mejarc

One aspect of the 2020 COVID lockdown I found distressing was the complete shutdown of my usual spin classes.

Most of us regulars were on a first-name basis, but did not meet outside the gym: it sufficed to see each other at class. This casual sociability didn't return when the gym restarted the classes. The new attendees aren't as friendly with each other.

The 1991 film _Danzon_ has a poignant narrative about trying to find an acquaintance who has vanished.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danz%C3%B3n_(film)

The worst, most bad-faith case I've seen of "advertising" an H1B job was of the job posting printed out, taped to the back of an interior office door, and covered by the recruiter's hanging overcoat.

Location: Oakland, CA, USA (San Francisco Bay Area)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: to Prescott, AZ (my hometown)

Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Node.js, React, Express, MySQL, MongoDB. Adequate in C/C++

Résumé/CV: http://linkedin.com/in/mejarc

About me: I am a web developer now enlarging my skills beyond the front end. I graduate with a B.S., Computer Science in September 2024. I've worked remotely on successful projects with aggressive deadlines for over twenty years. My experience includes working with startups, the public sector, medium-sized companies, and large multinational corporations.

I'm a considerate, reliable, valued co-worker to Design, Product, and QA. I'm often the one to initiate documentation and code quality standards. I am well suited to teams that emphasize user research and testing with prototypes. I am open to both contract and full-time roles.

Email: please send me a message through LinkedIn

Yes. Here in the western U.S., some public lands near populated areas close during the summer, because of extreme fire danger. Having larger crowds camping in the woods raises the danger for everyone, even with the supervision of the forest service. It'd be insanity to ignore trespassers on private lands in summer.

My courthouse wedding over 20 years ago cost $75, had no showers, no attendants, no reception, and was memorialized only by a snapshot taken by one of the affable court clerks. I've never regretted it. The only way my spouse and I pulled it off was to keep our plans secret from our families. My mother-in-law resents me for that to this day.

Loved his metaphors of the extravagant promises of beginner dance workshops. I had similar realizations when involved in Argentine tango in the late Nineties. There's similarity to the coding bootcamp phenomenon--the workshops generate graduates with overblown ideas of their competence, and the locals retreat from engaging with them, but the workshops can't profit by teaching slow, gradual improvement of a subtle art form over many years of practice.

I was invited to answer one of these, at a company with truly the most hateful manager I've ever had. Oh, was I ever ready to offer my jaundiced, embittered opinion...until the survey required I log in with my company email address.

Yes, there was the usual verbiage about anonymizing, blah, blah, but I lost all confidence that my response wouldn't be tracked to me. I never returned the survey.

I still haven't determined whether this was by incompetent or malicious design.

Gawd, that Volkswagen aroma. I'm sure there's a German word for it.

"[Jackie Opel] joined forces with the Troubadours, the house band of the Clyde B Jones funeral parlour." There's potential for at least one more newspaper feature, or streaming series, with this backstory.

I doubt any company, especially in SV, takes a PR hit from age discrimination, which seems to be widely accepted and barely punished. Google just wants to swat away the plaintiffs like annoying gnats.

Location: US Pacific time zone

Remote: Yes. Required.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: HTML/CSS, JS, Grunt/Gulp, React, Rails, Sec. 508/WCAG, design systems

Résumé/CV: linkedin.com/in/mejarc

Email: mejarc [at] gmail

Front end developer with deep experience working alongside application engineers and interactive designers to bring their visions to Web applications. Most productive in product development teams with dedicated back- and front end engineers. Tends to leave behind improved documentation and more efficient process. Project/contract work welcome.

The setting: a mandatory, in-person all-hands meeting at a medium-sized enterprise software company in SV.

The time: a few weeks before the winter holidays, mid-2000s.

What we expected: to hear about our company's IPO or beneficial acquisition.

What we got: orders to design and construct crazy! wacky!! zany!!! miniature golf obstacles in the office for the CxOs to play through.

I doubt the (unquantified) morale at this company improved.

So much of this account resonates with my experience as a UX ("X!" Must be technical!) developer in the Bay Area. I love this line particularly: "A film of pseudoscience sticks to everything we touch."

Until 1940 or so, the United States was relatively friendly to non-car transport--just look at the older sections of most towns and cities.

I love this project, but I detest control-top garments—if you branch into stockings or hold-ups, I promise to invest in some!

I noticed this when I visited Boston for the first time, after several years of living in SF. I was walking down a street--and I was delighted to keep walking, unmolested by oblivious motorists zooming out of driveways and garages. Too bad WalkScore doesn't consider this experience for its assessments.

Would like to hear more about any software safety course, beta or not.

There's a moving photo essay in _Harper's_ magazine this month about a sanctuary for wolf-dog hybrids. A lot of animals end up discarded because they're expected to be "doggy."

I don't see an obvious way to access the non-book content. The "Read|Watch..." navigation only goes to /about.

Yes, absolutely. Maybe if ads were less obtrusive (not animated, didn't strobe, didn't take up > 5% of the screen on mobile) I'd keep them enabled.

I'd lov this arrangement if it were the reverse of how I've seen it implemented.

The meeting/private rooms should be in the center, away from the scarce windows, and the more frequently used common space should have the privilege of natural lighting. Too many conference rooms are allowed to hog the view.

In my seventeen years living in Oakland, I've grown exasperated with the Sixties-leftover, anti-cop rhetoric that has left us with a disproportionately small police force. We voted in a measure to hire more officers, but lose some every year to retirement and attrition.

I really doubt mere straight employment would turn around the robbing creeps who gang up (usually three to a car--one to drive, the others to mug) on their victims. Thousands of other Oaklanders contend with desperate poverty without resorting to felonies. Until we have a fully staffed police force, though, we're all on our own.

You can fork the repo to make your own.

One thing I liked about my time as "dog-collar labor" is that all my co-workers had interesting non-work pursuits, and there was no penalty for leaving work behind to engage in them. None of us mistook our stints as cashiers, food servers, or book store clerks for our passions, nor did our employers.

There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.

Having literally bruised my fingers trying to appease a visual designer who wanted browser rendering to look exactly like Photoshop (for instance, the CSS-drawn gradients didn't meet her approval, so we had to lard the interface with background graphics), I'm now in the "Put designers in straitjackets until they learn the fundamentals of modern Web application design" camp.

It's the year 2013, and your competition is using frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation to release something while your dev team is fussing over bespoke line-heights specified in points. Maybe your app looks better, but how many users are waiting for that placed-just-so button image to download?

So that's why my rent here in the SF Bay Area is decreasing! (Not).

I admit it was kind of nice after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the dot-com bust in 2001 to have some breathing room. Alarms about hordes leaving California have the opposite effect on me, as I look forward to uncrowded hiking trails and affordable real estate.