wrestlerman

There are other serializers like blueprinter [0]. I haven't used it yet, but it seems like a good (fast) AMS replacement.

I also recommend using Oj [1] which is a very fast JSON parser/generator for Ruby.

JSON generating through DB seems like a good idea, but imo it's a bit too complicated solution.

[0] https://github.com/procore/blueprinter [1] https://github.com/ohler55/oj

I've seen there are plenty of comments that disagree with that statement. I agree, though.

I love working remotely. I've been working remotely for a bit less than a year now. I had some few months break at the beginning of this year where I was working on my own product, but I was still at home.

Why do I love it? Well, my wife is staying at home with me and we get to spend so much more time together. I think over that period of time we've got closer together. We can chat during the day, eat meals together and stuff like that, it's super cool.

More reasons? If I can work asynchronously (not being dependent on the rest of my team) I can schedule my day according to my needs. Need a one hour walk outside? Well, why not:) Even though it's not my company I'm working for I kind feel like I am the boss. I don't have people staring at my screen, I don't have people talking next to me, I can go to a shop and prepare a nice breakfast if I want to. It's really good.

I do agree that it gets a bit boring without a chitchat with colleagues. But I try to compensate for it by meeting with my friends and family regularly.

Yea, I know you are right. Still, it sucks that there is mindset like that...

I'm located in EU. I think this is part of the problem. Based on my job search, I've noticed that there is much more (interesting) jobs in USA.

Based on my experience this is very true. It's very annoying when you want to find a job, but you don't want to be a sucker, so you end up looking for a job for a long time. I don't get it. You want to hire someone talented or smart, obviously, you are gonna have to pay them good money. What's the problem with that? I'm sure they will bring much more value than a usual sucker.

Personal story ahead. I've been looking for a job for around two months already. I'm Ruby/JS dev, so there are a few offers I can choose from. The problem is, half of that offers pay very little. Based on my experience, related to working with other people and to my previous salaries, I'd be a sucker to apply to those cheap offers. What I'm even more afraid is the people I'd work with. I'm pretty young and ambitious and I learn fast and I want to learn a lot, but if you don't have a good mentor you are not gonna learn that much.

Unfortunately, the offers, that interest me, require much more experience than I have. I doubt that I'd have a real problem with adapting and doing the job unwell. But I don't even get invited to any interview from that offers, because my CV has one year or two years of experience less than they expect :( How can I show that I could be a good fit then?

I know it's not that much related to the topic, but I've been a bit frustrated.

I don't know why people make such a big deal of types. They don't add that much time to typing the code.

I also have noticed that if you write daily using some code style (for example using types) it takes time to switch to another style, for example without types. So you are better of using types, because you are used to it and you will code faster that way anyway.

Recently I've been tinkering with Elixir a lot. That's why I decided to share some small tips for learning Elixir. Hopefully someone will find it useful :)

Never been a CTO, but, don't be afraid to give some of your responsibilities to other people. Not sure how else to describe it, what I mean is just don't expect yourself to do everything, you have dev team for coding, etc.

Make sure your developers have everything they need to do their job: like tools, specs, docs, designs, etc.

And don't be afraid to ask questions to your developers, there is no way you will know the product 100%.

That's a message from a regular dev.

I don't know much how to help. I'm sorry. I have one idea though. Maybe find a temporary work in some other industry? Something new could spark a new passion? Even a job like a waiter/ress, taxi driver could bring a new look at life.

I think that interacting with other people could help. IT is very specific workplace, especially, startups, in my opinion.

That's a very valid concern. My personal opinion: Yes, the package system is pretty small. That's why it depends what kind of project you are gonna write and how much time you have. Ruby has a lot of gems, but many of them are buggy and deprecated... Proof: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia

I think that Elixir is gonna catch up. If you write a project where you need to use a lot of external libraries probably Ruby is better. If you don't need to rely on the external dependencies too much and you want to/have to write your own code(libs), imo, Elixir is a better option. It also depends on a project, lots of external api calls, webhooks, real time chatrooms, etc. I think Elixir is gonna be a better option.

