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scrabble

785 karma · joined February 6, 2013

Available for contract / remote work.
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scrabble··on Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers
This is my experience as a staff dev in an org with this type of org chart. Staff devs are considered lead engineers with no reports and sit in most of the lead meetings.
scrabble··on Technical Recruiting Needs to Focus on Selling the Position
Very much this. If I'm looking to know about a job somewhere, the first thing I do is check my network to see if anyone who knows me and has worked with me works there. Otherwise I'll see if people I'm close to know someone who works there.

Then I'll set up a chat with either an internal recruiter for that company or a hiring manager. The chat is to discover if the company would be a good fit for me, and on their side to see if I'd be a good fit for the company. If both of those things are true then interviews come very quickly afterward.

Having someone who works there means that you already have someone internally who can vouch for you. If it's already determined that you'd be a good fit from internal discussions then you generally have a leg up in the hiring process. And again it's also really great to figure out where you definitely don't want to be working.

scrabble··on A Humility Training Exercise for Technical Interviewers
Back when a was a tech lead and made hiring decisions for my team I would run the questions I asked candidates by the rest of the team in a 1:1 setting. We were checking that people could answer the questions well -- and sometimes when they couldn't it could show us weak points and give us ideas for training.

I always ended those 1:1 sessions by asking if the team member would be comfortable working with people who couldn't get to the correct answer. And if they could, what they would want to see from a candidate working on the question.

scrabble··on Special Cases Are a Code Smell
Padding the array is a bit of a code smell. You can't just pad an array without allocating a new block of memory. After allocation you need to copy the array into the new space. This is a significant amount of overhead to a fairly straightforward and efficient algorithm.
scrabble··on Retail Arbitrage at Walmart [video]
In this case Monopoly for Millenials is a Walmart exclusive item. So the money is made from people going to Amazon to buy it.
scrabble··on Samsung TV buyers furious after software update leaves sets unusable
It used to be that you could buy them as Digital Signage monitors. But for the most part these might now also be smart devices.
scrabble··on Samsung TV buyers furious after software update leaves sets unusable
The last time I bought a TV it took a bit longer because I insisted on buying a dumb TV. Privacy is a large issue for me, but also not loading my TV up with software that it simply doesn't need.

I ended up getting a TV that is not from a major brand, but has ended up looking just fine to me. I would love if more manufacturers continued / resumed selling dumb TVs of high quality.

scrabble··on United States Expatriation at an All-Time High
That is a major conservative politician talking point. I do not consider it founded in reality, but making it a talking point and an objective does increase political contributions from wealthy sources.
scrabble··on Canadian cable companies interrogate, search Montréal software developer
The article said that a judge ruled the search unlawful after the fact, and one of the reasons for that was because of the questioning -- so I'm not surprised there was no questioning in the cases you are familiar with since they may have been carried out correctly.
scrabble··on Canadian cable companies interrogate, search Montréal software developer
This seemed incredibly questionable for me when I read it. Of course, if he was prevented from consulting with his lawyer, how would he know if this is an empty threat or not?
scrabble··on How to Get Hired at CircleCI
> We’ll have you work on actual bugs in our actual code

> you’ll pair with us on a real feature or bug

Are you paying people who are interviewing with you? Or are you getting them to do real work on your code for free?

scrabble··on Problems with Swagger
I'll be honest, I stopped reading the article as soon as it mentioned Hypermedia, because I instantly saw the problem as the author being upset that Swagger is not Hypermedia.

I have a really hard time seeing APIs ever reaching that level of standardization, and I'm tired of having the Hypermedia discussion. I generally support logically organized APIs with good documentation. As long as those things are true, I'm happy for the API.

scrabble··on Why are developers switching from Mac OS X to Linux?
You wouldn't notice a change from me, since I switched to Linux on my MBP. My next refresh will be to a Carbon, but this laptop is still fairly new.
scrabble··on Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival
Nintendo actually has a very sizable war chest. I don't think they are struggling for survival at all.

