HN user
https://gunsch.cc/
previously https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgunsch, new account corresponding with a name change
A few months ago I was debugging a similar issue in a Go-based service layer, where frequent HTTP requests to the same domain kept making fresh TCP connections when I was expecting TCP conn reuse.
In this situation we were discarding the HTTP response without reading it before closing, which kept Go from reusing the connection. I didn't dig quite as deep as this post's author, but I imagine the same RST behavior was happening under the hood.
Pair programming! Get hands-on with your junior engineers and their development process. Push them to think through things and not just ask the LLM everything.
I hoped this might be like an externalization of g3doc. Nope.
Instead, I started reading through one of their highlighted examples --- the Go repo (https://codewiki.google/github.com/golang/go). This might be the worst high level overview of Go and its repo I've read. Mostly accurate but unhelpfully verbose, spending lots of words on trivia, and not at all making a compelling pitch for Go as a language or toolchain, how to use it, or how to work on it.
Sure, that's advised in interviews, where you're about to make a decision on someone's livelihood, hence the importance of reducing bias. That's a completely different context than in casual conversation at a social event.
I recently took 10 months off before my current gig. I did little to no coding, mostly just recovering from burnout and doing some side fun stuff. No one batted an eye about the break when I started job-searching again --- I think breaks like that in tech are pretty normal.
I also wrote a more detailed blog about my experiences and advice for a break if it's useful! https://gunsch.cc/2024/04/06/sabbatical-review.html
I had the fortune of taking Erdmann's Python class at the University of Arizona 15 years ago --- a Python/Pylab/data engineering class aimed at materials science engineering students.
He was already getting into this kind of art spectroscopy at the time, and the things he'd showed us at the time that they'd already discovered were wild. IIRC, they had laid out many Rembrandts on the same large "scroll" of canvas, identified where they were painted relative to one another on the scroll, and even identified some paintings of unclear authorship by thing them to that same scroll.
It was not at all surprising to see him move to Amsterdam and keep working with the Rijksmuseum. I smile every time I see this work pop up.
I spent a few years building OpenAPI-related tools at Google, collaborating with Apigee.
One of the "open secrets" about OpenAPI's history was how Smartbear spun out the OpenAPI spec to be a community-managed spec, but with the requirement that there wouldn't be official tooling offered with it --- arguably to protect Smartbear's investment in Swagger. (it's been a minute so specifics are hazy but IIRC it was something like this). The tooling ecosystem feels pretty disjointed as a result.
Compare to gRPC/protobuf, where the specification and tooling have been developed together. Parsers, static analyzers, code generators, documentation tooling all happen in lockstep with spec development, and the ecosystem feels much more cohesive.
Engineering lead/manager looking for engineering leadership roles. Ex-Google (Staff SWE), have managed teams and orgs from 20 to 140 engineers. Looking for anything from managing a single team, to director-level, to principal-SWE type roles. Deep experience in platforms (internal teams, APIs and API platforms, SDKs, etc.), but also have experience in consumer hardware, streaming media, and all parts of the tech stack.
Location: Seattle, WA
Remote: open to remote, hybrid, or in-person in Seattle
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: backend, frontend, infra/ops, client devices
Résumé/CV: https://gunsch.cc/assets/img/resume-2023.pdf
Email: andrew.j.gunsch@gmail.com+1. The comments bashing Closure in comparison to TypeScript feel like they're missing the timeline.
Closure brought modules, requires, compile-time type checking and optimizations to JavaScript years before TypeScript was on the scene. I wouldn't dare start a new project with Closure. But it was such a spiritual predecessor to what we have today in TypeScript, and has a special place in my heart too.
There are also government contractors who often pair with USDS doing this kind of work! Ad Hoc (my employer), Nava, Civic Actions, etc. are all part of a new generation of companies with related missions trying to bring modern software practices into the US government. While USDS is often on the inside cutting through bureaucracy, the contractors are often doing most of the technical build and implementation.
I happened to join Oink just before it fell over, and when it went down I managed to find some of the former members on a forum saying "hey, let's go build a replacement right away." I was only a budding PHP developer in high school, but managed to jump in with the right folks at the right time and learned a lot working on that site.
Couple stories from memory:
* What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back".
* I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know
* Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community.
* I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since.
* Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?
It sounds like you're assuming "managing up" is about managers who don't know how to do their job. I don't think this article is saying that.
My best managers weren't ones who knew every detail of each project and could give unsolicited effective advice. They were ones to whom I could tell what was going on on my project, could ask for help, could tell them what I needed, and then rely on them to follow through on helping make that happen. Sometimes that was needing more time for a deadline, sometimes it was needing a mediation in a complicated relationship with another team, and sometimes it was using manager clout to go escalate a request for compute resources.
In any case, two-way communication is going to create a more effective relationship than expecting your manager to simply _know_ what you need.
Yep. google.com homepage is giving me 502s.
It's been a looooong time :-o
edit: aaaand it's back
I've enjoyed YNAB a lot for budgeting and been using it for the last 3 years now. Works very well with my spreadsheet brain.
It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement account balances.
It's a real problem.
I've got a friend who went through the Code Fellows program last year. They advertise 93% job placement within six months. Based on conversations we had through his program, it seems like they're generally teaching a well-rounded set of skills, though tbf it's still a bootcamp, not a full CS degree.
Six months later, only 2 out of the 10 members of his cohort have gotten software jobs. He's still applying, but he's getting very few interviews and so far no offers.
