suchire

Temporal is a great system for jobs, workflows, etc. (we use it at my current job), but it isn’t really a replacement for PubSub per se, as there is only one consumer per task

Schema management is not too hard at small numbers of devs. We have a monorepo and a well defined data access layer in the monolith, so simple migrations, grep, unit tests, and frequent deploys are enough to handle 99% of needs

The harder part is ensuring people don’t hold onto connections during long-running operations. In some client libraries, it’s easy to accidentally hold one open. That plus autoscaling results in ticking bombs that are hard to catch with automated tests

It’s pretty easy to exhaust a DB if you have many replicas of a service connecting, each at high concurrency. 20 replicas at 20 connections each is enough to hit limits (like on Cloud SQL for GCP)

As you say, you can write a service to stand in front of the DB and mediate access, but PgBouncer is already written AND production ready

Cetacean ops https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cetacean_Ops

Fastmail. Excellent features, fast performance, and very reliable

This isn’t exactly Prolog, but Chalk [1] is a Prolog-inspired use case

[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/chalk/book/

I don’t personally have use experience of Quip, but from engineers I know who work there, fine-grained locking is how Quip handles collaboration.

A large part of it is ease of hiring. In 80% of cases, new grads are relatively simple to hire; you go to campus recruiting fairs, get bundles of resumes, and since new grads don’t usually have specialized skills, you can do bulk filtering by things like GPA or simple coding exercises.

There are a lot of negative consequences of this sort of “factory hiring” mentality (for one, you exclude huge numbers of some groups of people because everything is one size fits all), but if you contrast with hiring experienced folks, it’s way more streamlined. You don’t have to do sourcing, figure out location/geography, match up skill sets and team fit, deal with expectations around title/role, etc.

A lot of people mention salary and hours worked, but I suspect the real limiting factor in hiring at fast growing companies is time and staffing to do hiring, and if all you care about is the number of people typing code, you get new grads being overrepresented

The likelihood of mutation is directly proportional to how widespread a virus is multiplied by the amount of time it stays that way (more specifically, the area under the curve for infections over time). Vaccination and control of spread is critical to preventing further variants

“In Kubernetes, secrets are base64 encoded, so they are quite secure”

What

As people become more senior, the distinction in skills and responsibilities between managers and engineers starts to blur a lot. In fact, the best folks in both tracks have spend some time in the other track

The main issue tackled here is that multinational corporations operate across borders, and thus create problems of capital flight out of a country. Thus, even if the economic activity is almost entirely happening within a country (e.g. a local shop uses locally targeted online ads, sold by a sales team working out of a local call center, to attract neighborhood customers), the profits could be captured somewhere else, like an Irish subsidiary handling profits from continental Europe. Even if those profits get reinvested or distributed to shareholders, they might not get reinvested or distributed in that country where the revenue was generated.

“Innate immunity” is a particular thing in immunology that’s distinct from “adaptive immunity”. Adaptive immunity includes things like antibodies, and is most often what we are targeting with vaccines. Innate immunity covers a huge range of inherited systems including hard-codes responses to things like bacterial proteins, markers for fungi and viruses, etc

Like everything else in biology, there is tight coupling between innate immunity and adaptive immunity), so the distinction in reality isn’t so clear-cut about what’s part of innate vs adaptive, but that’s the broad gist.

In addition to the manager-to-managee “contract”, there are two other reasons to have goal setting exercises:

- Setting goals rather than tasks can allow for less micromanagement, if used properly. You have a problem to solve, with some freedom to choose how - Measuring individual (or even team) software engineer productivity is super hard. Unexpected problems, necessary research, tech debt, changing requirements, support interrupts, life problems, etc make consistent progress hard to measure, and no one wants to be measured by lines of code or “points closed”. Setting pre-negotiated goals and then achieving them is a more humane alternative

Geographic monopolies. Most households have only one broadband provider they can choose, with satellite or DSL as the only other fallback

Awesome, glad to hear that it’s been helpful!

Descript | Senior Backend and Full Stack Engineers | SF or remote (UTC-8:00 to UTC-4:00) | https://descript.com

Descript is a newly Series B startup applying AI and great design to make media editing as easy and collaborative as editing a Google Doc. Our software is a critical part of producing some of today’s top podcasts and news productions, and our business is growing fast into new areas like video, voice cloning, and screencasting! It’s a great time to join at an inflection point in our company’s growth as we democratize a field that until now has been highly technical and specialized

Our backend eng team is looking for senior backend engineers with distributed systems and ops experience to set our technical strategy as we scale our AI and media infrastructure and build out new products. We’re a small, scrappy team, so you’ll get to work on everything from a platform to deliver per-user trained AI models to media processing to real-time collaboration.

We’re committed to supporting remote work (we’re a geographically distributed team), strong work-life balance, and making sure that everyone is given opportunities to grow and excel! Please reach out to me at esuh (at) descript.com or apply at https://www.descript.com/careers

Although I’m hiring backend engineers, other teams at the company are also looking for full-stack engineers!

“It’s been the way people have been growing up for millennia all around the world.”

I don’t think this is a very convincing argument. There are many, many things that have been around for millennia that just aren’t that great. We’ve been living without vaccines, antibiotics, antiseptics, antihelminthics, poor nutrition, extremely high rates of childhood mortality, and high rates of death by childbirth for millennia. That doesn’t mean that state of being or way of doing things is inherently good

This isn’t a Mac layout? https://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-professional-for-m...

Yes. If he weren’t in office, there would be no obligation

Our stack isn’t super novel. We’re trying to make sure we don’t write ourselves into a corner with a stack that no one else uses, so we use Typescript/NodeJS + Kubernetes for much of our backend services, and Python for our ML pipelines

On the client side, we use Typescript and Electron, which allows us to have most engineers work across the entire stack and cross-platform

Thanks for posting this! It’s great when our users are excited about our product :-)

If anyone is interested, we are hiring engineers and PMs! In particular, we’re looking for senior backend engineers and full stack engineers.

https://www.descript.com/careers

I’m the tech lead for the backend/server team, happy to answer any questions as best as I can

Not solely, but in part? ;-)

I find they can sort of be taught in similar ways, as there are a lot of things about good, clear coding that translate to/from clear writing. At the risk of self-promoting, I wrote a comparison here a long time ago: https://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html

There were many influential policy decisions at the Federal level that pushed for defunding public programs, such as cutting federal grants/loan forgiveness for teacher training

It’s too bad some of these numbers are reported as averages. It would be nice to see something more percentile based, like p75 or p90, which are more effective ways of measuring quality of service

More likely it is the overhead of multiplatform support that motivates them to use Electron. Their support matrix is pretty big now: iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Windows, browser extensions, Chrome OS, and Linux

We use Dashlane at work, and every day I want to switch to 1Password, which I use in my home life. Dashlane has weird permissions glitches, a really buggy and very non-intuitive desktop app, really terrible web browser extensions that makes me tear out my hair in frustration, and even the mobile app doesn’t feel like it has the features I want, like the ability to add more than one password field (useful for accounts that have PIN codes and such). Even performance-wise, Dashlane’s mobile app feels really sluggish doing things like adding 2FA via QR code’s, which 1Password seems to do instantly.

Which government?

A job is a contract. If you don’t want the contract to be used that way, don’t write it that way. I don’t feel bad towards my employees or coworkers who wait to give notice until shortly after annual bonuses are given out. My previous boss encouraged me to stick out my job another couple weeks until the next stock vesting date.

As long as both sides sign the job contract willingly, without a severe imbalance of power, it’s not abuse. It’s business.