HN user

jackkinsella

494 karma

Freelance programmer. Been in the industry since 2009. I live in Berlin and also enjoy writing music.

I like hearing from people so get in touch. :-)

Twitter: @jackkinsella

Posts48
Comments81
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www.semicolonandsons.com 1mo ago

Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons

jackkinsella
4pts0
www.semicolonandsons.com 7mo ago

A development tool I cannot live without: bin/merge_master_into_all_git_branches

jackkinsella
1pts2
www.semicolonandsons.com 7mo ago

How to Build an LLM-Powered Database Query Bot for Your Web App in 1 Day

jackkinsella
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: How would you go about selling a website in 2022?(Legal Education Space)

jackkinsella
2pts1
slavenbacic.dev 4y ago

4 things I wish more designers knew

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.youtube.com 5y ago

The No-Framework Framework: JavaScript Without React [video]

jackkinsella
2pts0
ec.europa.eu 5y ago

Contract between European Commission and AstraZeneca [pdf]

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.youtube.com 6y ago

SEO Strategies for Web Apps [video]

jackkinsella
2pts0
frontstuff.io 6y ago

In Defense of Utility-First CSS (2018)

jackkinsella
92pts62
towardsdatascience.com 7y ago

What Is Data Science Bootcamp Like?

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.michaelnielsen.org 7y ago

Why Bloom filters work the way they do

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.gregegan.net 7y ago

Orphanogenesis by Greg Egan

jackkinsella
1pts0
what-problem-does-it-solve.com 7y ago

Webpack from Nothing: WTF is a webpack?

jackkinsella
1pts0
blog.bitmex.com 8y ago

BitMEX Technology Scaling: Part 1

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.jackkinsella.ie 9y ago

How Online Payments Providers Screw You

jackkinsella
1pts0
blog.kissmetrics.com 9y ago

The 7 Epiphanies Needed to Intuitively Grasp Statistical Significance

jackkinsella
2pts0
www.jackkinsella.ie 9y ago

A Lasting Marriage: Lessons Learned After 7 Years With Google Analytics

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.jackkinsella.ie 9y ago

Website Copywriting Guide for Those Who Don't Know What to Say

jackkinsella
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Show HN: Giving Away Review Copies of a Primer on Online Marketing for Web Devs

jackkinsella
8pts0
www.eventbrite.de 9y ago

Berlin.AI Summit Coming Up Thursday

jackkinsella
3pts1
www.quora.com 9y ago

Quora: What Should Programmers Know About Marketing

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.jackkinsella.ie 9y ago

Show HN: My Book on SEO, Paid Advertising, and Conversion Optimisation

jackkinsella
5pts2
medium.com 10y ago

How to start a company in Berlin – A (sort of) quick and dirty Guide to the GmbH

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.theguardian.com 10y ago

JustCloud.com – The no-backup backup service I trusted with my valuable files

jackkinsella
3pts0
www.oxbridgenotes.com 10y ago

CSS Refactoring: From one big fugly append-only CSS file to modular bliss

jackkinsella
3pts0
georgemdallas.wordpress.com 11y ago

The Story of Computer Vision

jackkinsella
11pts0
www.youtube.com 11y ago

Alan Kay: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we just make it “Complicated”?

jackkinsella
3pts0
www.tonymarston.net 11y ago

Dependency Injection Is Evil (2011)

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.oxbridgenotes.com 11y ago

40 page guide to modern autodidactism

jackkinsella
1pts0
www.mhpbooks.com 12y ago

France pass "Anti-Amazon-Law", making free shipping illegal

jackkinsella
2pts0

I love Gemini for general knowledge and think it far outperforms Claude for research, but personally I cannot use Gemini for programming due to: 1. it taking so long 2. it not giving any information about its thought process / what it's doing "in its head", whereas Claude code tells you what it's thinking and allows you to interrupt.

So for now, I would personally recommend dropping Gemini for the actual implementation of programming or anything involving analysis of your codebase.

I don't doubt that Google has smart people on this, and that this may improve in a few months' time.

Probably a memory leak

But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)

SEEKING FREELANCER | MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week ongoing contract

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

In Germany, it used to the case that renters would be forced to pay the broker fee. At this point, it was typically three month's rent. But the government created a law Bestellerprinzip (Orderer principle) that made it a requirement that the person who initiated the contract with the broker (nearly always the landlord) must also pay the fee.

