sontek

At least for me, when I hear "10x" engineer I think of the ones who treat the craft as a craft. There is no "shallow" or "narrow" in them. The possess the important skills in software development:

    - ability to learn quickly
    - understanding how to debug and track down problems
    - not afraid to jump in where needed

I've worked with plenty of "frontend" engineers and "backend" engineers. I've worked with people who are "SREs". These people have specialized and are usually GREAT at their craft. But I don't lump them into the 10x engineer.

For me the 10x engineer is the one who will jump in on react one day and then rust the next. They'll write ansible scripts and automate SSL renewal and then fix a CSS bug the next day.

They'll talk through problems with anyone on the team and help get through the block.

Think of people like Miguel de Icaza ( https://github.com/migueldeicaza ) who have such knowledge and skill to build complete popular programming languages (Mono), Cross Platform Mobile Platforms (Xamarin), Spreadsheet Applications (Gnumeric). But have no problem building simple iPhone apps in swift.

Think of people like Anthony Sottile (https://github.com/asottile) who works on most of the developer tools us python devs use on a daily basis (tox, pytest, virtualenv, etc). Who maintains and builds ubuntu and debian repos for every new release of Python so we can get it easily (deadsnakes). But spends time to explain simple concepts like using "--rm" with docker run to developers.

If you have worked with someone like them, you know you are in the presence of a 10x engineer. There is no doubt in your mind.

This is amazing. I just started teaching my nine year old how to code python (hes been doing scratch/block coding for a few years).

I was complaining how when I got started qbasic was perfect and there is a huge barrier to entry these days and nothing exists like qbasic.

I'm only 35 but I've continued to pick up skills throughout my life and I've only increased it as I got older:

    - Started learning masonry and general handyman work in 2018 (33 years old)
    - Started learning Spanish in 2019 (34 years old)
    - Started learning piano in 2020 (35 years old)

My goal for 2021 is to learn a lot about electricity, batteries, etc. and would like to build a little off-grid backup

My co-founder just left our company after 4 years because we basically had to pivot and restart with a new product that fit with COVID (we are in the events space).

Looking back at everything that lead up to him having to leave, I've come up with the one mistake I regret doing:

Splitting up duties.

We were technical founders but we decided one of us would handle the business side and one of us would handle the technical side.

I think this ended up isolating us rather than having us work together as a team. As we grew I hired account managers, sales, etc and he hired devs. We chose to start a company together but never really worked together.

Now 4 years later I'm working in the backend for the first time. I wish I would've spent more time pair coding with him and discussing architecture together. We worked at 3 other companies together and went to university together and I think we missed our opportunity to truly work together on something WE want to build.

This will actually be nice for me! I live up in the mountains of Puerto Rico with microwave internet, so not the greatest.

Currently I can only watch partnered streamers because Twitch only allows transcoding for partners. So if they are streaming too high quality I just sit and buffer the whole time.

If I can just turn on uBlock to get transcoding that'll be awesome :)

I think the big one everyone forgets about is hubspot. Works just as good as the ones in the list but its integrated with a platform a lot of us already use.

We love having all our chats tied to our CRM by default :)

We LOVE it... it’s been solid for the four years we’ve been on it. But we can’t stay on a dead product so we know we gotta make a migration plan

We are still on RethinkDB but know we have to get off it eventually :(

I spent 2 years working on the infrastructure for a large silicon valley company to make it so we could do geo located data while maintaining a good experience for the user and when I left we had never completed the project.

1. If you want seamless auth, how do you want to handle this? Do they go to eu.facebook.com and authenticate that way?

If you geo locate the user to give them the proper authentication, what happens to a US based traveler who is in the EU?

2. Shared data. Lets say an EU person (whos data isn't allowed to go to the US) is friends with a US based person. We'd like to generate a feed of data for all that person's friends. Do we now have to query a DB in the EU? Is it ok to return that data to the US?

3. What about all the rest of the infrastructure around running an application:

  * monitoring
  * logging
  * error alerts
  * backups
  * operations access controls

Its a hard problem to solve if you are starting with a clean slate. Its a harder problem to solve when you're trying to retrofit a set of technology that may not have been designed for geolocated data.

I think that happened for awhile in the early 2000s. I know we purchased a lot of UI component libraries back in the day.

