OhHeyItsE

9. How do you maintain a work-life balance?

Pretty sure the candidate is supposed to ask the interviewer that one...

Hypothetical: individual pricing based on how likely you are to pay more for an item, or how badly they think you need it. Sharing of data across domains could place you in a "bubble" where you see the same price no matter where you look.

Lots of commenters here failing to recognize how much competition within consumer vertical plays here.

For years AWS was the cloud, and the only viable option.

At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first) companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are alternatives for the first time ever.

Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery and digital media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the opportunity for competitors lies.

Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933

the ICO should have given them pause

Freudian slip? :)

Agree 100% in principle, but just want to PSA that 1-2mg of Xanax is a fairly hefty dose.

Urban legend. Not true at all. Nothing can kill a trip except time. Not even Xanax - it will just help you relax and kill the panic and anxiety.

The caffeine part is particularly bad advice, as a stimulant is the last thing you want to ingest when you are already highly agitated.

I always wonder where the myth that older developers are "slower" comes from.

Dunno about you folks, but I get better and faster every year. And, for me, that productivity metric is probably approaching parabolic.

You learn enough languages, frameworks, tools - all the fundamentals start to merge together. You can pick the next one up faster than you did the one you just put down. You understand how to design software; how to organize code. Exactly when to reuse, refactor, or copy/paste.

You have a better understanding of how the market works and the competitive strategies around product development will manifest - not only within your own product and industry, but when analyzing and choosing vendors as well (you really want to leave it up to a 25 year-old to choose AWS vs GCP?).

Sure, I've got a ton of better things to spend my nights and weekends on than writing code for free. I can also spot a doomed project from a mile a way and have no qualms about delivering a very curt "yeah no thanks" to that project manager who waddles over with some deluded hero fantasy where they carry the flag on my back for something that's probably never going to see the light of day anyway.

Maybe that's it? That's probably it...

This is good for Bitcoin.

[...right?]

Put aside what devs at your company may already be comfortable with

At your peril. Sorry, but it's true.

Any time there is something even slightly amiss it's going to be "Uh oh - looks like Mongo is giving us trouble again."

No matter what the real problem is a slam-dunk scapegoat. And your name is going to be forever attached to it.

Also consider how you're going to deploy & maintain the stack itself. Do you have an ops team that's familiar with deploying war files into a servlet container? Well now on the critical path to this thing going live is them learning how to maintain a new app server, language and deployment process?

That said, at the end of the day - all the tools, frameworks, and languages you mentioned are just fine, with some slight nuance:

DB: MySQL is fine, Postgres has some nice additional features if you need them: GIS, great scripting support, etc

API/App: Stick with the big ones (Elixir? C'mon...). Slight edge to Node because JSON de/serialization is automagic. Slight ding to PHP because... PHP.

Frontend: Who cares? It's going to be outdated in 6 weeks anyway.

Caching: Which ever one you don't have to maintain or think about. Did you choose AWS? Great. Elasticache supports Redis and Memcached.

PaaS: Whichever one supports all the features that you need.

Fun Fact: The largest collection of Cherry Blossoms in the United States is in Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/the_story_behind_br...

https://www.newarkhappening.com/cherry-blossom-festival/

A long-time dream of mine. Am envious. Wish I had the confidence to do it. Wish I knew how to get "Client #1"

It's a good idea, but if your product is a website, cookies and authentication in general are going to be a real challenge. Obviously you won't be able to share cookies between the site and the api. But you have the additional challenge of having your api domain treated as 3rd party and are thus subject to all the security measures and sandboxing that come with that.

And what if your product is just an api for use by developers? Now the api is part of your brand.

It's just a bad situation all around.

I've found that companies that are serious about this will offer some form of compensation (gift card, etc)

John Oliver did a great piece on this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Glad to see this on here. Really, it's never too late to learn anything, but I can offer context here as I have been playing for 25+ years.

I can say without a doubt that picking up a guitar is one of the best things I've ever done in my life. It is just so rewarding. There are no barriers to your level of achievement. Want to get better? Just play more. In fact, the first thing I do after a bad day at work is pick up my guitar. I know that I have at least something in my day that I can do better at than I could have the day before.

