kellishaver

Location: Morehead, KY

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Resume: https://kellishaver.com/resume.html

Email: kelli@kellishaver.com

Full-stack developer with 20 years professional experience building for the web, 11 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.

My specialty: helping media companies tackle the tough problems around processing, managing, publishing, and hosting tens of millions of images at scale.

Languages/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (including jQuery, React), PHP, SQL, Git, numerous AWS services, numerous web servers, linux.

SEEKING WORK

Location: Morehead, KY

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Resume: https://kellishaver.com/resume.html

Email: kelli@kellishaver.com

Full-stack developer with 20 years professional experience building for the web, 11 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.

My specialty: helping media companies tackle the tough problems around processing, managing, publishing, and hosting tens of millions of images at scale.

Languages/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (including jQuery, React), PHP, SQL, Git, numerous AWS services, numerous web servers, linux.

My husband and I have teamed up to teach our daughter (11) how to program, and while it may put us in the "bad parent" category in some people's eyes, learning to program is not optional. Fortunately, she seems to be interested and enjoying herself.

There are a whole host of valuable skills that learning to program teaches you; critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving and planning, organizational skills, collaborative skills, reading comprehension and writing skills (documentation).

These are all extremely important skills to have and they all seem to be severely lacking from her public school education, where the emphasis is on teaching to the test and following a less than ideal Common Core curriculum. Going to school isn't actually teaching her how to think to any serious degree.

It's teaching her how to intuit answers to standardized questions, certainly a useful skill to possess, but she also needs to be tackling problems too big to just "do" so that she can understand the thought processes and develop the methods to do complex thinking.

Actually being fluent in a programming language and writing a piece of software is something that I see as a sort of side effect; useful, certainly, but not the main goal.

Are there other ways to foster this sort of "big picture' thinking? Sure, but programming is what we know, so it's the vehicle we will use to teach her the skills we feel she needs to have, but isn't getting.

We took the kid out trick or treating and stopped for dinner on the way home. Then I again consoled said kid over the recent loss of her fish, when she came home to an empty tank and got sad (she was rather attached to that fish, "He was such a good listener."). Now I'm killing time waiting for a friend to get online so we can discuss some work stuff before going to bed.

Being legally blind, myself, I found a way to use my iPhone to help with my distance vision a while back. -- I point it at the thing I'm trying to see, zoom in, take a picture, hold said picture close to my face, and zoom in on the photo to see the thing I was after. This sometimes gets blurry, but is often still an improvement.

This was not at all what I was expecting from the title. I thought I was going to read an article about the importance of taking one day a week to not write any code. I'm sure that between startups, work, side projects, etc. some of us are coding every day on something or other.

As someone who often works alone, one of the best things I've done is to find someone else to share code, problems, and ideas with on a regular basis, even though we're not working on the same projects. It's helped me grow as a developer, has improved my mood, and has also just been an enjoyable.

But I still really do think it is important to make sure there's one day a week where you don't touch anything related to work or code.

126 - I have one eye, and pretty severe retina damage.... but I remember taking this before cataract surgery and getting a 1246. I'll take it.

I can't tell if you're being serious or not.....

Reddit discourages people who don't participate in the community from just posting links, to prevent spam. The more active you are, the more frequently you can submit things.

And a lot of people won't click links from new accounts, under the (usually correct) assumption that they're just spam.

There is a particular dislike for blog spam.

You can certainly become a new member of Reddit. It just takes some work at actually being a member, and not just self-promoting.

I cannot understand why it would slow you down, why do you think it might?

For me, I found the changing color to be too distracting. My eye was constantly being drawn away from the text I was reading to another color on a line below or above.

It may be worth noting that I only have one eye, and it's not a very good one - 20/100 visual acuity with about a 15deg. visual field.

I noticed a family in an airport a while ago --- the parents and the two children were all engrossed into their own mobile phones. I felt very sad and have since then trying to reduce my mobile phone consumption

You would have seen my family doing this a couple of weeks ago (well, except we have one kid). We were stuck there for 12hrs, and we were playing a game together, on our respective phones.

I get the sentiment, though, and I feel the same way about photography, which is why I don't often take pictures when we're doing family activities--I don't want to stop having fun with my family long enough to take them.

We're a lot alike in a many ways. My husband is also a developer (though more as a hobbyist the past few years - he also owns a local computer repair shop).

We both share a love of strategy gaming, we're both introverts, atheists, liberal. Neither of us are particularly outdoorsy or sporty. He's much better at math, and I'm much more expressive, artistically.

