davismwfl

I attack it pretty much the same regardless of language or project. Generally, I start with the product, see how it works, find the 3-4 most common workflows and get a handle on them.

Then I like to check out the database (or algorithms & data structures if no db) and see how data is stored and manipulated, usually tells you a lot about choices that have been made.

Then open the project(s) and trace those 3-4 workflows once I understand it from the top level workflows. Part of this is also of course, getting the project(s) loaded and building locally as needed also reviewing tests, CI/CD, dependencies etc.

Lately, I've used Claude Code to help me with this, have it build a function map or class map and have it breakdown key insights about the code and trace those few workflows for me that I then validate. My process is pretty much the same just Claude does a lot of the initial lifting. I'll also dump the entire DDL for most databases (if they are more then a few tables) and send it to Claude and use that as a way to look for patterns/issues etc. For older monolith apps I've had to break the DDL into chunks sometimes just because some of these older apps have a very large number of tables/indexes/constraints etc that have been added over the years. Same thing works for json stores too fwiw.

GPT + Grok (sometimes Claude) for writing docs, policies, requirements, client responses etc. Grok is often times more concise/direct, which helps me as I tend to be verbose. I always review/edit regardless. Much faster than writing from scratch, and combining responses on the same topic is sometimes best.

Copilot for code completion + reviews or small snippets/functions but larger code/module generation has been weak so far.

Claude for full modules generation or complex multi-file edits.

Research: Grok (less filtered + better search), Claude (complex dev topics), GPT (balanced but sometimes slanted and/or seems to favor certain sources).

My Teams: Mostly Copilot for code completion/reviews, mix of GPT/Claude for code. Last year was loose/experimental to learn but we plan to formalize guidelines more this quarter.

Definitely a ton of hype that doesn't always match reality, but it is a super powerful tool that really has made things move faster.

I don't feel like you have given enough information for anyone to answer without making many assumptions.

My take (and hence assumptions) is you want to build a product where other engineers utilize your stripe account while charging fourth parties. I believe standard stripe accounts only allow for end use, not intermediary use. e.g. you can not "repackage" stripe to a third party and allow them to charge on your stripe account. If I understand things properly too, this actually wouldn't even be a Stripe only restriction, this is a restriction by many (most) card networks.

Definitely not a lawyer and not an expert on all things credit card. I did work on a project that tried to do something like this. Our client was wanting to allow their resellers to charge for unrelated products through the companies merchant account. This is essentially repacking and they got smacked by the bank and told this is not allowed by card networks. Now, whether it was just that bank and they lied about the reasoning or not I cannot say. But I know the networks are super touchy about knowing who is charging, for what and the risk profiles etc

I have two different ones in the system right now (around 14 cameras total). Amcrest and SV3C are the brands and both are available on Amazon pretty cheap. I have a mix of 5MP and 4k cameras where it makes sense for better details etc. I also have a mix of the bullet cameras and the bowl versions.

I am pretty sure the SV3C brand is just a rebranded Dahua or similar, just a little different software.

FWIW: I also never use their mobile app to set them up, I just plug them into the isolated network and use the web interface to configure them.

My security system is pretty basic but super reliable and isolated/safe overall.

I use BlueIris for the NVR software (it is cheap) and I buy various cheap IP cameras that support OnVIF (almost all try to phone home, some directly to china IPs). But what I do is I put all the cameras on an isolated LAN that does not have access to the internet. My BlueIris server has two NIC's one for the video lan and the other for my data network. BlueIris has a static IP and is locked down as well to what it can access externally.

Two ways you can make BlueIris work outside your home, use a VPN on your mobile device (absolute safest), or use their free DDNS to point to your box. Their system seems fairly decent, and I've done both methods. I also log all the requests on both LANs and check them every so often to see what is happening.

It seriously doesn't cost much to set this up, especially for just a couple of cameras.

Out of ~20 engineers, we have about 4 that have unrestricted access to production. A couple more have read only I believe to one of the databases.