It's also tremendously rewarding to be able to kind of level-up to your heroes. I can play things now that I only dreamed of when I was a kid. Iconic solos and riffs that I thought required some kind of superhuman level of skill. Turns out it just takes a lot of practice. The difference being that those heroes wrote those solos in their early twenties, while I'm merely mimicking them in my late thirties. But I still get to hear those sounds coming out of my amp, created by my fingers.

What other hobby or activity could offer that? Most of us could spend 12 hrs a day in the driveway shooting hoops but could never even dream being the worst player in the NBA.

Which city? In NYC, a stand-alone townhouse in need of TLC with any outdoor space would probably start somewhere around $4-6 million (Manhattan). $2-3 Million in the outer boroughs (the ones that are up-and-coming, some of the gentrified neighborhoods are approaching Manhattan prices). All of those neighborhoods have poor public schools (yes, I know there are exceptions these days. But they are just that - exceptional. Not the norm). You would most likely have to send your child to private school. Minimum $20k/yr/child starting in kindergarten. Many push $40k/yr/child.

In surrounding suburbs with top public schools and ~45min rail commutes, a well-kept ~2k sqft house would be around $700-800k. New construction with all the trimmings: $1m+.

For many, this isn't really a "choice".

- be confident enough to start purging negative people and situations from your life.

- Early in your career, if you ever find yourself saying "I wish I could do X, but I work to much/have already used all my vacation time, etc" - without question you should to do those things and work less. Nobody ever looks back in time (especially in a situation when they are out of time) and says "gee I really wish I worked more".

- You are about to enter the age of drinking/bar/club/happy hour culture. Sure, have fun. But remember that there is almost never any return on this investment. All that time spent in the bar (and the time spent recovering from it) costs you time that could be spent pursuing your passions, hobbies, fitness, etc. Those things return in MULTIPLES later in life.

I kept waiting for the punchline that gave away the piece as satire. But... it seems 100% serious.

In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training

Does the author realize that this is the exact cause of his "problem"? Developers live in constant fear of "if you don't stay up to date, you'll never get another job". Combine that with the generally risky venture-backed tech climate, an at-will employment culture and the zeitgeist of youth worship and blatant ageism. All I can say is: you reap what you sew.

Turn this toxic culture around so that devs can feel comfortable that being a great engineer is enough, instead of chasing frameworks and books about algorithms.

Practically, I know it should go further. I think about doing it all the time. But it sure sounds daunting to take a 30-50% pay cut to move to an area with (significantly) fewer jobs.

What's the tech job market like there? Or are you fully remote like above?

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;

I don't think anyone has any issue with having to physically use a marker on a whiteboard during an interview. What else would you use for a system design question?

What is insane is expecting a candidate to be able to navigate a million state modification and off-by-one gotchas using only a marker and their short-term memory.

I find this refreshingly candid; human, even, for AWS.

I, too, think Docker is the bee's knees. But I don't think it would be good fit for a datastore (even though zeitgeist is to Dockerize all the things).

Docker seems to work best in an SOA type environment where you have a set of stateless services that might use different stacks. Docker simply unifies their provisioning and deployment.

the async nature of Node made my head nearly explode.

There is a reason that paradigm exists, other than to make development frustrating. How do you avoid thread exhaustion in PHP if you synchronously block on a line that could take a really long time to complete? (Making a request to an external HTTP service, for example)

Actually, no. AMP is really just that – a web components ecosystem.

Oh that's all???

Much of this is valid in spirit. But to me, is irrelevant with the advent of Node. Node does all the good things the author describes. It does some terrible things too, but generally does them much less terribly than PHP.

Yes, yes, yes. Though a rehash of https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-best-code-is-no-code-at-al... (which is itself a rehash)

Any meditation tips? I've gone through multiple fits & starts but I just can't keep my mind from wandering.

:(

As if this industry needed any more excuses for it's blatant ageism.