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dhotson

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Dennis Hotson

https://dn.ht

http://dhotson.tumblr.com

https://twitter.com/dennishotson

dennis.hotson@gmail.com

Posts478
Comments428
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www-cs-students.stanford.edu 3d ago

C Craft

dhotson
7pts1
www.pigenpalace.com 7mo ago

Dog Spinner

dhotson
2pts0
dn.ht 1y ago

Australian Energy

dhotson
3pts2
www.datagenetics.com 2y ago

Most common PIN codes (2012)

dhotson
127pts88
tenderlovemaking.com 2y ago

Fast Tokenizers with StringScanner

dhotson
1pts0
staff.tumblr.com 3y ago

Tumblr Announces Important Blue Internet Checkmarks

dhotson
52pts9
github.com 4y ago

Hironex – automatic, unsupervised extraction of road networks from historic maps

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2pts0
www.miriamsuzanne.com 4y ago

Body Margin 8px – The origin story for a style no one wants

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2pts0
eliotpeper.com 4y ago

Fellow travelers make the best teachers

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1pts0
twitter.com 4y ago

IBM Slide, 1979

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1pts0
medium.com 4y ago

Spreadsheets are dreams (2015)

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74pts19
www.businessinsider.com.au 4y ago

The untold story of Larry Page’s comeback (2014)

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1pts0
blog.danslimmon.com 4y ago

When efficiency hurts more than it helps (2015)

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33pts16
blog.danslimmon.com 4y ago

The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)

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218pts120
www.youtube.com 4y ago

Mechanical Animations

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2pts0
cari.institute 4y ago

Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

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1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

One-of-a-kind computer systems of which only one unit was ever produced

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9pts4
medium.com 4y ago

Why Flippa and why now? AU$15M Series A round for Melbourne-based Flippa.com

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1pts0
www.electrospaces.net 4y ago

Details about the telephone equipment used by president Biden

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1pts0
www.nathalielawhead.com 4y ago

Tiny tools and the ephemeral nature of digital art

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51pts7
github.com 5y ago

Pokegb – A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokemon Blue, in ~70 lines of C++

dhotson
2pts1
text.bargains 5y ago

Amulet, short text poems that SHA-256 into a hash with four or more 8s in a row

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1pts4
www.mit.edu 5y ago

Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

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307pts97
medium.com 5y ago

ts-migrate: A tool for migrating to typeScript at scale

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1pts0
github.com 5y ago

PEmbroider – Embroidery Library for Processing

dhotson
1pts0
alexnixon.github.io 6y ago

It's Time to Start Writing (2019)

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280pts57
www.robinsloan.com 6y ago

Writing with the Machine (2016)

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43pts2
wicg.github.io 6y ago

Compression Streams – JavaScript APIs to compress and decompress binary data

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3pts2
lethain.com 6y ago

First 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering

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4pts0
time.com 6y ago

I Spoke Out Against Sexual Harassment at Uber

dhotson
62pts4

Yeah, it's tricky because basically all solar arrays (rooftop and utility) all come online at more-or-less the same time so there's a huge influx of supply which drives the price down.

You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&...

You can see the demand peaks around 12pm and 6pm.

The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.

And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.

So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!

Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.

One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.

The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.

Heya, fellow Aussie here. Have you ever tried contacting your local MP?

I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!

The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.

It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.

I work at Influx (https://influx.com) which is human powered customer support.

We've found that inevitably AIs have some error rate and customers want to escalate to a person.

Our strategy has moved to:

- Let humans do the things that humans are good at: judgement, decision making, high novelty situations.

- Let AI do the things that computers are good at: repetitive tasks that require persistent effort

We've seen a lot of clients turn on these AI tools in their helpdesk.. hope for the best.. and get crap results. The tech isn't the hard part, the AI needs access to high quality context to answer questions accurately. But that requires more than just connecting your google drive or scraping your website.

We've found that a skilled human operator + AI is the best way to engineer high quality context to get the most out of the tools.

Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻

I'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable?

- WordPress code is open-source.

- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.

I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?

If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?

Yeah nah, for me it's exactly that: plain html/js/css files. For simple things, I copy/paste.. not a big deal.

If it's getting more complicated, I'll abort and upgrade to rails to use layouts etc.

The middle ground of static site generators are a trap in my personal opinion.

If I need to add a feature, I've found it's easier for me to implement it directly rather than try mess around configuring a static site generator with plugins etc.

Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time.

Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.

It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.

Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files. It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.

I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though—I don't recommend it for everyone.

The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder.. pretty easy upgrade path.

Yep, exactly!