I also have direct knowledge of a couple of other startups, similar size of 20-30 people in engineering, and they are about the same, no more than ~6 people.

In most cases, people really shouldn't be accessing production, it should mainly be deployment tasks that do. But you need a certain number of people to have access to cover failures etc. For example, having at least 4 people provides coverage if one person is on vacation, and then another gets sick etc.

I've read other companies basically have every engineer has production access to what they deploy, not sure I agree with that approach but I can see the argument.

I have worked in a number of hardware based startups, still do, and most have been product led or at least try to be. There isn't a one size fits all answer for what I think you are asking, and without more details it is unlikely anyone can give you great insights.

Generically, most hardware based companies today are really software services or data companies that have a hardware "interface" product. e.g. pick a consumer wearable product, what's really the product there? the hardware? or the users data? The answer is generally the user's data and insights that can be pulled from that data. So product led there generally starts with the insights and data, the hardware is just a means to acquire it.

My main point is unless you are selling primarily disconnected hardware, e.g. a non-connected toaster, you almost always are focused on the software services and data around the product and the hardware is just the bow you wrap it in to get what really is your product. So being product led for hardware isn't so different than SaaS or others. The one key difference is part of the user experience is the hardware, so you spend more time around optimizing the hardware and convincing customers why your shiny object is the one they need to buy. In the end though, usually those reasons to buy still boil down to the insights that come from the software. Hence you are still looking at all those growth metrics, engagement etc that most SaaS or software based business are watching.

If you are a truly non-connected or have severely limited software in the product then I'd have some different comments, but those are pretty rare in today's market.

Nope, I've actually had it opened for multiple days and just walked away and come back and it has been fine. I've had a few occasions where I restart it cause of something, but not like you are describing. I have two machines I run the intellj IDE's on, m1macpro and a intel based macpro, neither has any issues.

I am also not doing Java, primarily either node.js or C/C++, or I am using DataGrip.

Unless you two had discussed it in some prior conversation, it is a red flag IMO and I'd be cautious with this person in any capacity. Doing this without having a chat about it, is disrespectful IMO as well. It also shows a lack of foresight into what might cause team issues too. So it is a warning sign on multiple levels, at least to me.

Technically competent is a big grey zone IMO. For example, I am sure Musk knows the details, limitations and technical aspects of the welding that takes place at SpaceX, but my guess is he isn't competent to do it.

That same example could be used for most of technology. I am sure Musk understands ML at a pretty solid level, but ask him to build or train a model and my guess is he wouldn't show "competence".

I think technical competence is also different then "could do it", e.g. I think Musk, Zuck could sit down and figure out most software related tasks. But it isn't a good use of their time. They have a good enough understanding of the technical limitations and requirements to lead people in product creation which has proven immensely valuable.

Building is easy, naming is hard. In this case though, you're overthinking it. Pick one and move forward. Attributes is super common to use in these scenarios. Properties is also common and wouldn't be out of place.

I like to always build a project dictionary early on, as it just is helpful for everyone coming along later, and also if concepts change over time the original intent is clear. So like in this case, I'd just pick "attributes" and then have a markdown file or wiki etc that has common terms, and attributes would be described with examples. A quick 1-2 sentence write up is way easier then trying to spend a lot of time picking the perfect word/phrase.

tl;dr; I think both C and C++ be around a long time. Just look at COBOL.

I learned C in the 80's and C++ in the late 80's/early 90's. I have heard every few years since probably 1996-97 how C/C++ were dead or dying languages and had no place in modern development. Yet they both have continued to grow in usage, especially with the IoT push.

I happen to still love working in both C and C++, not that they are the most productive or best tool for every job, but for high performance or low level, embedded etc they are still a great fit.

FWIW I feel most languages have a purpose and when used for those purposes they excel. However, when you use a shovel to pound in nails, it isn't the tool that is the problem. I do see languages like Rust replacing a lot of things C/C++ have been used for, but not everything.