One thing more, because Elixir's code is much easier to deal with, it's easier to fork and fix deprecated lib than in Ruby(Rails).

It's just my opinion.

I thought same in 2018 when I didn't use Phoenix. But after trying out Elixir and Phoenix, damn... Elixir and Phoenix give you so much, nice websockets, concurrency, fucking easy to read code with great docs.

I was a bit sceptical about the praise Elixir was getting, but after working with it for a while... I started noticing a lot of stuff that is lacking or abused in Ruby and Rails.

I finished high school not that long time ago... I'm gonna say... Think Lean (startup lean) go to the high school and ask the kids what they want to know and what could make the presentation better for them and their friends.

As a kid, I really disliked listening to presentations from some random folks, because they were just talking and talking and talking about their job, lol. Make them interested in the field, show them why it's so cool. A million words are not gonna convince them, but if you show them something cool and show them the path to do it at home, some will get interested :)

Location: Poland, Europe

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends on the city

Technologies: Javascript, React, Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zapa%C5%9Bnik-410091b0/

Email: adam at wrestlerman dot me

Hi, I'm looking for a position that involves Ruby/Elixir. I can additionally do Javascript, so I can be your fullstack developr :) At the moment, I'm building my own products, so I'm learning a lot about the business side, which is cool and useful, imo.

I'm from Europe, so I will say why I don't want to work in London (and I get a lot of offers from there!)

The salaries that are offered are a joke in London. The expenses are so huge there! Even if the salary is a bit higher than my current one, I would spend much more.

There are a lot of joke startups, some new cryptocurrency or blockchain startups... Nope, I'm not gonna join anything like that.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of big cities and London is too crowded (for me).

Allow remote and I'm sure you are gonna find someone.

Hey, the author here :) Retrochat is my first product ever. It solves a problem where teams lose or don't complete their action items from retrospectives. It happens because many existing tools don't focus on action items as much as they should. Retrochat is supposed to fix it.

Currently, Retrochat is available in Beta. There are some features missing, but they will be added, hopefully, soon.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask :)

I'm gonna say, don't be too hard on yourself. You may expect to be as productive as on your previous job, but there is a big chance that you won't be. It will take some time to adjust to the new setting (even if you worked in your free time on the business).

Anyway, congrats, good luck.

At first, I disagreed, but then I completely agree after thinking about that problem more. The proper mindset comes from the Top. If managers can't guide/lead their devs then they just can't expect business-oriented development. I guess most often what they want is less coding more features anyway. But if developers are supposed to help with business then they should understand the business and not be viewed as programmers but as the developers - for instance, programmers would probably code new feature from 0 but developers could use external SaaS to verify the need for that feature in the first place. I agree that developers need free room and a lot of help from management to make business development a reality.

On the other hand, I do think that not every developer is meant for that kind of work, there are lots of developers that think only about coding...

I have the same opinion. Building SPA is f* hard and time-consuming. But it depends. If you know how to build SPA fast, then, by all means, go that route. (As a solo dev or small team)

I use Rails, but Rails views are a disaster. You can use a lot of different patterns/gems, but still, logic is highly coupled with the view layer. Personally, I like Phoenix approach with templates + views. But still writing script tags makes me cringe a little bit.

But I wouldn't discourage people from using SPAs, though. If you are gonna have a lot of buttons, modals, different tables, charts, forms and stuff like that, I would go SPA. Or first serverside -> SPA. Especially, when you are working in the team, it's so much easier to tell one person to craft this json api and another to craft this design with a consumer for the json api.

That become long... in short: if you have a small team or solo go server side 99%. If you have a big team or app that's gonna be very heavy UI -> go full spa or go server(mvp) -> spa

I think it depends on the business you are building and also on yourself. I don't think everyone will be able to build something good without quitting. I also don't think it's not impossible to build a business while having a job.

I think what most people fail to recognize is that building a business can take years. Everyone thinks (including me, welp) that you can build next big SaaS in a couple of weeks. The truth is that you can't. It will take probably a couple of months at least. The sooner you realize it, the sooner you will succeed.

