Herald_MJ

SilverRail Technologies (Expedia Group) | Senior Python Engineer | London, UK | Full Time | ONSITE | Above-market Salary | https://www.silverrailtech.com/

SilverRail is searching for a senior-level Python engineer for our Account-Based Ticketing (ABT) team: think "Oyster for rail". We believe what we're building has the potential to revolutionise how people get around the UK by train.

We're looking for a Senior Backend engineer who predominantly works in Python 3. We use Django, Flask, PostgreSQL, AWS Lambda, and Docker, to name a few technologies. We're also going all-in on microservices, so anyone with experience or interest here could make a great candidate.

We work from a relaxed, comfortable office in central London (Tottenham Court Road), and offer flexible working hours as well as some remote options. We respect your work/life balance, and we have Glassdoor reviews (https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/SilverRail-Technologies-...) to prove it.

We work in self-organising, cross-functional teams, so applications from engineers who also have a burgeoning interest in Product, Design, or Engineering Management would be very welcome.

If you're interested, please email matt dot jackson at the above-linked domain, or through https://silverrail-technologies-inc.workable.com/j/B13759F83.... Thanks!

Perm roles are now (finally) getting better at competing with sky-high contracting rates. Every successive budget also makes contracting a slightly less lucrative situation.

Revenue vs user satisfaction isn't entirely a binary choice though. If Monzo offer a feature which costs them a lot but offers user's some convenience, it's a bit of a balancing act to figure out what the convenience is actually worth. Debit card top-ups were costing Monzo millions per year, and seems to me to be only marginally more convenient than a bank transfer.

Debit card payment into a bank account is kind of an odd feature anyway, it seems like a bit of a relic from back when Monzo weren't a fully-fledged bank, and were just offering a prepaid card.

Tried this in London for bicycle routes and it's completely broken: https://imgur.com/a/mF4CU43.

Yes, I don't really understand the controversy either. I work with Python a lot in my day job, and I am quite frustrated with how slowly the language moves. For a long time, it seemed like the reason was the Python 2-3 switch, but now we don't have that excuse, and things are still slow. Every little decision seems to get immobilised at the PEP stage.

That's not an accurate summary of assignment expressions.

Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It's quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.

`range()` also takes an optional `step` argument which would help here.

I agree. I have only just heard of this product, but can immediately see it would be extremely useful to me. Sadly, I can say 100% that I can not justify this kind of spend on a single operational analytics tool. For that reason, I probably won't even try it.

This should help you: https://gist.github.com/reggi/dc5f2620b7b4f515e68e46255ac042...

Once you have your lambda running inside a VPC, you can assign an elastic IP to the VPC. You don't need an EC2 instance, but you will need a NAT gateway, which is billed at similar levels to a small EC2 instance anyway.

I found this interesting too. Does anyone know a reason why it didn't work?

And what about non-free?

Not relevant to article content, but: please don't use Javascript to hijack my scrolling like this page does.

It was an optional course for me, and also one of the hardest I took. But also one of the most enlightening, rewarding, and enjoyable of my degree.

Just tell them you don't have cash, and they'll make sure their card reader starts working.

They will actually usually just suggest driving past an ATM so you can get them cash.

A good alternative that usually works is if you suggest paying them with a cheque. Usually then their card reader will magically start working.

Correct me if I'm wrong here: MyTaxi and Gett are solely for black cabs? This makes them a lot more expensive than private hire. Their UX is also slightly behind Uber's offering.

Addison Lee are also overpriced, and are not a company I'm willing to support due to their director's comments about cyclists and public transport.

One service you haven't mentioned here is Green Tomato, which have a tolerable app, but seem to have so few cars on the road that the wait time for a car is often a lot higher than Uber. Potentially this could be an opportunity for them if Uber truly do disappear from London.

Since such work would complicate the PyPy code base and our day-to-day work, we would like to judge the interest of the community and the commercial partners to make it happen (we are not looking for individual donations at this point).

It's a useless and confusing marketing buzzword

A marketing buzzword is something like "web scale", which might be used by a non-technical person to describe a technology, but has no real technical meaning. Serverless is not a buzzword because it is the name used for a collection of technologies, even if it isn't a specific product. "Software containers" also falls into this category.

Yes, serverless architectures involve servers. Well done for recognising this, you are very smart. In fact, you are smart enough to realise that the architectures we are talking about here are very distinct from traditional web hosting services. So, it's convenient to use a different name for them.

Finally, it doesn't really matter whether you like the term or not. It is the accepted term and it is here to stay. If you want to engage in conversations on the topic you will need to move past your misgivings.

No, I'm not peeved by the "misnomer". What is getting a bit annoying is every conversation about serverless being dominated by snarky comments about there being no such thing. As software professionals, we all know there is a server involved in responding to requests for our applications. But 'serverless' does accurately describe services like AWS Lambda, because the experience of development is such that you don't really have to think about servers, along with all the complexity of provisioning, configuring and managing them.

TL;DR: It's just a name. Get over it.

My favourite is a small town called Towcester - pronounced like "toaster".

Uh oh! The data scientist isn't up to date on the trends in gender studies and critical theory, better send her off to sensitivity training!

The problem here wasn't that the data scientist was asking the wrong questions, it's that they were upset by someone stepping and offering an improved set of questions, and felt the need to complain to a manager instead of responding.

The Github management's decision of asking the author _never to communicate with this person again_ is even more bewildering.

pgAdmin3 is the postgres GUI tool you are looking for. Avoid pgAdmin4.

These issues might have a place in technical interviews, but framing it as a question the user can get "wrong" feels a bit like you're setting a trap. In a real interview, this would just be a talking point. What would be interesting to an interviewer would be seeing how quickly the interviewee grasps what's happening that is unexpected, and why. Marking the candidate down because they didn't know about these quirks beforehand is kind of missing the point.

It feels like a lot of this quiz is just trying to "catch me out" on subtle behaviours of Python I didn't know or might have forgot about. I guess this is fine if you're making a little trivia toy to distribute to Python developers on the internet, but I don't really think it achieves much as a hiring tool. Getting questions on this test wrong would probably demoralise a lot of great candidates.

Is that legally enforceable?

Their latitude and longitude have been mistakenly switched around.

I know of the first two examples you gave, but disagree that they're evidence of Apple not being interested in user privacy.

Let's not hijack this thread to talk about Apple's security record.

Can't speak for Android, but on iOS it is not possible for an app to "listen" to your microphone unless it is in the foreground, and you have explicitly given the app permission to do this (the first time the app attempts to do so). It can also be revoked at any time without removing the app.

The only way around this restriction would be using a private API Apple could have provided. Given that Apple has even integrated some aspects of Facebook into iOS, this is not totally impossible, but it's hard to imagine Apple having an incentive in allowing Facebook to passively record and transmit all user audio. To date, Apple actually seem to be pretty good at protecting user's privacy.

Actually, I don't think any of those criteria should definitively rule a place out.

At that point, your monthly fee would be greater than that of a regular S3 bucket, which has fewer barriers to retrieval.

Full time, career Python developer here. Never worked on a project as part of my day job which is built on Python 3. Recently, for the first time ever, there are projects in the company I work for which are built in Python 3. But I'm still yet to work on them.