martin

Skytap | Full-Time | REMOTE (US/Canada) | Mid/Senior Full Stack Engineer (Ruby/Rails/JS/React)

Skytap, a cloud infrastructure startup based in Seattle, seeks a talented, mid-level or senior Rubyist for a full-time, remote opportunity as a Rails / full-stack engineer, anywhere in the US or Canada.

I’m the hiring manager for this position. My team of 5 (including this new opening) manages a product of our own that sits atop Skytap’s cloud platform and helps to drive one of the most important segments of Skytap’s business. We work closely together, wear lots of hats, operate with a high degree of autonomy, and are generally pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. :)

More info: https://jobs.lever.co/skytap/0d7943d0-a111-4ac5-a907-5fe0704...

Don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or would like to chat: my HN username at skytap.com.

Yep, I've had it for about 2 years. Biggest complaints are that the buttons are on top and easy to press by accident (although there's a lock button on the side), and the lowest setting isn't low enough for me (5'8"). All that said, I think it's great for the price. I'm thinking about upgrading to a big ol' Uplift Desk because I want to get an under-desk treadmill with enough room for a chair next to it.

If you wanted mobility around the house while avoiding WAN latency and reliability issues, you could buy a server and keep it in your house, rather than renting it and accessing remotely. Then get the Air and use that to RDP, SSH, etc. to the server.

I've heard this many times, but interestingly TurboTax says it's not true.

http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Small-Business...

People who have equity in their homes don't typically foreclose, and owners in NYC typically still do. Two reasons for that. First, property values in NYC haven't dropped as much as in other areas. Second, co-ops constitute a very large percentage of the purchasable housing in Manhattan (and in some of the outer boroughs as well). Nearly all co-ops subject you to a very invasive board approval process where you need to reveal everything there is to know about your income and assets. They want to know that you're making more than enough money to meet your expenses and that you have sufficient reserves to cover yourself through any period of hardship. Co-ops also usually require a sizable down payment (almost always at least 20%, sometimes even 100%). If you seem risky, you don't get in. So there's definitely less of an opportunity for shenanigans with exotic mortgage products and the like than in other cities.

Also, the fact that they (okay, we) are concentrated in large cities like New York where wages for professional jobs are above national averages could drive the numbers up.

I was looking into this a while back, and I'm curious: does anybody know whether it's even possible to develop a sophisticated add-in for Mac Office? MS added VBA support back to Mac Office 2011, but VBA can only do so much. On Windows, sophisticated Office plug-ins are typically COM add-ins, which can be implemented in C++ or .NET and thus can pretty much do anything you want. Those are obviously not cross-platform, though. I believe Mac Office also supports AppleScript, but it's not clear to me whether that's any more powerful than VBA.

Really? Since when?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript)

http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"

I'm not saying that simultaneous voice/data isn't useful. I'm saying that decent network coverage is more useful.

I'm pretty underwhelmed by that argument, given that my iPhone 3G on AT&T's network in NYC can barely do voice OR data, let alone both at the same time.

You just blew my mind. Thanks!

* Dual-monitor remote desktop! Please??!!

* What are you guys doing with Windows Installer (MSI)? You create this installation standard which everyone adopts, then you stop supporting it yourself, making people install Office 2007 and Silverlight with BS desktop startup scripts. WTF?

* As alluded to by others here, stop making stupid UI changes for no reason. I've been using Windows since 1992, upgraded to Win7 a couple months ago, and STILL can't find anything. I'm in support, and it's basically impossible to lead a user through anything over the phone anymore, because (for example) getting to the screen where you uninstall a program looks different on almost every Windows version I support, often with multiple variations per OS.

* The .NET runtime gets corrupted ALL THE TIME for our users. This is at least partially because you release patches that fail to rollback upon unsucessful install (see http://blog.usabilitythinking.com/2010/06/root-cause-for-cor...). This was enough of a problem before you started bundling .NET with Windows so that now I can't even have a user uninstall/reinstall it without really messing with his OS.

* This may make me sound silly, but I miss VB6 -- not the language itself, but rather the ease with which you could easily throw together an executable and send it to a user and have it just work. Now, I have to build a whole installer unless I want to have issues with missing .NET versions or weird .NET security issues.

I worked in IT at GS for a couple years. 15-20% was about right for bonuses there, on average. In 2006, I got almost a 50% bonus, but that was an exceptionally good year.

Something like this is required as part of the recently enacted CARD act (in the US):

"Credit card issuers must disclose to cardholders the consequences of making only minimum payments each month, namely how long it would take to pay off the entire balance if users only made the minimum monthly payment. Issuers must also provide information on how much users must pay each month if they want to pay off their balances in 36 months, including the amount of interest." (http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/help/what-the-ne...)

This is a question that interests me as a Varnish user with a several-hundred-line VCL. We exclude certain URLs from caching altogether, drop certain cookies but not others, drop certain querystring params but not others, cache separate versions of the same page for mobile and non-mobile browsers, do limited caching behind basic auth, purge certain pages from cache when a post gets published, etc. VCL isn't the most elegant thing there is, but there's usually a way to do whatever I need. I don't know that Nginx isn't capable of just as much flexibility, but all the HOWTOs I've found are pretty simplistic and I haven't found the docs to be that helpful. If anybody has resources or experience to share regarding complex Nginx caching setups, I'd love to know about it.

