chrisdinn

When other website owners realize how much traffic you send them that is good for you. Maybe they want to sponsor that newsletter if it’s driving a lot of business.

Is ”advancing our amazing bet” a nod to the Google Fiber turndown?

My advice is to check LinkedIn for listings but don’t apply that way. “Easy Apply” lowers application friction so effectively that every posting gets ~1000 applicants of which few are actually qualified. I don’t think I ever heard back on a LinkedIn-submitted application even for jobs where I had rare and directly applicable experience.

In the last six months I’ve been hired once after applying (on the website of the company itself) to s job posting I first saw on LinkedIn. I was poached shortly after via inbound from recruiter on LinkedIn

In Canada, it seems like there’s a large and growing number of remote jobs available at US software firms through employer-of-record startups like Deel and Remote. Canadian software engineers are surprisingly cheap, relatively speaking, especially when you hire outside the Toronto area.

Economic realities mean there’s quite a bit of downward pressure on CAD right now, so this is likely to continue to be a good deal on both sides for quite a while.

I’m still getting approached by recruiters for Canadian-based remote roles like it’s 2021.

I’ve used Placemark for well over a year to build custom map-based graphics for torontoverse.com. There are a lot of web apps in this space now, and always QGIS, but I personally felt Placemark struck the right balance between simplicity and power.

Thanks for building it!

I’d love to see you elaborate on this. Anecdotally, my experience was the exact opposite. Is there some documentation making this point?

In the course of optimizing I came to know the various JVM GC algos (concurrent mark/sweep, parallel old, etc) by the corresponding memory graph alone. I never, ever had to debug similar latency in the Go stack.

Teasing this apart I see a few things: a) logging, b) modules rollout and c) missing frameworks.

I’ve never had a logging issue in large systems. Explicit error return (as you know, on every function) allows you to log in your code, not lean on only libraries that support your interface.

Modules rollout was part of growing up. But, you won’t get Go 1->2 upgrade issues as we have 100% backward compatibility on version upgrades. Moving to the latest version of Go is trivial and simply unlocks new features.

Too many allocations for Go is going to be too many allocations for JVM too. This seems like an problem isolated to that team.

I’ve done Go at both a three engineer startup and at Google and I can’t help but notice none of these are really the type of problem that crop up later.

Curious to understand what you are suggesting here. What’s a better story for polymorphism than duck typing? What would (better?) null-safety look like in Go?

I’ve got to disagree with this strongly. I built and operated the same large system in both languages (acquisition forced me to rewrite) and both the dev and operating cost of the JVM was much higher.

Go is a high velocity language. Code reviews on language/style issues are non existent, it’s GC is blazing fast (not our experience with JVM) and it’s really easy to read. I’ve watched many new engineers ramp up on both systems, as both operated side by side for a while, Go was inevitably faster for engineers.

What made maintaining Go hard for you?

I write a lot of Go and I can’t tell you how much this warms my heart.

Compatibility probably isn’t much fun for the language team, always having to keep one foot firmly in the “distant” past. But for those of us that have to maintain large Go systems it’s such a gift.

He usually goes by JM Fortier on YouTube and I think he’s great. He’s a real inspiration to me, for sure. He’s very open and has a lot of stuff up there on various channels about the development of his market garden.

Just to be pedantic, I’ll point out that’s literally “transparent” matter and we use the term “dark” which is really more appropriate for something that absorbs EM radiation because it also implies the mystery of the holes in our knowledge. English is great.

Hiawatha is more than just a leader he’s essentially a religious figure to the Haudenosaunee who historically reside in roughly the area around Lake Ontario.

It is definitely in bad taste to take a meaningful symbol from an existing marginalized culture and use it to brand your open source project because you think it sounds cool. But, this is something that was not widely recognized as bad until very recently, especially outside North America, and obviously this already happened a lot in the past so I don’t think it reflects badly on the authors or contributors at this point. That said the name should change and, at bare minimum, that cartoon has to go.

It’s a great idea, though, for us all to learn the real story of Hiawatha, the Great Peacemaker, Jigonsaseh, Tadodaho and the origins of the Five (now Six) Nations. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it helped inspire the structure of the early USA. It’s also a refreshing alternative take on power and leadership from what we are usually shown in the West. One of the world’s great cultural treasures, I really think.

He’s describing a graph data structure using a tree metaphor but definitely not describing the “tree” subset of graph data structures.

There are two new trackball models released this year, the nano and mini.

This is the article that the study authors linked to in their other writing: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...

I mean, Google was built on protos in a “NoSQL” database (BigTable). I think maybe you are overindexing on personal experience.

If you store protos in your Redis keys (like most people using “NoSQL” for data storage), this comment doesn’t have much punch. Pretty sure we all can think of some pretty high profile examples of NoSQL + structured data working very very well at scale.

The Timeless Way of Building describes a philosophy, not just of building practice but really of how to live a good, fulfilling life. A Pattern Language is an set of examples of how to shape specific parts of your community and home to implement that philosophy.