Jobs are a little more selective for C/C++ in general, but there are tons out there and good C/C++ devs do well.

My 2 cents, don't aim for full stack from the start. Decent full stack engineers take many many years to become truly full stack, and even then they'll still have an area of specialty.

I've seen people calling themselves full stack but in reality they don't even have an area they know well and so they are just weak across the board which makes it hard to even give them a chance. Pick an area, spend your time there first and once you are fairly solid there you can start branching into more parts of the stack. I do think it is smart to branch wide across many areas, but you need some depth in an area first to help you land a job and be productive for a team.

Totally agree, it was different in 2001 and 2008/2009 as inflation wasn't a major factor, now inflation is essentially acting like an additional tax. So if people lose 8-10% for a couple of years and salaries stagnate I think we will see much different market condition especially for employment.

I was never laid off but I and had to lay some people off during the dot com bust, yet during the 2008 downturn my teams all grew in size (just a little slower than the prior years). Mainly what I saw was companies that had solid foundations, even if they were VC backed and unprofitable, did fine overall. They just had to be a bit less speculative and more calculating how they used their funds. Ones in speculative areas or doing weird shit got hammered and weeded out of the market fairly quick.

I personally never witnessed reasonable quality engineers not able to move around and find work (outside a short 6ish month window during the peak of the dot com bust), sure it took a little longer for some, but we are still talking like 2-3 months. I changed jobs twice during the dot com bust and recovery as well as during the 2008 cycle, but I had solid experience. The people who were mainly laid off were the inexperienced that didn't have a tech degree. e.g. where companies took a chance on training them to fill a tech role which they were struggling to fill during the boom cycle. People regardless of degree or no-degree that had 5-10 years did fine generally, and 10+ years did well as long as you were reasonable in salary requests.

The biggest issue I saw was salaries stagnated for a really long time and companies took advantage of the job market to hold the salary growth down. To be clear, salaries didn't go down so much as they just leveled off and stayed there for WAY too long IMO.

There was some good that came from the dot com bust. The market weeded out all the speculative job seekers who had no business writing code. It removed a lot of the poorly ran companies, and it forced companies to pay attention to the fundamentals. So it wasn't all bad either, and I think we were healthier after for quite a while.

Hopefully this cycle turns into another correction and we clean up some stuff and it happens quickly. Nothing says it has to be a horrid all or nothing event, most recessions aren't. 2008 was unusually tough on a lot of people but left the tech area relatively unscathed. This one won't be quite the same, but HNWP & LP's need to still put their money to work, so there will still be plenty of money for decent companies. And tech is everywhere and not optional for companies anymore, so there will be a market for good engineers and like positions.

React is neither good nor bad, it is just another framework. Usually developers are keen to rewrite things in their current flavor where they are comfortable. You need to be detailed with them and understand what react is going to solve, because while it might solve some things it will bring with it a lot of baggage and complexity too which may or may not be good for your current app.

My general rule is newly hired team members can't rewrite systems or major components within their first few months on the team. Of course it isn't an unbreakable rule, but the goal is to make them fully understand the product and clients. A lot of times people want to rewrite things cause they don't understand the problem you are solving and by rewriting the code base they can dig into the problem more. When in reality if you force them to live with the existing codebase for a bit it can help them and you feel more comfortable with a rewrite if that becomes necessary and usually it goes better too.

I've seen devs use react for landing sites that are 3-5 pages and maybe a couple of forms etc all because they didn't know how to interact with forms through javascript. Or one I loved is a new dev saw jquery in a project we had that was still operational and doing great but he freaked out wanting to rewrite a stable cash cow of a codebase cause jquery is "bad". I doubt/hope that isn't your case here, but just make sure you feel confident in the reasoning and it isn't just cause they know react and it is the hammer they use regardless.

Yea, there is no reason they should be asking you to take PTO then, IMO. It all kind of becomes moot if you go and either get dismissed or are only there for 2-3 days since you'd be working the other days anyway.