Moving from car ownership to Zipcar does introduce other burdens, though, especially around scheduling. You have to make a reservation in advance -- in my neighborhood, a couple days in advance for peak times -- and you can't cancel beyond a certain time. You have to know exactly how long you'll be and your plans can't really change, and if you get stuck in traffic, you get to pay an extra $50 for being 5 minutes late. It's a great service for what it is, but it's not for everybody.

Also, people don't usually sell their house and buy a similar one in the same place -- they either upgrade or downgrade, or move to a different neighborhood or city, and in either case, the prices are likely not to have moved in the same direction at the same pace. In my neighborhood, 1-BR coops have dropped in price more quickly than 2-BRs, for example.

27" i7 iMac with 8GB RAM, attached to a 30" Dell display (3007WFP). I switched about a month ago from a MacBook Pro (attached to the same Dell display), and it's phenomenal. It's the first setup I've ever had that actually feels fast enough to run everything I need (iTunes, Word, Excel, and Windows running in VirtualBox, along with a few instances each of iTerm, Chrome and Textmate) without skipping a beat.

That's not necessarily true, because the RS Cloud rates don't include any bandwidth while the Slicehost rates do. Depending on your usage, Slicehost can be cheaper.

Yeah, a lot of companies do this. As somebody who went to a mediocre state school, I obviously don't care for this practice, but as somebody who does hiring, I understand. In addition to advertising our positions at good schools, I always post them at my alma mater as well (somehow I feel bad if I don't), and it's just depressing. Resumes I get from my school are routinely littered with embarrassing errors (how do you misspell the name of the college you're currently attending, anyway?) and are consistently weak on experience compared to their peers at the better-known institutions.

In general, restricting your candidate pool based on where they want to school probably really improves the signal-to-noise ratio. And since recruiting is a numbers game anyway, with dozens or hundreds of applicants applying to each position, it's not exactly an illogical thing to do.

I was on site at one of my clients, a top investment bank, and was surprised to see the guy I was visiting was using Google Apps for his work email. Turns out they were piloting it as a potential replacement for Lotus Notes (yikes). I don't think they actually decided to go with it, but the fact that a big firm would even consider a hosted solution for something like email -- especially in the financial sector, where there's constant obsession over security and regulatory compliance -- rocked my world a bit.

I live in Queens, NY and the B&N in my neighborhood has basically zero seating. It's actually the only B&N store I've ever seen like that, and I emailed them to ask why. The response:

"As our stores and selections have expanded over the years, we have had to reduce the seating in some locations to make room for additional inventory. However, I have shared your feedback regarding our Forest Hills store with the appropriate department who will certainly keep your feedback in mind."

I don't know about this person's specific situation, but state laws do make a difference. In some states, the high-deductible coverage can be obtained by a single 20-something for $60ish a month. Here in NY, we have this goofy community rating law, where premiums on individual insurance plans can't be affected by your age. So there is no individual insurance option, even for 20-somethings and even with a high-deductible, that doesn't cost at least a few hundred dollars a month. Do a few searches on eHealthInsurance.com and you'll see what I mean.

DabbleDB is one of those products that I will probably never get to use despite being potentially very useful. Why? Because my company won't let me store proprietary information on somebody else's servers.

If you continue with this project, I would encourage you to consider letting people license the software to run on their company intranets. I know a lot of companies don't want to bother with installation support and such, but to me this seems like a pretty obvious market -- there are countless CRUD apps I could really use at work but just haven't had the time to build from scratch, and if DabbleDB had a not-outrageously-priced intranet solution, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Eh, it doesn't really work. I was looking for a book recently, and the B&N web site said that 4 stores nearby had it. I called to confirm, and it turned out only one of them did.

If all you want to do is attach a header and footer to an otherwise static HTML page, why not just use SSI? http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html

For any This American Life fans here, there's a great episode about these guys: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=3...

You might be surprised. Keep in mind that developing for IE6 isn't necessarily difficult if you don't care about standards compliance or cross-browser compatibility. In a corporate environment where IT is a cost center, it's often acceptable to support only a single browser company-wide if it means saving money.

Also, a lot of corporate IT shops are not doing anything particularly interesting technology-wise, and have already built IE6-compatible frameworks that make most of the front-end web development they need to do easy enough. On the other hand, upgrading to IE7 would mean exhaustive testing of all existing applications, and the support of "the business" to expend resources on the project. It's much easier to do nothing for as long as possible.

Just to add another data point - I work for a SaaS company serving the financial industry, and 25% of our user base is still on IE6. (We still have major clients running Windows 2000 too, but that's another story.)

I stopped reading at the point he described the existing solution as "a custom blend of C# and .NET programs." He obviously doesn't have a clue about the platform he's bashing.

I've hired a couple of people recently, and personally I use cover letters to see how people write.

Not every hiring manager cares about this, but I will not hire somebody who can't write half a page of text without making egregious spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. I've seen cover letters that, when opened in Word, become a sea of red and green squiggles. It demonstrates a total lack of attention to detail, among other unflattering characteristics.

Sadly, I rule out a LOT of applicants this way.