Following the patterns without understanding the philosophy makes no sense to me because it’s a very opinionated and, in the modern world, quite radical. What if you don’t agree with it? I think many don’t. At least, you want to be able to read them critically.

Reading A Pattern Language without reading The Timeless Way of Building makes no sense at all. We do it, I think, because many technologists stumble on A Pattern Language through its relationship to Gang of Four and other “pattern” approaches. The book I always return to, more and more as I get older, is The Timeless Way of Building.

To piggyback on this solid comment, a lot of times it’s us engineers who can fix this. I sat on L5 hiring committee at Google for a while and I really believe what diverse-background candidates need is more support at HC. I could sell these candidates to the committee often, with minimal effort all they needed was a champion at committee. That can be you, dear reader, at many of the big tech companies.

Mostly HC is a ton of work (eg read 8 full interview packets a week) so if you express an interest and are a decent interviewer you’re likely to get shot at it and you can make a real difference.

You want to flip this. Google/Facebook operate the ad tech and own the site (or, more accurately the audience) so they don’t need to deal with third-party publishers on a per-request basis at all.

I don’t think this is a convincing argument. I don’t believe it’s good to allow third party tracking pixels on youtube.com (for instance) and the alternative way for buyside to get that data is ADH. It sucks compared to prior state for people who need to use it, but it’s necessary to provide user protection.

OA is just open auction which is what most people think of when they think of AdX, ie. more or less anyone can bids on your inventory.

O&O is owned and operated, where you actually own the audience. In the simplest case this is like YT or Insta for Google and FB but it can be kinda nuanced with more traffic falling under the umbrella than you’d think. More and more this is where energy and attention is being focused, especially as cross-site data becomes scarcer.

After years at Google on DFP/Ad Manager these quotes read kinda sad to me because this is a lot conspiracy sounding stuff and in reality it’s just not that kind of operation.

Sell-side ad tech (ie. DRX) doesn’t make much money for Google, relatively. If Google likes AdX why isn’t YT inventory on it? Because they actually like the buy-side tools. Sell-side gets basically no love, no real fresh ideas. I say this having the utmost, deep respect for Ad Manager/AdX’s current and former eng & product leaders.

What happens here isn’t about market dominance, no one is thinking that. They already killed the display publishing golden goose, by Google standards there’s nothing to dominate in pub ads the business died. It’s a small market, now, putting display ads on other people’s websites. Big business is O&O which exploded around it, this is obvious.

Projects like this are about two forces colliding: smart engineers without a deep understanding or connection to the publishing industry and an internal org losing relevance/importance as its size relative to its peers decreases.

IMO, (this is definitely just my opinion) the real real problem is none of the ads you can by through AdX actually work. Using OA a lot leads to users tuning out your ad units because they are often really weird or bad-quality & register as noise.

Canadian parents do this too, I’ve known several students whose parents bought homes to live in while they study. It’s not necessarily a naked investment ploy, it’s simply very difficult to maintain a certain quality of life for your children in rental accommodations. I’m not commenting on the ethics of it, just the suggestion it’s specifically a Chinese behavior.

Supply in KW is far more constrained that GTA. I bought here in 2019 after selling a Brooklyn condo and had to buy something under construction. There was nothing reasonable (ie didn’t need a ton of work) on the market.

Why is everyone so eager to blame this on China? Of course there are some Chinese buyers here in Canada but if you’ve actually been in the market or know any builders you know that explanation doesn’t add up.

Think about how desperate you have to be to buy in Woodbridge if you’re studying in Waterloo? I think they were more likely victims of the situation not perpetrators, c’mon.

Waterloo is a legit school, not unexpected for it to draw international students and of course they have money, international tuition ain’t cheap.

Ontario isn’t building nearly enough housing for the rate of flux in the economy. We’re 10x behind. KW is a great example, we’re still building too many cul-de-sac subdivisions with 3000sqft houses on 3000sqft lots. We can’t build enough supply that way. It’s also supply geared towards the old university-and-insurance economy not the new tech-priced-out-of-Toronto economy (hello me). This seems sustainable to me, supply isn’t keeping up.

I have a house in Kitchener but also a farm in PEC. The situation in rural Ontario is an order of magnitude worse and certain to crash. I bought farmland (with pretty bad soil) in 2014 for under $2000/acre—basically it’s agricultural value. A one acre lot across the street from me on a similar old farmstead sold for 100x that price this winter. This is not sustainable, I mean our wells go dry all summer. I get high speed internet such as it is through a complex direct LTE setup. This demand won’t last.

You’re definitely right by that measure. There’s a famous hydro energy deal between the provinces of Newfoundland and Quebec in Canada where in the 1960s Newfoundland agreed to provide hydro power in a long term contract (80 years?) for what is now a fraction of its value. It’s viewed as an enormous boondoggle (“Churchill Falls”) but what most don’t realize is it was signed under the expectation that the coming wave of cheap, abundant nuclear would make hydro power uncompetitive.