euphemize

Agreed, I'm quite sensitive to the scrollbar size when I land on a new article, and in this case I almost closed the window, thinking this would take the whole day to read :)

Yep, sounds much more natural at the end :)

Jamais entendu ça de mes trente ans au Québec

Also agreed. I will use single-letter variables like "c" or "x" occasionally for lambdas or anonymous functions, but that's about it. "lambda x: not x" in python - anything longer I think should be descriptive.

Agreed with you. Perhaps if you're using temp or tmp, something could be done better, but I see no harm in using the others. If you're counting things, a variable named "count" sound perfectly reasonable to me.

I am not sure when this was written, but Lambda supports ES6 directly as of about a month ago. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-4-3-2-runtime-n...

I think you can avoid the transpiling/babel dependency.

Great work!

Interesting. Had a google interview not too long ago, and this was exactly the question asked to me - how would you design an algorithm to find overlapping free time from person X, Y and Z. I guess they got more practical with their questions over the years.

Looks great, liking that is suggests times too.

Great realization. I'm in a similar boat. On the upside, 30 is still quite young, there's lots of time to do other stuff and slow things down ever more.

Montreal is not known for its tech scene. Scrolling through this page, I can immediately identify:

- the "startups" that are a 1-guy team doing "disruptive-PASS-agile-SCRUM" consulting

- large, partially government-backed monsters where money is burnt and not much is produced

- the students who just built their first social photo-sharing app, wondering why they can't find any funding

I've heard of them from others or was offered jobs there - there isn't a lot to choose from around here. Salaries are low as the city is cheap. There are also good companies in that list (some great ones even), but I'd say it's pretty inflated.

I work remote for a US company with its headquarters in Europe, it's the best arrangement possible, I'd recommend it for others (paid USD, half-day overlap with coworkers = lots of time for quiet coding, trips to Europe often to catch up with team).

So, you were in MTL for ~1 year? Working / studying?

I used to try and reason with ES settings on production, for about a year or two. Something would invariably break, unless you spend time with it every day, checking configurations and monitoring performance.

We use the AWS ElasticSearch service, and while it does not provide the same flexibility, it's been fantastic for us. No configuration files, no weird restart behaviour, no thread pool madness - it just runs. You can upgrade your instance sizes seamlessly and it integrates well with other AWS parts (ex: cloudwatch).

My ground rule is that anything I easy_install will go into env, and env will quite often be (re)built on a separate machine that matches my target environment. So I treat it as a disposable folder, and it’s never committed to any repos.

Was wondering, do you pip freeze > requirements.txt? I don't see the file in there, but I assume that's what you mean since you mention that none of the env folders make it into version control.

On a semi-related note, I used to have tons of projects like this a year ago, and having moved most of our python code to AWS lambda, our repos have shrank to maybe 25% of their original size. Granted it's not fabulous if you need to run a JS app on top of your Bottle framework, but we used to have a lot of small services here and there, the provisioning and deployment was so much work.

This is an unfortunate title for this post. AWS released API Gateway sometime last year, and this makes it sound like a caching layer behind API Gateway, to access S3 files.

Unfortunately it seems like the argument is mainly semantic then - I find it reasonable to think that "pedantically instructs the programmer how to properly do what’s requested, even though it obviously know what is meant" is pretty much a detour to say it's not good, it's implied.

I just don't see why DHH needs to do this - ruby has so many things that make it stand on its own.

Did you read the quote? He very exactly says that python is bad in comparison - by using a concrete python vs ruby example.

If this was a passing mention on some blog post, I'd be inclined to believe you, but this post is not like any other. It's a descriptive update of the current rails "doctrine". When I ask you "why is your X so great" and you tell me immediately "look at how bad Y does", I'm inclined to think you're not feeling very secure about X.

  This is easily described with a contrast to Python. [...] Ruby accepts both exit and quit to accommodate the programmer’s obvious desire to quit its interactive console. Python, on the other hand, pedantically instructs the programmer how to properly do what’s requested, even though it obviously know what is meant (since it’s displaying the error message).

By the way, python handles your example very gracefully in comparison to other REPLs (for instance, node spits out a cryptic, but expected traceback on exit/quit)

Living in Montréal, I'm happy to see this article. The highways / traffic situation is horrible here, but I will point to one example in particular.