He plays more video games than I do and I watch more documentaries than he does. He's a bit of a dreamer. I'm a bit more pragmatic.

We both have a very similar sense of humor.

We both have our own particular hobbies/interests that the other doesn't share, though. Sometimes I think it would be nice if we did, but I think the differences are also probably very important and healthy, too.

I'm not sure this is specific to the tech industry. Right or wrong, I think that "be competent at [job] and pretty/sexy/funny/personable" pressure is something a lot of women feel in a lot of jobs. I think a lot of times, that pressure is more imagined, or self-inflicted, than real.

As a not particularly attractive, introvert, female developer who has been rather successful in my career, I don't feel like I've missed out on any opportunities because of those traits.... and if I have, they're probably people I wouldn't want to work with, anyway.

Same here. My original one had the screen lift issue, so I sent it back and got a replacement, but I haven't noticed a bit of slowness, deterioration, or any other hardware/software issues out of it. I've used it almost daily since the day it was released.

Five at the moment. The personal/side projects (2 of those 5) get worked on whenever I have the free time to. The others, I have dedicated days of the week that I work on and am available to work on them, e.g. one of them gets Mon./Tues., one gets Wed. and one gets Thurs./Fri.

That way I can dedicate enough large blocks of time to the projects to really get some good work done and my clients know exactly when to expect to be able to reach me and when to be getting updates from me.

Of course, every now and then emergencies or major deadlines happen, but for the most part, I try to set a schedule and stick to it.

I've been doing HTML/JavaScript with my 11yr old. We're pair programming a little offline web app she can put on her iPod touch.

No, it's not the point. Is the UI difficult for many people to see? Maybe, but unlike you, I don't hear Apple telling people who need to use their accessibility tools that they're "not good enough."

Thank you for classifying me as "not good enough."

I'm more productive at night. My office has good ambient lighting and I like to keep it between 72-74 degrees. In the summer, that usually means I'll keep a fan going, which provides some nice white noise, as well.

I develop on a 21.5in iMac, standard Apple keyboard (the one with the number pad, not the wireless one) and have both a magic mouse and a magic touchpad. I tend to use the mouse more. I only have the one display. I like the idea of two, but with only one eye, which, itself, has peripheral retina damage, the very narrow visual field means two monitors causes more neck and eye muscle strain than it's worth. My desk chair is a pretty beat up, inexpensive, generic office chair, but it's comfortable.

There's a couch in the office, good for sitting and reading, and a stationary bike, good for taking breaks and thinking sometimes.

If I'm not doing anything too mentally taxing, I will have music on - usually Pandora, so never quite know what to expect. Otherwise I prefer silence, or something like the fan running, or rain.simplynoise.com.

The office has to be kept super clean and organized, otherwise I have difficulty focusing and start to feel a bit cramped/crowded (it's a 14x16 room)..... a quality that does not carry over to the rest of my house, which is either a blessing or a curse..... not sure which.

I am occasionally accompanied by a cat that likes to sleep on my feet, or a hound who will make himself at home on the sofa.

14pt Deja Vu Sans Mono - I'm very nearsighted.

Wow, yeah, the memories. 2 Advanced was the coolest thing on the internet back in its day. There are all kinds of good reasons why it's a bad website, but it's still pretty nice eye candy.

I hadn't been to their site in years. It looks like they're still doing all Flash, but have moved more toward game development.

Yeah, I probably have about 10 years on "the guy," myself.

I guess it was the casual assumption that a man would be the one filling the position. In a lot of ways those unintentional biases are worse than intentional ones.

There was a post on HN jobs a little while back about a startup looking for a "front end guy" which reiterated several times throughout the post that they "need a guy" and if "you're the guy" to contact them.

The job sounded great otherwise, and was definitely one I would have been interested in, but I felt immediately disqualified and annoyed.

Normally these types of things don't bother me and I often think people read too much into things, but for some reason, that one did. Maybe it was the casual nature of the writing. It made it seem more personal, which, in turn, made it seem like the author was making it clear that they actually weren't interested in hiring women, that they legitimately felt as if a man was needed to fill the role properly, or that the idea of hiring a woman was so foreign to them that it hadn't even crossed their minds.

It was very off-putting.

Maybe it's the fact that I spent my youth growing up around HAM radio and then did several years of EMS dispatching, but I much prefer listening to the scanner than the news. It can be chaotic at times, garbled at others, but if you're used to sorting it out, it's the best way to get accurate information.

How many different times can someone re-skin Zombie Dice? The (huge) d12s would add a bit more variety, though.

