zeemonkee3

It reminds me of early 20th century footage of barnstorming aircraft inventors. Now it's just Boeing and Airbus and precious little in the way of real innovation.

I think it was the fall in oil prices in the late 70s/early 80s - combined with a ruinous invasion of Afghanistan - that finally did in the Soviet Union economically. Putin should take note.

Otherwise - despite the appalling human cost of projects such as the White Sea Canal and farm collectivisation - the USSR did indeed become a global power if only for a short period. Red Plenty [1] is an excellent book on the subject.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571...

Typically deployment is a "solve-once" problem, even if you don't use docker. You set up chef, puppet, ansible or fabric to handle deployment, installs, database migrations and so on, and tweak as needed.

Of course that may not be the case if you have some kind of commodity service you have to install in lots of different environments, such as Wordpress.

How do I know that? What is the interviewer looking for?

Maybe in company A they are looking for developers who come up with a solution on their own and don't rely on external libraries or Google. Maybe company B don't like developers reinventing wheels and prefer they at least research prior art first.

I don't know what kind of culture your company has, but at the very least out of courtesy you can signal what the requirements are in your test.

Hiring right now is a shitshow of old wives' tales, cargo-culted practices from big name tech companies, shady recruiters, mismatched incentives, interviewers who have no experience or training in interviewing, gimmicky apps trying to somehow gamify technical interviewing and endless whining back and forth on HN and Medium.

I'm sure a lot of developers who are currently employed are put off applying elsewhere because the whole process has become so demanding and unpleasant and disrespectful.

One company I applied to for example asked to do a take-home test, maybe 2 hours. I did the test, only to be told it was the first stage of a long and gruelling process involving a further 8 hour take-home project (unpaid, of course) followed my several rounds of technical and non-technical interviews. I immediately withdrew my application. When would I have the time to do 8 hours - it was timed for some bizarre reason, so it had to be done in a single block of time - on a project? Maybe for my own projects, sure, but that's my spare time.

Interviewers and recruiters are, after all, being paid to sit there, while interviewees are - unless they're unemployed - taking precious time off to travel, maybe stay overnight in a hotel, sit through hours of gruelling interviews and tests, all for a job that may or may not offer anything much better than what they've already got. And yet the penny hasn't yet dropped that maybe your shitty process is the reason you haven't found anyone yet?

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm convinced that it wasn't this bad 5 or 10 years ago - maybe if you were interviewing at Google or Microsoft, but not if you were applying for a bog standard dev role at a startup or SME.

He's a developer, not a telepath.

In tests like this you make it clear what's allowed - "use the standard library, no external dependencies" etc. Because in a normal working situation, his solution is perfectly valid.

If I were interviewing him it certainly wouldn't be a dealbreaker. I'd probably want to discuss more about pros and cons of in-house vs using libraries, because you tend to find out more about the skills and qualities of a developer from human conversation than scribbling on a whiteboard.

Interviews like this are a two-way thing. In this case, I'd pick up the vibe that this was a company cursed with NIH and withdraw my application (unless I was desperate for a job or some other overriding factor, of course).

Technical interviews (much as I hate the whiteboarding bullshit) do give some insight to the interviewee about the kind of work and codebase they'll be dealing with - like the time an interviewer told me "We're really enthusiastic about MongoDB!" - OK, thanks for the coffee, I'll see myself out....

Are people using React starter kits? The major issue I'd see with React at hackathons is the large amount of configuration you typically need to do before you get started. I dislike starter kits due to the additional complexity overhead, but I can imagine for a throwaway project they'd be fine.

NodeJS + MongoDB is this generation's Laurel and Hardy stack ("look at this mess you got me into"). Last generation's was PHP + MySQL.

How about vimperator? Vimfx is OK as a stop-gap but that's one extension I wouldn't want to lose permanently.

Perhaps it was written on gold-lined vellum?

I'm assuming the plan required the input of lawyers or other expensive advisors. Still it seems excessive for a bootstrapping company.

> This is true unless you have a very popular app and a very large team.

Or you have very important and lucrative clients in government, healthcare, or some other crusty large organization with horribly dated browsers they're not going to replace any time soon. That quickly makes you throw away the latest React-* solution and reach for jQuery, however much you rage inside.

Take away templates and add Django Rest Framework and you have a very capable platform for building large CRUD APIs complete with models, permissions, serializers and so forth.

Is it the best solution when you just want to stream data down a socket? No. That doesn't mean it's useless for many other things.