FWIW too, a lot of newer managers, and younger people just don't know these laws/rules simply because they haven't ran into them yet. So it is common to have them make, sometimes odd, requests with no malice or bad intentions, just out of a lack of knowledge.

From when I was a founder and ran into this, I was advised from my attorney in a simple phrase, pay them.

tldr; make sure you work at least a few hours that week and that generally forces your employers hand.

Some states have specific laws on the books so you should always check, but even if they don't there are already a set of federal laws protecting employees. Basic rule is exempt employees are to be paid for the jury time, though there are a few potential loopholes. The advice I was given though was just pay up as it isn't worth the headaches later.

The reality, if you work 1 hour during the entire week, from home or at the court house, or train ride in etc, you have provided services for your employer and are entitled to be paid. There are some thoughts (maybe rules) that state if you do no work during the week and take a full 5 days off that the employer can ask you to take PTO or go unpaid, but they cannot punish you in any way.

California likely has more detailed laws around this so I'd check just to know. I will say, when you are bootstrapped as I was and have someone gone for a week that isn't a nothing impact, it hurts. The reality is I could have likely gotten the employee free from jury duty because it was a hardship to the business (yes that is real), but to me that is just wrong and sends the wrong signal to everyone.

If you are working for a startup, it is likely they just don't know the laws and are trying to figure it out too, so I'd not be a jerk about it but also be up front. If they are a larger company, they likely know the rules and are trying to be less than fair and skirt their responsibilities to the system and to you.

obligatory, IANAL, just have paid a number of them over the years for professional advice.

Depends on how big the company is and how well it is lead.

Generally on my teams those who do their work and contribute to making the team, company and product more successful get promoted (when ready).

Those who hurt the team are worked with to fix the issue and only after much effort to try and correct issues is someone let go.

tl;dr - performance or lack of, and team dynamics positive or negative are what drive those decisions.

I have a different solution. I was lucky early in my career where I got to work on a few projects that were distributed not for scale but for super high reliability. I studied what I was given but studying was only so helpful.

To that point, I recently had someone ask me how I learned some of the things I did on distributed. I am not disagreeing with other commenters about reading up and studying but I think that it isn't as good as experimenting with things yourself.

Pick something like "leader election" and implement a naive/simple version of it so you have a better understanding. Take that and run it in AWS on 3 (or more) micro instances and play with failure scenarios. Alternatively you can do the same with local computers on your network, or raspberry pi's or any other SBC. For less than the cost of a text book you'll have real world experience implementing and experimenting.

From there, try other scenarios and keep building and testing. Doing this is far more valuable then just reading about it. Then if you do hit a job where you need those skills it isn't just academic to you, you'll have played with how it works and seen how to debug issues etc.

Speaking of debugging issues, one of the hardest things in distributed systems is just that, debugging. So build a basic (again maybe naive version) distributed logging/tracing solution so you can see the issues first hand. You'll then understand (at least somewhat better) the way to evaluate the common solutions/ideas that are on market or that people push.

You can learn a lot even by just setting up something like zookeeper or etcd and learn how they work, failure modes and how they can help or hurt you.

Just some ideas, but the basic concept is to actually implement things. Even just run your tests in containers (not as good IMO but still better than just reading about it) if you can't afford to spend a little money in AWS or on SBCs etc.

*edit fixed a word mistake

I don't have any concern over having to use the internet to reference things or find samples that save time.

In the 90's I had a large book collection that I used for learning and for reference which served similar purposes. That plus the man pages and SDK docs you got with libraries was basically your goto. And even then, we still had programming forums (BBS) and usenet for finding help and samples.

Oh and if/when you did Microsoft programming keeping the MSDN docs on your machine was an option, which was like 4Gb if you installed it all.

FWIW: I do fairly often write code without internet but if I am using a library I am unfamiliar with or need to do something that is less common I'll save some docs or key web pages locally to help me.