Getting to the airport: there is no way to get to the airport easily. There is a dedicated bus line that might get stuck in traffic for 10$, or you pay 35$ for Uber, or 50$ for a normal cab (which also might both get stuck in traffic). You need to plan at least 2 hours from your house to get there, often 3 hours in advance for your flight. I've taken the bus dozens of time, and you can see the faces of the poor passengers, realizing they thought 1h to get 20KM away would be enough.

I go back and forth to Amsterdam and the difference is embarrassing. I get to Schiphol, hop on a train (every 5 mins), it costs 5 euros and I'm at Central Station in 15 minutes.

Light train? metro extension? How hard can it be?

This guy got a bunch of things wrong:

I don't like that.

Not sure how "not liking something" equates getting things wrong, but I agree with most of what the author mentioned.

Using 'x' or 's' for a short lambda makes no difference. 's' could be anything, like 'x'. Unless you're specifically using django, there's no point in renaming _. Agreed with you on the argument lists and exceptions.

Python doesn't have NULL, I think you meant None.

Great point. Also, the pipeline you mention removes many risks related to the 'common' mistakes mentioned in the article (scaling, monitoring, provisioning it all done for you - or almost).

We're using gateway -> lambda -> dynamodb, and there are a tons of gotchas and small things that AWS need to iron out, especially with gateway -> lambda.

Really? People who write code, any code - but make under 6 figures are not "software engineers"? What's making 6 figures have anything to do?

At the end:

  To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires.  Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s     salary.  It’s a lot less than Shithead would cost.  And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to   work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay.  You’ll be amazed how effective   this can be.

I like this idea, but I'm not sure it's realistic. Constraints change all the time, just like your users' needs. In principle this works, but I'm not convinced that everything should aim to be finished.

The max speed is 40 k/h - I'm no expert cyclist, but what happens when you go 60, 70, 80 down a long hill? Can the Lily catch up to you, and up until how far? What happens if it can't?

But what is it? What does it do?

"Introducing your passcard!", "Choose a registrar", "Your all access pass to everything.", "A system giving users control of their identity."

I still have no clue what this thing is, or why I would want it.

So I've played this game a few hours yesterday, and more on the day it came out here.

I logged in this morning again for a quick game, and it appears you've considerably shrank the "worlds" into smaller spaces. The game has changed completely for me, as it's about 50/50 that I will survive the first 20 seconds. It's gotten extremely tight in there and there's no more room to maneuver. If you're a big cell, it's almost impossible to die, as there is now always a stream of little guys that get trapped, then sucked in.

I really had a lot of fun "exploring" the worlds and occasionally bumping into another cell, or just crossing paths yesterday. I could go on long chases that would last a few minutes, which was a lot of fun. As of now (I tried the 4 regions), it's basically a reflex game. Splitting in half to "attack" I think is the cornerstone of this game (if you want to get big, you have to risk a bit), but it's so crowded now that it's prohibitively expensive/risky to do so, which sucks.

A small thing to consider for user retention: if I've carefully built up my cell to a respectable size, I will try to play smart and not leave my computer, grab water, go to the washroom, because I'm invested. If I die every 3 minutes, it's easy for me to drop it, forget about it and move on. I spent 60-90 minutes in a single game yesterday, and didn't want to "lose my work", if you see what I mean.

Awesome work (I think the small upgrades on the theme, names, etc. is awesome), keep iterating - but I think I'm going to get back to productive stuff now, because the game has lost most of its appeal to me.

Cool, gimme a field to add a custom header (e.g. "Authorization" is pretty common) and I'll use it!

A bit uneven as a post. Some really, really great advice, some more questionable I find.

The logo doesn't matter at the start, find a simple text based logo you can re-use for different projects

Not convinced. Your logo will follow you around for a long time, regardless of what you tell yourself. People will see it and associate you and your startup with it. Doing a large rebrand is difficult, costly and time-consuming.

If there's one thing you should hire for, it's intellectual acumen, a high “figure shit out” quotient with the ability to grind

I think this is true in general. I've worked with highly intelligent, but less-motivated people, and you're always waiting for that magical moment when they come out of their lethargy and become a 100x worker. And that moment usually never happens.

Just a nice dude

I guess female unicorns can't apply.

Passport or ID copy

Nope, I will never send my passport copy to a random email address - this is even illegal in certain places.

If anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's technically my native language. It might also be that French seems to have more alternatives to say the same thing in different ways, but that could just be just me.

[0] C'est presque toujours plus long en français qu'en anglais. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in French.