If I'm going down the SPA route I'd just build the frontend separately using ember-cli or webpack or some other "native" solution and forget any asset pipeline.

This is one of the best things about Django - outside the admin interface it's not opinionated about your frontend setup.

Just ask them simple questions about their code. "Why did you use a class here? What does this function do?". Or even what motivated them to do the project or what the hardest challenges were. It should be pretty clear whether they're the real deal or not.

IIRC Twilio use Flask, and contributed the flask-restful library [1]

[1] https://github.com/flask-restful/flask-restful

Often the founders have trust funds and connected families, so never have to worry a day in their lives about missing rent or going hungry.

> There is nothing forcing you to use all the extra dependencies

This right here is a major problem with a ton of apologists. "You don't need to use X and Y, just start with barebones Z".

If you're doing your own side project, sure. Or if you're lucky to be developer #1 in a greenfield project. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that's happened.

Most of the time, you're going to be maintaining someone else's work. They'll have a ton of dependencies and glue and workarounds, and you're really, really lucky if they've written tests or documentation. So all the complexity mentioned in the article? You get to deal with that, only not so neatly put together. More likely they'll have an out-of-date version of react-router that's incompatible with the library you're trying to install, upgrading react-router means rewriting a ton of code because they love to change their API every other release....

Now I like React, and I've built things with it. But there is a huge and growing PR problem with it right now, that for all its promise there is too much incidental complexity, too many ways to do it, a lack of standardization around things like build tools. Companies aren't overjoyed at having codebases that become impossible to maintain 6 months out, when the frontend devs jump ship. Whether the answer is a more structured framework like Ember or Angular, I don't know, but there is a lot of fatigue and frustration around trying to build and maintain a project out of lots of tiny pieces, and it's showing in this thread.

The anger in this thread does not bode well for the future of React.

I predict big, complex, arcane React stacks will be a punchline in a few years, much like J2EE/EJB is today.

And yes, I know React itself is a small library - Java servlets were a small, simple API that formed the foundation for a ton of over-engineered abstraction on top.

Zamenhoff lived in a part of the world where the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires intersected, and Esperanto reflects that. Although the vocabulary is largely Romance, there are words of German/Yiddish and Slavic origin and the grammar is more agglutinative in character, like Hungarian. It's very much a product of the roots, history and heritage of its creator and his homeland.

His point though was that SF isn't particularly suitable as a city for startups; there's no magical "tech gold" that you can't get elsewhere, like West Virginian coal - people go there just to be in the game, because that's where the VCs chose to be. Historical and geographical factors in fact make it a particularly unsuitable place for a bootstrapped startup to exist.

The difference perhaps is that although Hollywood is the place to make deals and host awards ceremonies, the actual work of filming is done around the world, from New Zealand to Ireland to Vancouver.

We could only wish to be as socially mobile as the Victorians

http://ereh.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/1.abstract

EDIT: from the paper, it appears that mass education in England toward the end of the Victorian era only made a short-lived dent in social mobility, presumably because any temporary advantage in being more educated levelled out after a generation.

In the UK up to the 1960s-1980s, working class people could get a leg up through grammar schools and fully-funded higher education (tuition and modest living costs subsidized by the government) - if you could prove you were smart and hard-working enough, you had a chance to rise up. This ladder was successfully kicked away by comprehensive education and mass higher education (with introduction of student loans rather than free grants). The politicians who introduced these measures of course ensured their own children were privately educated.

Moving to the Latin alphabet must have been quite a shift as well.

To what extent are many languages today "artificial"? Modern Hebrew was resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their unification/nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is the Greek Katharevousa (official language until 1976).

Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there's surprisingly little that's "natural" about the "natural" languages either.

> I just don't believe you can force a language on people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not

Look at the EU: although there is complete freedom of movement of labour for EU citizens, cultural and language barriers prevent true movement to a far greater degree than within the US.

When basic income is a done deal, then maybe. But it's not, and in a toxic and divided political system basic income - and other necessities, like modern universal health care - are not guaranteed for years, if not decades.

J2EE wasn't even that old when Rails was new - maybe 4 or 5 years? But it offered an optimal path between the Scylla of J2EE architecture astronautism and the Charybdis of PHP spaghetti.

Any decent coding school should teach the basics, so that learning a new framework or language is, if not trivial, then at least something you can pick up on your own.

I think it fell out of favour after WW2 - returning G.I.s had their fill of poor-tasting low-quality mutton from war-ravaged and rationed Europe and wanted their steak, dammit. [1].

[1] http://www.qmfound.com/food_wwII.htm