Cool, sounds like congrats are in order first as you had a qualifying event you are rolling over. Given that, I'd double down on the accountant (attorney not very important IMO in this situation) just cause it is easy to screw these up. I've done this both in real-estate (similar type of program and rules) and corp (though primarily real-estate). The process is easy on the face of it but requires quite a bit of tracking and reporting to do it properly.

I'd say in your situation, no, the salary isn't important and in fact may work against you tax wise. But you'll have to make sure the corp is doing a real business as there are some rules around parking, though I am not an accountant or attorney so my understanding may be incorrect. Good luck!

I know you are probably trying to do this without hiring an attorney/accountant, but please go talk to at least an accountant and pay for a few hours of their time. There are ways to do this so that it works to your advantage tax wise and keeps everything on the up and up. However, done wrong you can screw yourself considerably and wind up with an unplanned tax liability on yourself, the corp or both. And what state your are in matters to this as well.

On that note, hopefully you registered in your operating/home state already too and got all that out of the way as that is another pain point a lot of people miss early on when they register a Delaware corp. Frankly, unless you plan to take a VC based round soon the Delaware corp is really a liability for new solo founders just starting out. If you are bootstrapping it is almost always more simple, faster, easier and less prone to issues to manage a state based LLC or S Corp that you setup with the proper structure to support moving it to a C corp later. Talking to an attorney and/or accountant makes all this so much easier and prevents you from winding up on the wrong side of an equation unintentionally and unexpectedly.

You don't need to spend tons of money, but get some advice from an accountant and/or an attorney on these things to make sure you don't wind up spending $10k in liabilities to save $1k in fees.

There are some orgs that a degree is required and your friend is right, though most I find are more experience focused. In my experience, the orgs that work like your friend described are generally not where you want to work anyway as they are using bureaucracy and credentialing not merit (like anything though, exceptions exist).

A degree is what helps you early in your career to get a foot in a door, or a slightly higher starting pay or position etc. In the end, it is your ability to sell yourself, deliver and most importantly be personable and work with people of all types.

For the most part in tech, whether I am hiring an exec or engineer the only time I actually will look at/for a degree (or certificate) is if I am hiring someone with no professional experience or filling a highly specialized role. Frankly, too much time spent in university is a negative indicator to me, unless you were specializing in a research heavy area or needed it for a professional certification like a medical doctor, attorney etc.

FWIW, some degrees and certain schools on a resume are a negative indicator to me as well. This is because over the past 20+ years I've seen the type of people they produce on average. That isn't to say I won't interview a candidate (or hire them) if they seem like they are a potential fit, just that I'll dig pretty deep to see if the candidate avoided the issues I am aware of. More traditionally "top rated" schools/programs are on this list than basic public state universities.

At any good company, it always boils down to the person in my experience, not a piece of paper. And it should be noted, C level and other exec's usually get hired through referrals, their own network or headhunters and not generally through blind resume submittal. So it is generally a much more personalized process than applying as a basic engineer etc.

In general job hopping is much less an issue than it used to be. That said staying less than a year at multiple jobs, unless they were clearly a temporary consulting gig is definitely a major red flag. It is important to note too, someone with a 20 year career that has had 2-3 short stints is seen far differently then someone with < 3-4 years of experience that has the same.

When I review a resume I look for short stints where the person was an FTE (or freelancer) as generally it is a sign they have a hard time being a team player, or they look for any small reason to self eject versus work through issues. Companies aren't perfect, not one of them, so there will always be one or more reasons people can use to eject, but you need to stick it out some and learn how to work through issues.

In general (specifically in tech), if you stay a minimum of 2 years no one will really care much if you move on, under that and you have to be more cautious how you present and discuss it. I'm not saying I wouldn't interview someone with 1-2 stints under a year. But if you have ~3 years of experience and have had 3-4 jobs it better be clear to me that the jobs were planned as short term gigs or something specific like 1-2 of the companies failed etc.

