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jmandzik

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Owner at https://azath.dev. Formerly principal engineer @PayScale, @ScienceLogic, @Charter

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Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny.

Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.

The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.

This article is fantastic, juicy stuff to wrap my head around.

Anytime I whip up a new visualization in d3, I look like a wizard at the office. Thanks Mike! Owe you a beer if you're ever in DC.

Many "boring old companies", well, aren't. I work in Cable and could have written the same job post (subbing Ember for AngularJS in our case). In a culture where results count, and fast results count more, you may be surprised where you can look for jobs.

Edit: It's actually remarkable how close my tech stack lines up. CodeIgniter (php), node.js, JRuby, AngularJS, socket.io, d3 & highcharts, memcached (reddis soon, I think). It's a good time to be a polyglot in the enterprise space.

For what its worth I think you're creating a false dichotomy here. I literally studied Econ in undergrad and quickly landed at a telco as a dev. My 'on the side' self education of programming landed me a software engineer role because the analytics that came with my non-traditional developer skills made for good problem solving cred. 8 years later, I'm wearing architecture/analysis/developer hats on a daily basis with a senior title.

The point is this comment serves as a microcosm of this thread; a faceoff between stereotypes of a boring, big company with benefits and sexy startup with lottery ticket potential. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. There really is work, even outside of the Valley, that solves real (fun!) problems with real compensation. To assume only two paths to whatever personal definition of success in this field is limiting your options.

Somewhere, deep within Wells Fargo HQ, there was a depressed developer in a windowless office that died a little inside when asked to make this.

Sublime Text 3 Beta 13 years ago

I just tried it out on my client and server side JS projects. Cmd+Shift+R and type the name of your favorite function. Its pretty damn fast.

I was inspired by this post when I first read it a few month ago. Since then, I've used a modified version of StatsD to send data to an in house realtime graphing engine. A lot of our tools are php backends, so it was super convenient to be able to drop the class in and start measuring things.

For anyone interested, I used wrote node.js process takes arbitrary statsd-compliant data point and serves a socket.io enabled front-end for 'zero-config', realtime graphing.

We've found it useful internally for taking quick measurements on various projects. I was going to productize or open source the whole thing, but then life got in the way. Maybe it will see the light of day someday.

I think a large part of the strong finish is a feedback loop. As it gets closer to achieving the goal, the belief that this concept could take off strengthens, which leads to more signups.

That and the press blitz, of course.