I don't ask this question because I want to know the answer.

The questions I'm trying to answer are:

- Are you intelligent?

- Are you diligent and well prepared?

- Are you self-aware?

- Have you put any thought into what you want and why you're here?

To find out the answers, I can't just ask those directly unfortunately!

I'm not sure if it's helpful, but if you want some perspective from someone that's interviewed a few hundred software engineering candidates..

I ask this question to every candidate I interview. My expectations for this question are very low.

I find it's a very effective screener for low effort applications. A lot of candidates I interview haven't even looked at our company website.

If you're the kind of person that's doing zero preparation for a job interview, I've already learned something about you.

Many people I interview just answer the question very directly:

- "I got laid off"

- "My current company is returning to office and I want to work from home".

- "I've been working at X for 5 years now and I'm bored"

- "I want to make more money"

- "I want to work with an international team"

.. honestly, that's all totally fine.

I agree that there's no need to pretend about your motivations—I'm not expecting a lot of enthusiasm about writing boring business software at my company.

On the other hand, if you've done some basic research about the company or the role and can ask some good questions—I'm learning something about your intelligence, conscientiousness and self-awareness, which are actually the things I'm testing for.

Job interviews are full of latent variables like this. As an interviewer I want to find out if you're good at X, but I can't just ask "are you good at X?". I need to test you out by asking other questions that demonstrate X.

Anecdotally..

- Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy.

- Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day.

- I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats.

- I think there's something in it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/

- It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time.

My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...

A strong link problem is where "overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is".

In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy.

But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I've ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.

Yeah, that's a great demonstration of the technique.

One tiny tip.. :) you can pass a block to `.to_h`, so instead of using `.map` + `.to_h`:

    h.map { |k,v| [k, v] }.to_h
.. it can be simplified to:
    h.to_h { |k,v| [k, v] }

Influx | Lead Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia/Indonesia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx provides customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to help build out a new team.

Our engineering team is currently very small so we keep it simple and focus on delivering value: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, hosted on Heroku and AWS.

There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Lead Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia/Indonesia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx provides customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to build out a new team. Our stack uses Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Senior Software Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. Our stack uses Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx provides full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for an experienced Ruby engineer. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Melbourne/Malaysia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx builds full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

We're looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

One thing that changed it for me was making my own physical photo albums when I get back from a holiday.

I've been using albumworks because their HD books look fantastic. They're a bit pricy at ~$90/book but it's 100% worth it for me.. plus there are heaps of other alternatives if you're on a budget.

An important part of the process is trimming and curating the photos down to a reasonable number. With digital it's so easy to end up with thousands of picture you never look at.

Putting together an album is a bit of work, but I found they key is not to overthink it. The end result is that it's much easier to show people and it's more interesting for people to flick through.

Also, when I'm on holiday, I got annoyed with sharing on instagram because of how it compresses the hell out of images, so I ended up making my own photo blog for friends and family to follow along.

I've got my workflow set up where I can post-process photos in Adobe Lightroom and then update my site with a Makefile and a folder full of JPGs. It's easy enough to do even at the end of a hectic day of travel—no messing around with blogs and static site generators. If you're curious: https://dn.ht/journal/ :)

More recently, for shorter trips I've also tried shooting with a film camera. Like another commented here mentioned, I find it can help stay more in the moment and you get a nice little surprise when you get your rolls back from the developer.

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Malaysia | Full-time | https://influx.com Influx is looking for talented software engineers to join our small but growing team.

We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Malaysia / Indonesia | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx is looking for talented software engineers to join our small but growing team.

We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Latin America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx is looking for talented software engineers to join our small but growing team.

We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

- Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.

- Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.

- Top-notch communication skills are essential.

- Eager to learn and grow.

Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)

Influx | Software Engineer | Remote | Latin America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina | Full-time | https://influx.com

Influx is looking for talented software engineers to join our small but growing team.

We build full-service customer support teams that can flex and scale monthly. Influx enables companies of all sizes to deliver consistent and high quality service 24/7.

Influx is looking for experienced Ruby engineers. This is primarily a back-end role using Ruby on Rails and Postgres with infrastructure hosted on Heroku and AWS.

The Influx engineering team is small but growing. There will be enormous opportunities for learning, personal growth and taking on more responsibility as the team continues to expand.

What we’re looking for:

  - Someone that is curious, collaborative and ready to take ownership and responsibility.
  - Comfortable being part of a small, autonomous and distributed team.
  - Top-notch communication skills are essential.
  - Eager to learn and grow.
Email me at dennis@influx.com to apply or ask questions. Thanks! :)