awslattery

Vet here, who has done Grow with Google events for Veterans in the past, as well as currently serving as a mentor for Google Developer Groups in North America.

Understand the drive to find Vets who want to engage with the demand side, but the supply side re: Become a Mentor is missing a lot of information: what are the expectations, time commitment, how to register events, is there support for events, etc.

For example, I'd be happy to host events and provide a regular touchpoint to connect and mentor folks locally, but I've got another kid coming in a few months, so I'm having to be extra picky with my time at the moment.

DLC for a dust mode, for those of us in Southern Arizona?

Still down in AZ.

There was something special about being a kid and pushing an update to your site via SFTP on the sidebar in Dreamweaver, then calling or hitting up your friends on AIM/MSN messenger to check it out.

There is a "Removed watched videos" option in the three-dot-menu for the playlist itself on desktop at least. I have to do this every so often, and this is a very welcome feature as I used to do it as you describe.

Herman Miller Embody, picked up with a Veteran discount early COVID lockdowns. Noticed significant improvements in reduced pain about a week into having it, still feels as good as it did almost 3 years later.

Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, AZ has always been a site of fond childhood memories of participating in their Night Observing Program, and enjoying their solar observatory as part of a school field trip.

It looks like they had a soft reopening late in September, so hopefully full tour options will return in short order.

Yes, currently stuck in a login loop on desktop and 500s on browser.

This has been my go-to over Fast.com for years. The breakdown of latencies and speeds at different thresholds was very beneficial in validating the behavior of our 5G Home Internet through Verizon.

In my line of work would not be so easy, as large corpos have a bunch of job safety and info sec standards, beyond internet connection.

Having worked DoD in the past, I can completely echo that it would be quite a challenge to explore something like this for many organizations.

I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.

"This is why we can't have nice things," personified.

What kind of space did you find

It is a rather unique build done by a lawyer-turned-metalworks artist a little more than a decade ago. Multiple units with adjoining walls, each with a private patio, minisplits, and a rather raw aesthetic. Very high ceilings, plenty of outlets of various voltages/amperages available. Our neighbor makes bespoke cycling bags and such. Other tenants range from retail and services to private offices.

and how did you pitch it?

The founder of the company lived here for many years, and paid for coworking access pre-COVID when it was still a startup (now general cloud/software consultancy for public health agencies and the like).

WFH and the vacation of many of our decent coworking spaces due to COVID took a toll on him, and moved to PHL about a year ago for a change of scenery / be closer to some of our larger clients.

With that context, it was pretty easy to pitch it as a physical "hub" for him when he visits family/friends, myself, and our other employee who lives in the same town. We still have a good physical location for our corporate entity, and the cost difference between 3x coworking offices at post-COVID rates was not too much for him to stomach.

The other employee lived in the same town already?

Yes! We had become good acquaintances for a few years before COVID as he worked remotely for an organization in Ireland from the same coworking space.

When COVID hit, his team were among the first to be cut, and as his skills meant I would no longer be overextended between cloud and frontend, it was one of the easiest hires we've made to date.

unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home

WFH for 2012-2023 here.

With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.

In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.

Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.

Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.

It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.

Exterior aesthetic gives me Arris/Motorola Surfboard cable internet vibes.

Google Maps + Suica worked wonders in 2019!

Was in Japan in late 2019 for a tourist trip with my wife -- I think that's as close to pushing our luck as we managed with COVID.

Managed to avoid it for years -- locking down initially, then slowly expanding our social bubble of trusted friends (not family). N95s when picking up to-go food from our favorite restaurants once they started reopening, while going to OB/GYN appointments, etc.

WFH was something I was already accustomed to, and working on the peripherals of public health government contracts, working on projects directly related to COVID surveillance and vaccination was quite humbling.

After hosting a vaccination pod in our living room in March 2021 (a pharmacist friend had J&J doses that were to be tossed by end-of-day -- and had multiple epipens on standby), and our social bubble also getting vaccinated, we collectively started to relax. After the Pfizer booster that fall, we at least felt better prepared should we get infected.

After a pregnancy of multiple OB/GYN visits, an emergency C-section, and a few business and leisure trips with airfare, we managed to remain unaffected as far as we could tell.

Then, after a short outing to a local bottle shop with some friends last week, we felt cold-like symptoms. After a few more days of worsening symptoms, and a couple at-home tests, there was the undeniable positive line for my wife and I. I had the brain fog and cough, she had complete loss of olfactory senses.

A week and change later, we're still waiting for that negative test to mark the end of our precautions. All symptoms but a few after effects are gone, and thankfully others in our group managed to avoid it, or were asymptomatic.

COVID is far from over, far from gone.