This one's the real answer (or at least a substantial part of it). On VA.gov, the USWDS components (and their composition into a modular forms system) was a large part of making sure that applications met the accessibility needs of the general public.
Source: I was the VA.gov engineering lead for awhile
This has been a little tricky to confirm, but I'm getting 100% ping packet loss to 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4,4, and https://isup.me/dns.google confirms the site is down.
In doing so, you're betting that _you_ can grow your money faster than organizations you give it to can make impact on their communities.
Helping people who need it _now_ rather than in ten years helps _them_ start contributing more effectively to their communities, or blunts negative effects of them _not_ having that help for the next ten years.
Sure, it's a bet you can make that you'll grow your money faster than it would have impact being put into the world --- but it's one that takes a certain amount of hubris.
Ad Hoc | Frontend, backend, infra / DevOps engineering | REMOTE (within USA) | Full-time | US Citizenship required Ad Hoc is trying to make federal government better by fixing its tech from the inside. We work on Healthcare.gov, VA.gov, and many other public web services, and focus on bringing product and technology best practices into government agencies. No defense or intelligence work, just civic services.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
Ad Hoc | Frontend, backend, infra / DevOps engineering | REMOTE (within USA) | Full-time | US Citizenship required
Ad Hoc is trying to make federal government better by fixing its tech from the inside. We work on Healthcare.gov, VA.gov, and many other public web services, and focus on bringing product and technology best practices into government agencies. No defense or intelligence work, just civic services.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
Yep, good guess, thanks for noticing. Added to the post.
Ad Hoc | Frontend, backend, infra / DevOps engineering | REMOTE (within USA) | Full-time | US Citizenship required
Ad Hoc is trying to make federal government better by fixing its tech from the inside. We work on Healthcare.gov, VA.gov, and many other public web services, and focus on bringing product and technology best practices into government agencies. No defense or intelligence work, just civic services.
We're a remote-first company, a culture fully on Slack, a bunch of civically-minded weirdos with a strong sense of work-life balance and coworkers scattered all over the country. We look for people who are open-minded, empathetic, think of the user first, and who genuinely want to improve government services for citizens. Come help us make that happen!
I'm the Engineering Director at Ad Hoc and happy to talk with anyone who wants to learn more about Ad Hoc or generally about doing modern tech in government. Feel free to reach out to me directly (email in profile), or apply at https://adhoc.team/join/. Let's chat!
I replied to your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975825 about that exact question!
One weird thing we've discovered working on VA.gov for the last five years is that we on the contractor side actually have retained a lot more institutional knowledge than the VA has. It's a problem! We think that knowledge should be on the government side, but the structure isn't there yet: USDS and 18F have rotational term limits that keep people moving through, and at the VA (not sure about other agencies) they're just in the last couple years building out an organization to do that long-term product ownership and institutional knowledge retention, even if implementation teams come through. It's moving in the right direction but it's slow, large-organization change, with a lot of extra slowness that's unique to government.
As others have mentioned already, 18F and USDS are in this space. They do some work, but their scope and manpower is limited, and they try to multiply their impact through contracting. Part of that is helping federal agencies write better contracts to be able to source the kind of contractors they want --- ones who think in terms of product development, user research ("build with, not for"), and are using modern software development practices. Bringing in contractors helps them multiply their impact, especially with how difficult hiring people into government is. (and a lot of people in tech simply didn't want to work directly under the Trump administration, which --- as liberal as the tech field tends to lean, seems to be a factor on hiring at 18F and USDS).
I work at one of the contractors in the space (Ad Hoc [1]) and get to work with people from USDS every day. Like others have commented here, the government salary ranges are a problem for them to hire enough. Our last COO had been an administrator at OPM, and would say things like "on the government side, I couldn't ever hire the kinds of software developers that we're able to here on the contractor side."
[1] https://adhoc.team/ -- we're hiring, full-time remote!
There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about.
I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
VA has attempted a lot of open-sourcing as well, including most of VA.gov [1], including the project management of it, mostly as an ideological stance from the VA product owners we work with.
Open-sourcing hasn't cultivated much in the way of public engagement with the projects, but it's done a lot in terms of making development easier for the range of contractors + VA employees we have, and (IMO) nudged toward better decision-making with the underlying knowledge that everything we do is publicly viewable.
Other federal agencies routinely come to VA asking to learn from their digital modernization efforts, and I suspect the open-source stance has been a big part of that.
(I also work at Ad Hoc. It's great!)
[1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-team..., repository links at the bottom
You're right that it's ambiguous with respect to gender, and that _is_ the point.
However, it's _also_ ambiguous with respect to quantity of people it refers to (singular or multiple), i.e. the "Sally and her friends" example. Does "they" refer to Sally, or the whole group? Having a a separate "singular-they" word available would disambiguate.
I work on a contract for the VA, which includes open-source repos [1] for VA.gov's frontend + backend systems. We work closely with USDS [2], who has been a huge ally in advocating for doing our work in the open, including our project management. It seems like GSA does a lot of similar advocacy work, though I haven't interfaced with them directly.
One interesting thing we've run across is that Public Domain source code is not considered "Open Source" in terms of OSI licensing [3]. This isn't usually relevant, but has blocked use cases like software services offering free use for OSI-licensed projects.
(To other readers: If you're interested in chatting about working on modern, open-source projects in the federal space, drop me a note! Email in profile).
[1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-team..., repository links at the bottom