romanhn

It's called fractional CTO and is most definitely a thing.

I suspect he's thinking about the stack vs heap distinctions.

I mean, this is basically the author of this post :-)

I hate these kinds of articles, which come off as "I read about a bunch of these things and if you don't know all the same stuff, how dare you call yourself senior". I typically see this in mid-level engineers who haven't gotten humbled by experience yet. The premise is bogus - most people are a mix of mappers and packers, rather than landing squarely on one end. And you can absolutely be a wonderful senior without knowing the details of the CPU architecture or definitions of OSI layers or whatever. This is literally contradicting itself - you must not memorize but understand the why, but also here's a list of whys you should have memorized. Ugh. How about we accept that titles are meaningless, that companies have different standards and incentives, and that as long as higher titles mean more money and clout, individuals will generally optimize for that.

And speaking of titles, it looks like the author spent a total of one year in the workforce before going on to become a cofounder/CTO and currently claims that title at four organizations simultaneously (with under ten years of experience, not that this is an indicator of much). Wonder how he feels about the CTO bar.

ChatGPT is pretty decent at it.

This feels like Cloudflare using the strangler pattern to continue their march into established cloud provider territory.

Their serverless implementation is outstanding - AFAIK, they're the only ones offering true scale-to-zero compute with no cold start delays. I've used it successfully to host an SSR app that hits an external API basically at no cost. If I'm reading this correctly, I can now move the API code into Cloudflare Workers as well, and just leave the database at the old provider, with the promise of much lower cost-for-performance for compute and better database performance. Sounds compelling and helps to move chunks of infrastructure to Cloudflare, who will undoubtedly introduce hosted relational databases in the future to complete the picture.

I'm unclear about the security implications though. My current database is in a private subnet, it would be unfortunate to have to open it up to the world to take advantage of this. The other downer is that Workers don't natively support .NET, so I can't make that move yet. But it's certainly intriguing!

No content here, just an ad deployed to the top of HN.

There's literally dozens of us! :) I'm using .NET 6 with a React frontend and Linux-based AWS infra. Feels like the best of all the worlds.

Startup.com was great. I've also heard good things about Valley of the Boom. And, while not exactly a dot com movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley is a classic about the Jobs vs Gates rivalry.

Plenty of companies using Macbooks as their primary machines. Though as soon as the finance/accounting departments grow beyond tiny they frequently get exemptions to be able to get Excel on Windows - all other options are sub-par.

To be clear, I am not passing judgment on Oz - I think his accomplishments are impressive, all the more so given his day-to-day challenges. And I'm not at all a fan of the Leetcode interviewing culture either. My point was that Oz is not Carmack, Knuth, etc, so wouldn't fall into the exception bucket that Google cares about (unlike you or me). There are usually well-meaning reasons behind these processes, regardless how well they turn out.

At the extreme edges of course there are exceptions. I think we can agree that this is not the case here?

FYI, it is incredibly common to subject acquihired employees to the same interviews, and extend offers only to those that pass. This is especially true at FAANG.

With a big company like Google you can't just randomly hire someone without putting them through the rigorous interview process that can be months long (been there, done that), accomplishments or not (see the Homebrew dude).

Thank you. Also found additional discussion in https://designmodo.com/font-psychology. I'm still skeptical that there is anything intrinsic about the meanings specific fonts convey outside of being used in previous contexts (e.g. conveys "fashionable" because it's overused in fashion industry, per one example). That said, I'm more open to the idea of font psychology now.

> they transmit a, mostly subconscious, feeling—reliability, innovation, vision, purpose, etc.

I do not believe this for a second. Has there been any serious research done on this?

Same reason getting excited about higher CPU speeds is so 90s. Latest tech generations do not enable meaningfully new experiences compared to the early ones, and the hardware capabilities plateau over time (whether due to Moore's Law or other miniaturization limitations).

Samsung S9 that I got 5 years ago. Prior to that I upgraded my phone every two years (typically every other Samsung smartphone generation), but the newer phones don't seem to be compellingly better than my S9 and phones these days are eye-wateringly expensive, so there's not been much reason to update while this one continues to work perfectly.

Fantastic list. I would also add The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier to really hone those people management skills. And The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is a nice quick read on organizational politics.

PIA definitely fell out of favor in the last few years. Here's a post noting a few issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21584958

Google's VPN. I was already paying a small bit of money for extra Google Drive storage and they recently started including the VPN as part of the Google One package.

I got tired of tracking the status of my job applications in spreadsheets and emails, and built Rolepad (https://rolepad.com) to help with that. The goal is to help applicants focus on their job process and not expand mental energy on the mechanics of tracking dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of job applications.

The tool is free and helps you manage your job applications, pipeline status, interviews, emails, notes, etc. Notable features include the ability to leave detailed reviews of your job process (+ read others' reviews and get various per-company stats... this is new, went live yesterday - tracking more fine-grained data than Glassdoor and others), forwarding emails to save@rolepad.com so they can be tracked as notes within Rolepad, sharing your progress via Sankey charts, and more.

Nope. Losing the first game after a 71-day streak cured me completely of the addiction.

First off, I don't think anyone can answer these questions for you. There are a ton of considerations that could influence the end result, and you haven't provided any context really, so any answers you get will reflect this. That said I'll give it a shot.

1. You'll likely get a bunch of opposing opinions here on HN, it's a divisive topic (which probably means you can go with either and be fine). That said, my recommendation would be to start with the cloud - tons of managed services out of the box, good default security, lots of resources, ease of experimentation and rolling back infra that didn't work out, etc. Look into serverless tech like Lambda to control costs.

2. Whatever you already know best. Unless you're looking to learn some specific tech. But if you're focused on delivery, underlying languages/frameworks matter vanishingly little.

These aren't "algorithms" in the traditional sense of that word. They are complex, convoluted systems with hundreds of moving parts/services owned by dozens to hundreds of teams. There's no one individual who has a total understanding of the whole thing, and only a few that could speak to it at a high level. Most folks are busy optimizing and improving the microservices their team owns and such. The few folks with the high-level understanding are typically senior enough where divulging this info is neither particularly thrilling nor worth any potential risk.

And yes, recommendation engines are not nearly as exciting as the conspiracy theories around them.

Yeah, this is definitely a much better formulation and one I've used in more recent interviews.

You're right of course. However, interviewing is a game of limited information and I consider all signal I get from the company (after all, they're doing the same with me). I think a few things had to be broken in order for an employee to feel strongly this way, end up in the interviewing panel, and feel comfortable to share their views.

Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.

Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politely bowed out of the process when the hiring manager reached out to me with the next steps.

This was Nvidia in 2006 and their stock is up about 200x since then.

Google search does it already: https://blog.google/products/search/hum-to-search. Worked decently enough the few times I tried it.

I got tired of tracking the status of my job applications in spreadsheets and emails, and built Rolepad (https://rolepad.com) to help with that. The goal is to help applicants focus on their job process and not expand mental energy on the mechanics of tracking dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of job applications. It's got a few beta users and I've gotten positive feedback, but there are still a few things I need to add before its ready for primetime (aka Show HN).

The tool is free and helps you manage your job applications, pipeline status, interviews, emails, notes, etc. Notable features include the ability to leave detailed reviews of your job process (+ read others' reviews and get various per-company stats... this is new, went live yesterday - tracking more fine-grained data than Glassdoor and others), forwarding emails to save@rolepad.com so they can be tracked as notes within Rolepad, sharing your progress via Sankey charts, and more.