Although Nintendo doom and gloom has been a popular theme for many years I'm a little surprised to see it here.

scrabble··on Super Mario Run
The point is definitely collecting the special coins. The pink coins seem to get harder to obtain as the game goes on. The purple coins afterwards are even harder, and the onyx coins are really challenging.

The levels also have different obstacle and coin layouts depending on the special coins you are going for.

scrabble··on How to run a meeting (1976)
This is helpful for me. I serve on a local board and this very much describes the type of discourse that occurs there. For reference, we run the meetings according to Bourinot's rules of order: https://www.amazon.com/Bourinots-Rules-Order-Assemblies-Shar...

By the same token, this is not terrible useful for me in terms of work meetings which are extremely informal in comparison. They are also intended to achieve a different goal.

I'd say that both types of meetings are appropriate for their goals, but I've also been surprised at just how effective the more formal meetings have been in achieving progress and consensus.

scrabble··on Gameroom
I saw that one of the screenshots from the limited number they had was Willy Wonka Slots. So that's a no.
scrabble··on Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius
You could just grab user location and populate it in a db. Use a proximity search to see which users you see and see you.

You could also break things down by geofence, but that would work better for a city chat since there would need to be overlapping fences otherwise you could be next to someone and not see their messages.

There are other ways to do it, but if you are going to use Internet connectivity, that's the simplest I believe.

scrabble··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
You can't take the Wii U tablet with you. It's not the core of the system. This allows Nintendo to combine their console and handheld divisions so that they can unify their focus and have a steady stream of software, even if third parties don't show up.
scrabble··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
It's brilliant. I have kids, and I could definitely see it coming places like the car where the kids are able to play together, or where I am able to play with the kids.
scrabble··on Final – A credit card built for the 21st century
Your account is charged when purchases happen. So your account would not be locked. You just couldn't make any additional purchases until you updated your account.

Chargebacks are the big problem for companies that operate like this.

scrabble··on Node v6.9.0 (LTS)
As I understand it, native promises don't make native system calls. They are still pure js. They are just implemented differently from Bluebird which optimizes for the most common use cases.
scrabble··on Final – A credit card built for the 21st century
Other cards might do chargebacks and fraudulent charge recovery, but I look at online services like Playstation Network. If your account is compromised, and you do a chargeback, they will ban your account and you lose access to all your digital content. On top of this, they often will not even provide a refund for content purchased by someone who has compromised your account.

Having the ability to give them a completely different card # with a monthly limit for just them really provides an additional layer of protection without the threat of losing access to goods you legally acquired.

scrabble··on Node v6.9.0 (LTS)
Bluebird already has this, and is more efficient than native. But this is definitely a step forward.
scrabble··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
I think even UI/UX review would be good. Like looking at things that pop up on Show HN and doing a short video covering usability and design of the thing.

Seems to me that it would be easier to cover UI/UX in video format than screenshots and pictures. I'm by no means an expert in that area though.

scrabble··on Show HN: Marathono – A GUI tool for managing long-running processes in macOS
I could see myself getting use out of this. Thanks!
scrabble··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
Other than the Chrome icon on the "Get It" button, there's no real indication on the page that this is a Chrome only extension.

I like the design though. Looks pretty slick.

What's the target use case?

scrabble··on uWebSockets 0.10.0
A million connections into the computer that you work on? Are these bot net connections, or do use your machine as your server?
scrabble··on New P2 Instance Type for Amazon EC2 – Up to 16 GPUs
This is true. But real time encode is essentially what you need to do with live video instead of VOD transcode. You have other processes doing the other necessary work during the transcode.

All in all, I look for somewhere around 0.25s to complete the rest of the work and deliver the segment to CDN.

scrabble··on New P2 Instance Type for Amazon EC2 – Up to 16 GPUs
I'm doing live video ingestion. Transcode to DASH/HLS at 5 different qualities + alternate audio/subtitles where provided.
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