One strategy you can try is to arrange your resume not in chronological order but about skills and projects you've worked on specifically. This sometimes gets you past the resume review stage though the short stints will come up and you'll need to have a good reason why you are worth taking a risk on. The first one that was because of relocation is fairly easy to justify so I doubt anyone dings you for that, but the others will raise some eyebrows and potentially concern.

Get with the dominate provider(s) in the areas you are evaluating and talk to them, there are tons of options that you won't ever see online from them. Companies like Verizon, AT&T etc have all kinds of business plans which you can't find online, you need to talk with a business account manager. As you'd expect, volume has a large impact on your pricing.

If you are just prototyping and not ready to create a relationship then use one of the online plans with a provider or Twilio etc until you are ready. You'll generally pay a bit more doing this, but for prototyping it gives you more options and you can try different providers etc.

The most annoying part is the people who don't write comments.

Code comments are important (sometimes more important than the code), even for code that seems self describing, as in many cases putting a few notes of the "why" is super critical to prevent people from making breaking changes later. That said, I am not advocating for commenting completely self describing code lines, e.g. // for loop etc.

My personal work style is I first write comments as the outline of what I want to have happen then fill in the details via code. At the end, I'll remove the unnecessary comments, but by doing this it helps me make sure my code is fully commented and helps me organize my thoughts before just writing code. The worst case is I sometimes leave unnecessary comments but that's fairly minor IMO. This method works at any level of code too, e.g. modules, interfaces, files, functions etc

Frankly commenting this way has saved me countless hours of debugging, especially in more complex and code dense functions, algorithms is a good example. Non trivial lambdas is another good example where a good comment can save a ton of time.

I also require function header comments with parameter descriptions and return value details etc. Tools like doxygen are invaluable when you work with teams that need to share details on interfaces etc.

Knowing nothing else then what you list, I'd consider you junior to maybe intermediate, it would all depend on how you do in an interview.

I'd echo a couple of comments, apply for roles you think fit your skills. Startups call people with 2-3 years senior all the time and I'd not consider the vast majority of people filling those roles as senior. It all depends on their categorization.

I've seen people create career levels in startups that are totally out of line with reality but they use them. So worry less about title and just make sure based on the job you think you can do the work and deliver. Don't be afraid to reach "up" though, plenty of people with your type of experience can out deliver more senior candidates, it all depends on the person.

Honestly, I strongly doubt a small startup is getting 10k applications a month. I advise a few startups & small businesses that are actively hiring multiple roles and I work at a startup that is actively hiring multiple roles. Yes, many people are active and applying, but it is not 10k applications a month even for multiple positions for a small startup.

One of the hardest tasks for a company, especially right now, to do is to create the resume funnel. So I know some startups try to hack it and create FOMO on their hiring funnel, which is what the claim you heard sounds like to me. Yes, certain brand names will get crazy number of applicants, but that isn't the case across the board.

General jobs/economy reality. The more positions open when there is low unemployment (relative to the position) the smaller number of applicants per position, and the pickier the applicants. The fewer jobs open with "high" unemployment the larger and less picky candidates become. After the dotcom bust, when I was hiring we would see 500-1000/month resumes per open position in some cases, just insane; yet, before the bust we would see < 100/month usually, even at highly known companies.

Recruiters are the fastest way to build top of funnel. Work with recruiters to screen for you on the basics. A lot of recruiters have a deserved bad reputation but not all of them. Ideally find a good retainer based recruiter, they aren’t cheap but if you are hiring multiple roles it is far cheaper.

Other hints. Streamline your process, but don’t follow big tech hiring strategies. It is moronic for a small startup to act like Netflix or Meta or Google. Most startups lose good candidates because of the process being poor or disrespectful of the candidates time.

I run a simple process and can get candidates through in a matter of 2-3 days usually, assuming they can make the time too. Recent example, first call on a Thursday, tech interviews on Friday and offer on Monday. That’s how you compete against the tough market conditions and larger startups who can pay more. And even then it isn’t perfect, we lost that candidate cause he had offers higher then we felt we could pay for the match. Good for him, but his feedback was very positive to the recruiter about us and the process.