Yea, probably a lot of people would ... for that kind of money. I guess it really depends on the person. Some crave money even if they are super rich. Some just want to have a happy life (no matter what money) - whatever that means for a person - focusing on a hobby, helping others, reading, etc.

TL;DR OP liked his job, but his motivation was decreasing. Could be possible earning much more in the next few years. Gonna build his own things from now on.

Long story short money is not everything. I understand it. I'm currently unemployed working on my own things and I pretty like it. Although I don't have that much money saved and probably I'm gonna find work soon, I've found out that I'm that kind of person, who wants to explore the world by myself and on my own terms.

A very touching story. Yet somehow I feel happy for him, that he had found his friends online.

I used to play a lot of MMO games when I was a teenager, not WoW exactly. I wish more kids played that genre nowadays. I think all the competitive games nowadays like dota2/lol/fortnite don't have the same feeling like MMOs. Obviously, you can find many friends in them too, but the culture is so much different. In MMO games you could just spend hours chatting with people and doing nothing else.

I'm sure there are many more cases like that and I think that MMO games are really one of the best experience in gaming. You can meet people from all over the world. It's a bit like traveling, but focused solely on people not on food/history, etc. Ofc, that's my opinion.

I don't understand that surprise. It's their business model, what do you expect? They need to earn money, right? If you don't like them, stop using them.

Similar story here. I don't feel bad, though. There is just not enough time and resources to make every detail perfect. And I don't feel like overworking, because it will just burn me out in the end.

Hi, I wrote a post about perfectionism and how to deal with it. I think that in a startup culture leaders are pretty aware of this issue as they have faced it before (when building a product). Unfortunately, when it comes to new hires, especially ones completely new to startups, they don't understand how valuable their time is and what exactly they are being paid for. Many time it's not the perfect code that matters, but half broken feature that can be pushed to users to validate their needs.

What's your opinion? How many times have you had to deal with a colleague that wanted everything to be perfect?

Cool, but slow. Couldn't all the data be packed into frontend? Waiting even a sec to check out some property is impractical.

Nothing specific atm. I do agree that startup could mean a lot of things. But I've learned already quite a lot from the questions that were provided, for which I'm very thankful.

  Location: Warsaw, Poland/Remote EU
  Remote: Yes, please.
  Willing to relocate: Depends where. A big city in EU? Nope.
  Technologies: Ruby/Rails/Reactjs/Elixir/Javascript/Can also do golang or python or vuejs if you want to invest in me.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zapa%C5%9Bnik-410091b0/
  Email: adam at wrestlerman dot me

I am not actively looking for work, because currently, I'm building my own products. I could start from the beginning of April, though. I'm into startups, I like building stuff, marketing is cool. I don't have much experience, but I learn fast and I bring a good spirit to the company. Don't believe me? Ask my previous employers.

I know few people that got jobs thanks to bootcamps.

How exactly dev skills would help you with starting a job? Do you want to code it yourself? Or do you want to know what if your devs go correct path?

You have to understand that development is a very wide term.

There is a frontend - UI + UX, both of them pretty complicated and it's only making designs a reality. Not really worth learning as a PM in my opinion. If you want to build a SaaS yourself, you would have to learn it, though. But as I said it's still a lot of work to learn it, just for programming UI+UX...

Then there is a backend. Lot's of different programming languages. Not only languages but also frameworks. This won't really help you with your current job. But there is SQL and databases. In my opinion, this is worth something reading about and playing around. Why? Because sometimes very simple things are very complicated to implement due to database structure made by developers. Additionally, you can write your own SQL to query some data instead of asking devs to craft it for you.

I'd also look for books that are meant for PMs on this subject. I'm sure there are some, but I don't know them. I'd learn about general stuff. Why there is backend + frontend + devops. How do they connect with each other, etc? This would help you understand better dev teams dynamics. Also, it would allow you to avoid some traps when starting your own company. Like thinking about using SPA, when server side rendered is just enough.

What's Eng team and HoP?