But I think we all had a enough of those component development companies go out of business or deprecate the version we were using that we are gun shy on doing it again.

I know I stick with opensource only at this point for that very reason. At least if they decide to stop supporting me, I can support myself.

What was the point of using Twilio's API if you were using WebRTC already? Wouldn't it have already worked without twilio?

I love the idea of the random mixing! I have the same thing happen where once I find a group I just stay there, even if I want to try meeting more people

As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)

We haven't tried cockroach yet because we are still on RethinkDB and are scarred by the experience of them going out of business.

I hope someday I'll be comfortable enough to experiment and use something other than postgres.

This is missing too many hand drawn stuff and memes. This isn't the jepsen I remember :P

Python RapidJSON: https://github.com/python-rapidjson/python-rapidjson

Is pretty amazing. Its the first library we add to most of our projects. I wonder if it would make sense to port it to using cffi so that pypy can benefit?

Nice! I'm excited! I've been working on a heavy NLP project with spanish and been having some issues and so this will be nice to test out and see if it helps!

I love spaCy and how its improving all the time

I wouldn't publicly shame companies that might be regulated by slowing moving policies. Anyone who collects payments (any start-up that wants to stay around for long) is required to follow some form of PCI which currently still has really bad rules.

You can disagree with the rules but if you don't want to get in trouble, you have to follow them until they fix them.

Work at a business and look for problems within it that aren’t being solved. This can be inefficient processes that could be solved with software or replacing vendors you’re unhappy about with a better solution.

You won’t be able to find a B2B problem from the outside. You need to be inside and observe. If you pay attention you’ll find a ton of business ideas.

LiveJournal!

Obsolete means to no longer be produced or used... These things are not obsolete.

They aren't cool / widely used but definitely not obsolete if half the worlds financial systems still run on them.

What would the opportunity cost? What does silicon valley have that philly doesn't?

I started my company fully remote but doing payroll in multiple countries is a pain. Have you solved this? I'm limiting my employees to the areas I've already registered with the proper authorities and not hiring in any other locations.

Definitely not true. I think every developer understands that porn is pushing the limits of technology. If I saw someone coming from any of the big sites I'd definitely be interested in what they worked on.

Every hiring manager I know only cares about what you worked on, not who you worked for.

Yes! My wife is angry because most of our photos were on my account.

* Weather

We eliminated any area that got below 50 degrees at any time. My wife and I had no interest in being cold!

* School Quality

We have two children so school quality was very important to us. We used sites like:

https://www.niche.com/k12/

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/rankings-...

We originally eliminated private schools and focused on public schools since we had only lived in areas like San Francisco and Miami. We added them back when we realized other areas like Atlanta have reasonably priced private schools.

* Community

We wanted a global and diverse community. We wanted our kids to hear multiple languages and learn about different customs and celebrations.

* Cost of Living

We wanted to have a better life without having to increase our overall take home pay. So things like cost of house and amount of state taxes was an important issue for us. When we moved from San Francisco to Miami we stopped paying 7% to California which went straight to our kids college savings.

So after living in San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City we decided to move to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The cost of living in Puerto Rico is comparable to Utah and Georgia, weather is amazing, and the private schools are top notch. Most people here are bilingual and well traveled. It is an amazing community to be part of and I'm glad we made the move.

We also have fiber internet for the first time in our lives since it was only available in small parts of any of the cities we lived previously, so our work is much better :)

A lot of founders are first time founders. They barely know how to run a company let alone shut one down. I think it is fine for investors to invest in great inexperienced people.

Maybe it would make sense for the investors to mentor them during the shutdown to make sure it is done correctly, since investors have been through it many more times.

I think the names and URLs are not matched up correctly. But other than that, yes.

I don't play games and have both a Linux desktop and an iMac. When you are doing a lot of distributed systems and large datasets the beefier machines help a lot.

I also have two laptops obviously but my main workhorses are the desktop computers. I'll even to shell into them when I'm on my laptop.

I don't have any data on it but I feel like the desktop market is getting bigger as datasets are growing and software is becoming more distributed. My 2015 macbook sounds like an airplane taking off when I code on it. The fan is at full throttle 100% of the time.

The only reason I know what this app is!

NYC is by all accounts ahead technologically of PR. PR has had this technology for awhile. Its been a long time since I've been anywhere in the US that didn't accept chip.