The fee magically dropped to one month's rent and less since that point; now that the less desperate party had to foot the bill, they were unwilling to tolerate the high prices.

NYC needs the same legislation.

The value of SRS goes way beyond memorization. When applied seriously to a field like programming, it enables you to think about the program-design space in a more abstract manner and quickly call to mind and evaluate possibilities. Look up "chunking" as it relates to performance (e.g. in chess).

I've written (and, more recently, made a video) about my 10 years of experience using SRS (via the free tool, Anki) to boost my IT skills.

https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method

Also learning the uke. I wonder what hacks you've figured out? My first insight was:

- it's easiest to remember chords when you think of them as fundamental ur-shapes with the "bar" shifted up (sometimes requiring additional fingers)

After falling in love with the Destroy All Software style of genuinely advanced, all-encompassing programming screencasts, I started a YouTube channel with my own twist on the theme: Screencasts situated inside a decade-old, profitable, production web app, ones that emphasize actual workflow.

I've been an indie-hacker for 10 years so have seen the effects of my programming decisions over the same period. I've seen how fads come and go, sometimes wreaking havoc. I've also seen how coding decisions affect business (such as strategies to transform data into seo at scales of 10k+ items). I've seen how to keep something running day-and-night as if your livelihood depended on it - since it very much does.

That's the game plan anyway. I'm five episodes in: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

For fun I took up the tenor ukulele. Compared to any other instrument I've tried, it's got a much kinder learning curve. You can sound alright playing four-chord rock and pop songs in easier keys like C major after a month.

As with any good habit, it's important to reduce resistance. If you want to eat healthy, have juicy apples at hand in the fridge.

I made a conscious decision to start installing all my dependencies into a folder within my project source-code so that I can painlessly jump to the dependency's source and read it. (E.g. in the Ruby world, this means installing to "./vendor" in your project).

The effect of doing this is that it's easier for me to read the source code of a library than it is for me to leave Vim and look up the docs online. Voilà, now I'm reading more source.

This is something I struggled with for longer than I should have. For me, the turning point was just diving in and practicing playing along with real songs every day until the patterns became clearer. No matter who uncomfortable and hopeless it felt at first.

I recommend going to HookTheory and working your way through every song you're familiar with in the "beginner" section. These songs tend to stick to the big four chords (I IV V vi) and once you nail them, you're half-way there for most pop and rock. https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/difficulties/beginner

You'll make more progress doing that for an hour a day over a month than you will in five years of theory.

I found your idea of recording the screen during work very clever and I plan to replicate.

Some things that have worked for me:

— learning to type programming symbols accurately and with confidence. I realized when pair-programming that I lose a ton of time to backtracking due to typos. This is particularly bad when working in interactive code consoles where the poor editing capabilities mean typos are more costly. There are web applications out there like typing.io that help with this.

— keeping a "dumb mistake log" where I write up any silly errors that cost me too much time so I'll know to double check these things next time (e.g. "space instead of tab in Makefile > make tabs appear differently", "wrong file but with same name > keep an eye on the folder in the editor when switching files")

You'll never learn it all—none of us do. But there are employers out there who are willing to give you a chance to learn on the job, so long as you've nailed the core ideas. I consult in web development, mainly using Ruby and JS, but some clients are happy to hire me in PHP despite my having no experience here. Their assumption—and I think it's a reasonable one—is that my 10yr's experience with web patterns will largely carry over.

I use arq for automatic daily backups to s3 as well as Time Machine once a month to an external HD for an extra layer of redundancy. But more importantly than that, I have a checklist for testing that my backups actually work and that I won't somehow end up locked out of a server etc.

I often find in these discussions that Americans look with undue admiration over to Europe and imagine that the same stuff doesn't happen here.

But it does.

I recently got my wisdom teeth pulled out in Germany, and without my asking, the doctor sent me a pack of 12 Ibuprofen and billed me 24 euro, i.e. €2/pill. I didn't want them because I had 500 of the same at home, which I bought for 25 euro — i.e. €0.05/pill. That's a markup of 40x.

It's comments like this that keep me coming back to Hacker News. I sometimes find myself in political discussions with people and feel that they aren't playing fair for whatever reason (fair in the sense of good natured truth-seeking). Your counter-example is the perfect, non-snarky retort.

[dead] 9 years ago

Made some changes – should have a larger font on iPhone and (hopefully) be reader mode compatible?