find functional programming to be a powerful paradigm shift but for most developers functional programming either doesn’t resonate or resonates at the level of an academic exercise that helps you think better about writing code but best remains an academic exercise.

He's lived a different life than nearly anyone else. Certainly so caught up in his responsibilities to Facebook that he's been unable to grow and change and branch out and fail, and be rejected and forced to reinvent or repurpose himself the way most people do. It's impossible to imagine what my life would be like or how my perspective would be different if I was caught in a bubble of a project I started in my late teens turning into a near trillion dollar success that only grew and grew from the moment I started on it.

He’s certainly determined whatever his true self is, it’s not good for business.

Why does the reader need to read this blog post?

We don’t but we think we might learn something or be entertained. Withholding a piece of information that lots of readers are naturally curious about is odd. I like the post & Dan Luu’s writing in general but I’m dying to know the why behind the computer in the smallest box request.

You estimate it’s rated 3400-ish and it loses games????

Agree it’s not a great or neutral look for all audiences.

Why not set it to private?

Real estate and flat purchase prices have been rising faster in Berlin than anywhere else in the world over the last five or so years. The rental market is also rising, there's a growing startup sector and lots of international immigration. There is a housing crisis in central Berlin within the ringbahn where demand far far outreaches supply. Going to a Berlin flat viewing is an exercise is intense competition. Rental prices are rising accordingly.

One of the tough lessons of my years as a developer is many developers love to adopt Google scale solutions and Google practices because they’re from Google and they come with prestige and a feeling of proximity to the most visible technology company. Whether their problems are a good fit for Google scale solutions or not. It’s inevitable and it takes a lot of soft skills to argue against even if it’s dead obvious you’re going to be running a few instances of an application maximum. The simple solution is far less sexy than the Google solution.

I agree and having a missing word in your text often leads to confusion :)

Honestly you could drop the "bits" which is a bit redundant and use the phrase "Uses CSS selectors to extract content from HTML files."

It's more than fair to say in technical documentation you intend others to use having a grammatical error or missing word is confusing and a problem. It's the writing equivalent of having a bug in your code. And it's definitely not "writing to a target audience" as the parent comment suggested. We all make mistakes but don't try to call a mistake effective documentation.

As web developer for over a decade "bits content" doesn't mean anything to me. But I understand what the tool does from the rest of the description. Try running a google search for "bits content," [0] it's not a commonly used phrase in web development or anything. It's a poor choice of words.

0. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22bits%20content%22

I believe the author would agree with you, his last bullet point is write for humans not for machines. When he says write less code, I believe he means favoring simpler architectures, saying no to features & tools until you absolutely need them & even finding no-code solutions. Not taking verbose code & making it less readable by shortening it.

It's originally from 1998 and has been updated since then.

I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work.

On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.

I agree with this in principle but in practice code I write that’s quick & easy and not very readable is usually not understandable by me in a few months either. So if it’s a personal project I hope to last I still want to keep it simple with my code.

Wow I think in 10+ years, I've only had 1 or 2 cases of brew failing to install something. It's a piece of software I've been consistently impressed with over the years. I wonder why our experiences differ so much.

You could but an NFT with the deli menu has already been done https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...