Much of society has deemed it endemic or irrelevant, and so for the masses, that'll be how it is until the next spooky variant, or similar virus exploits the lack of holistic societal changes that could still be employed.

I, for one, would have liked social distancing, masking when ill, innovative and sustainable packaging for to-go food from local establishments, and investments in public health infrastructure to remain.

In my career to date, a web application developed at breakneck speed (3 weeks for functional demo to stakeholders, which included members of CDC on Operation Warp Speed advisory committee) by myself and the CTO at the time to facilitate applications to receive and distribute COVID-19 vaccine in late 2020.

This is when the official option afforded by the CDC was a 7 or 9 page, non-fillable PDF that they expected hospitals, clinics, and your primary care office to print, complete, sign, scan, and return to the public health agency you fall under -- who would then transcribe that into a massive CSV for import into one of their immunization data systems.

The application was demoed before multiple PHAs, ultimately becoming the sole solution for an entire state, and one of the largest PHAs in the world. It has since become a showcase project for ongoing data modernization initiatives within these two large PHAs.

Tens of millions of vaccinations were made possible by this effort, and it's still in use today.

--

Outside of my career, the persistent browser based game (PBBG) I made when I was 13. Several years before I would enlist in the military myself, I received a message from two players -- brothers, one of which was deployed to Iraq at the time, the other in school stateside -- who were able to maintain a higher degree of connection with one another, given limitations of communication otherwise.

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OP, great thread. I always knew there were amazing folks in this community, but it is incredibly inspiring to see the many other responses in this thread.

As a new dad, I would love to have the voice-to-text accuracy and speed I get on my Pixel phone on my desktop OS. Done right, I could easily see myself using it more often than when I have my youngling in one arm as I've been WFH for the better part of the last 6 years of work.

What a blast from the past seeing ki4u again. I spent hours on here as a young teen obsessed with Cold War era history.

CTO of a 4 person org.

Took 4.5 months of paternity leave, and 1 month of flex-time in December 2021.

Worked for us by knowing it was coming to plan ahead for in terms of breaking down knowledge silos, dry runs of delegating niche tasks, and documenting tasks I became owner of in tenure.

During paternity leave, I was fully disconnected. Upon my return, I had a team who grew during that time, and we're more resilient as a result of my time away.

My largest gripe with Corsair (Elgato) here is that I can't set padding on a per-tile/button basis, as it seems icon packs, system icons, and native Stream Deck icons come in varying sizes.

Second, the profile switching is hit or miss with Electron (or adjacent) applications, which I don't fault Corsair for. Looking at you, Discord and Slack, which I would love to set a contextual app profile for.

We don't call them grunts, we call em butter bars (2LT).

Same experience here for the last 4 years. Hardware mute with the on-boom LED has been extremely useful.

I will be very sad the day my Arctis 7 dies, as I've learn from friends that the newer iteration has a different wireless receiver which, anecdotally, seems to be far less powerful in terms of range.

Had to do a double take for a minute, as in my days in the Army, we could max out our AN/TRC-170 on troposcatter mode at 2.0 kW, with a substantial range on a good atmosphere day.

The use case here, however, is incredibly different. We'd typically be towing 2x 10 kW diesel generators with us, so this is certainly an interesting POC to follow.

All smart TVs are terrible, and aigapping Vizio has been the only saving grace to them in our first home to date.

Brute forcing it, and being genuine. The latter helped me make friends who, recognized the deficiencies, and aided with the former over time.

I used Vercel to spin up a static React Storybook, last deployed 460 days ago.

With this update, they are now asking $20/member to keep your team slug, even if you have no deployments/projects whatsoever.

I'd take whatever cell phone number you're using, and run it through https://www.twilio.com/lookup (https://www.twilio.com/docs/lookup/tutorials/carrier-and-cal..., specifically) to see if for whatever reason, you aren't showing up as your carrier and a mobile phone type.

Services that once let me use my Google Voice number, for example, locked me out until I could pass verification with a "real" mobile number over the years.

COVID definitely helped push my recommendation that our small team move to full-remote, and start to transition to more asynchronous work. It's great being able to hire outside of our local market (especially for SWE talent), and we won't be renewing the lease on our albeit small office this year (moving to grant coworking or at-home furniture/equipment reimbursement).

Make a developer account on Twilio and buy a number from them. Use this whenever a phone number is required online

Non-carrier numbers won't work for many services, and unless I'm mistaken, you are required to provide an address, recurring payment method, and a phone number for 2FA to sign up.

They didn't "come at me" when I've done this a few times in the past, but thankfully I haven't been in a position to put their akin-to-malware on my system in a few years.