simonlebo

Missing tiers 6: After hours.

On the 28th of September I got charged $900+ for Facebook ads that I never ran. I reported it as fraud to my credit card and let Facebook know. I would recommend everyone that have their PayPal integration to check their bank statement for unusual activity around that date.

I am mostly disturbed by this essay and a lot of the comments. Reading the news is a difficult act indeed. You need to read between the lines, understand that a lot of things are opinion based and that there are a lot of opinions depending on how you look at a problem. But just because it is difficult and quite imperfect is it a reason why we should stop doing it? How else can we fight inequality, injustice and problems of the world. I understand tat Aaron's point is not to do ignore problems, and his history obviously bring nothing but respect but in an era where "Fake News" is being shouted everywhere, I fear that the message of this essay is a dangerous one. By disregarding news because of it's limits/imperfections, we expose ourselves to much bigger problems. I force myself to read the news everyday because I think it is my civic duty.

Could ISP be responsible for attacks coming from some of their infected users? Shutting down someone's internet for 'abusive use' would be a good incentive of getting incriminating devices out of the market.

Yes I agree that 90% of all the projects advertised are what you describe and not worth anything. No-one should waste their time on it. But there is also this 10% of really quality work. There seems to be a shortage of talent in some areas of the world and the technology is here for teams to be distributed so some CEO/CTO give these freelancing sites a go.

When I first had a look I got quite pessimistic about my chances of finding work and money through it but decided nonetheless to give it a fair go.

I passed a few tests that gave me an initial edge as a newcomer, and decided to follow most freelancing advice I found on the internet: don't down-value yourself with a bad hourly rate, and apply to jobs professionally. It took me a few weeks to get a first contract, and after a month or so I was working 60h per week. I also read "The Freelance Pricing Guidebook" by Glenn Stovall which is a simple pdf of a dozen of pages which really gave me a good think of how to approach being independent and potential pricing strategies.

I also try to get out of the platform once I built the relationship with the client but it is not without risk if they run out of money, you don't have that nice guarantee that the platform offers. It happened to me that a client owed me 5 digits amounts and I regretted for a while having gone directly to him (he ended up paying, he had just ran out of cash).

If you find an USA client and you are not in the USA, with the strong USD it can be really advantageous for both parties. If you are in the USA I'd still say you can do well (I think Australia is more expensive than USA).

Maybe I really got lucky, or necessity forced me to succeed since my girlfriend got sent to a rural area with no work for me. Now days my work is so much more interesting, better paid and I met some amazing people thanks to that platform.

I have been working exclusively through upwork for 2 years and make a good living off it (I also live in Australia, it's not like I can charge 10$/h). I would highly recommend people give it a try, you will be surprised that there are lots of client out there looking for talent who are ready to pay correctly or premium.

I've been working for 2 years solely through upwork and I am really happy with it. I get a normal freelancing rate for my country (Australia) and sustain my family with it. I was sceptical at first seeing the low rates but decided to give it a fair try and was happy and surprised with the result. Most often it lead to move the work to outside the platform since their 10% fee can get to big numbers pretty quickly.

Also I'd like to add that some of the companies that I work for have found some great talent through the platform.

I've been starting a few Django projects during the last few years and I have had trouble finding packages that are compatible with the latest versions. Maybe their release cycle is too fast for all the 3d party apps to keep track?

Also I find that some of these 3d party apps use a notation like >= Django 1.X but that's not really true because of backwards incompatibility. A clearer way to know what exact version Django apps are compatible with would already be really helpful.

This is a great post that goes through the setup (mea-culpa it is actually 3 one-liners, 1 for E,L, and K :) ): http://evanhazlett.com/2014/11/Logging-with-ELK-and-Docker/

Good luck!

I came across a few of the issues mentioned in that article while using docker in the last 4 months but I have to say I will never look back.

What I like the most personally is how easy it is to install and experiment with 3d party tools. You want an elastic search stack? In one command you have a webserver hosting Kibana with Elastic Search and Logstash properly configured on your local. Jenkins, Elastic Search, Redis, Postgres, etc: they all have their dockerfiles and can be installed as one liners. Removing them is equally as easy.

Oh and I don't know why it is written that running a Docker registry is "extremely complex". Just like any Dockerized app it is a one-liner.

This new ease-of-install just by itself is worth of my gratitude to the guys that build it.

I just tried using Firefox again after reading this. I stopped after 2 minutes, when I realised installing the flash plugin was a pain. Apparently Adobe stopped supporting Flash for linux in 2012.

A few UX small remarks.

I don't understand why clicking on a selected criteria on the 'Create Your Perfect Programming Test' doesn't deselect it. It made my first interaction weird since Javascript is always selected.

The close button made me close the tab a few times. I was expecting a back behaviour. Not that it matters since I see your site opens its own links in a new tab which is also something I do not like.

Great article. My understanding of Docker is quite new, so take my remarks with a grain of salt.

One thing I would emphasise in the first paragraph is that you need at least other provisioning/configuration tools to set up the servers where the docker containers will be deployed to. I know it would obvious to most, but you would still need to start/stop these machines with correct docker install, firewalls rules, and probably more. The VM layer has been flushed out, but still exists and needs attention.

After spending more than a week looking into Docker, my one frustration with Docker is that I have not found a way to correctly develop with it. Most of the docs I see are about deploying established apps, but I would love to see tutorials about how to develop, and start from scratch with it. Does Docker stand in your way when developing or does it make it easier? Maybe a solution is to create docker wrappers for our favourite framework that would abstract Docker. Anyways, I'd love to see more on this.

Wow. Political correctness at its best: bring on the witch hunt! What if he replaced girlfriend with boyfriend? Would that still be sexist? His joke was not on the sex, but on the fact that she was his life partner. You know couple stuff. I kind of feel sorry for him because he was not intending to offend but just be funny. It would be sad if he lost his job over that. I find Atlassian's response makes sense since they are walking on eggs with such a topic.

Yes there are some logical exceptions to the motor boat always give way. These are however exceptions. http://www.gosailing.info/Navigation%20Rules.htm

The equivalent in the cycling example would be that trains have to give way to cyclists which was not my point.

I live in Australia and the debate here is pretty heated between cars and cyclists. The main reason pedestrians are not really mentioned is, in my opinion, because Australia does not have many pedestrians centres and they don't coexist with bikes all that much.

I do agree with a lot of this article about the uselessness of enforcing outdated road rules to cyclists. I personally will rarely completely stop at stop sign. I find the danger much higher to try to immobilize the bike, un-clip the shoe and start again with a very slow speed (potentially exposing myself for a much longer period of time in that dangerous crossing zone).

To solve accidents between all of these actors, I think there should be a simple rule of giving the slowest vehicle always the right of way, which is what courteous people do. A pedestrians should always have priority over a cyclist and or a motorist. If accident happen, the cyclist/motorist should take the full responsibility for it. Likewise a cyclist should have priority over a motorist. The person at fault should be proven guilty unless proven innocent of some unpredictable situation.

It is a bit the same on the water, where motor boats have to give way to wind powered boat for the same logical reasons.

This article argues that the system overestimated the cases (which it did) and therefore did not work. To reproduce the results of traditional systems is not the purpose of systems like GFT. If you look at the graphs you can see that GFT provides an indication of an increase in flu cases before the traditional systems. This is where it has value; it provides an early indication of an emerging problem.

Can anyone explain how disabling ssh has anything to do with automation? We automate all our deployments through ssh and I was not aware of another way of doing.