Probably just a reference to the original source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keep-calm-and-carry-on

We bought one. I have mixed feelings about it. The new Wii U controller and the touch screen feels like more of a novelty than a useful/lasting gameplay dynamic. It kind of feels more distracting than immersive at this point.

Part of the reason for the slow sales may be that there are virtually no games out for it yet. There are several coming out starting in March, so it may be interesting to see what sales numbers are like, then.

Also Nintendo isn't launching with a new Legend of Zelda game to accompany the new console this time. I guess the Gamecube didn't have Windwaker until about a year later, but Ocarina of Time launched with the N64 and Twilight Princess with the Wii. The Zelda franchise alone seems to boost console sales a fair bit (which is pretty telling in its own right).

> Crerar said the family had not considered her Coke habit dangerous because the drink did not carry any health warnings.

What!? Are people really that dense? 2.2 gallons a day is, for the average person, a ridiculous amount of any beverage, even water. Assuming it's not diet Coke (which has its own set of problems) that's 1760kcal/day, 475g/day of sugar, on top of the 400mg/day of caffeine. It seems like a no-brainer that this would slowly kill you. It would just be a question of what got you first - the caffeine or the type II diabetes.

Oh, sorry. I can see how that was misinterpreted.

I don't mind that they have different opinions/views, I just meant that after reconnecting came the realization that we have virtually nothing in common anymore, so I didn't really derive any benefit out of it in the sense that it didn't really rekindle any old friendships.

Nothing wrong with that at all and I can respect that, our lives just went in different directions.

The only ones where I was really bothered/lost respect where the ones constantly posting the racist/hateful stuff, which certainly wasn't all of them, but a large enough portion that a combination of these two factors has just made the whole experience useless at best.

One at a time, and I have to set a very rigid schedule and stick to it, otherwise it ends up being too stressful. Sometimes the hardest part is stopping once I've worked the 2hrs I scheduled for Project X, when it's 10pm and there's nothing else going on, but too many nights of not stopping and I get tense and difficult to live with. Down time is important, too.

I think the list of things that can make a relationship fail is probably long and varied and very different from person to person, but I'll offer up my two cents.

One of the biggest challenges for me has been the ways in which my husband and I have both changed over the years, sometimes growing together and sometimes as individuals, both of which are healthy and normal, but navigating a relationship during those periods can be difficult. The dynamics, expectations, and what the other person can bring to the relationship are in flux during those times and may end up on something different than where you started. There are times when I've felt disconnected, held back, or left, behind, maybe even a little unloved or resented, and I know he's had times where he's felt the same way. Again, I think it's normal to have periods like that in any 17+yr relationship and we've weathered them well (in general) but I can understand how some people would not.

I think this is particularly true of people who enter into these relationships at a younger age. As much as I thought I did, I don't think I truly knew "who I was" until I was closer to 30 and had enough life experiences to really figure that out for myself.

Another factor I see often, though it isn't an issue for us, is that I see people relying too heavily on that one relationship or giving up other relationships for it. I know a lot of women who think that because they are married, they can't have male friends, or people who think they can't go out and enjoy an evening with friends unless their partner comes along. Sometimes these assumptions are wrong, sometimes they really would upset/anger the other party involved. This, to me is wrong. You don't build trust in a relationship by never extending it and you don't grow as a person if everything you do includes a plus one. You end up with an odd sort of co-dependence and isolation (the fact that I see this happen so often could be somewhat cultural due to the region of the country in which I live).

So for me, the two biggest realizations have been that:

1. I'm in this relationship because I want to be, not because I have to be and that I need to be happy with myself before I can expect someone else to be able to live with me happily. I need to be allowed to be my own person and explore that and my partner needs the same. We both need to be able to form meaningful friendships with other people on our own terms, not dictated by the other, but also remaining respectful of them. 2. Changes in the dynamics of a relationship over time are perfectly normal and healthy, even though they can, at times, be really hard. Maybe it's not what you thought it would be when you signed up for this, but it can still be pretty great, and 5, 10, 15+ years of shared history, experiences, love, and support is something worth sticking around for and working on.

As for whether or not I am fully satisfied with my current relationship, yes, I am, very much. I get a little annoyed sometimes at some of the sacrifices I feel I am making because of my husband's current situation (e.g. I really want to move to another part of the country, but it's not possible right now due to some commitments he has), but the relationship is completely worth it and isn't suffering because of it.

I really like Sequen Pro. I wish they'd start a Kickstarter or something to fund the development of a Postgres version.