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midnightmonster

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Lead Developer, Johnson Law Group

  email: [
    "joshua@l_tt_rblock.com".replace(/_/g,'e'),
    "jpai_e@joh_so_lawgroup.com".replace(/_/g,'n')
  ],
  url: "https://joshuapaine.com"
Longtime JS hacker, loving Svelte, expert with Ruby & Rails 2.x-7.

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Interests: Art, Books, Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Freelancing, Open Source, Philosophy, Programming, Remote Work, Running, Startups, UI/UX Design, Web Development, Writing

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The law firm I work for (as lead software engineer) did the TN thing for a Canadian software engineer hire for my team last year. [I was not involved in the paperwork but] my understanding is we got an immigration lawyer to help us write everything the right way, since we had not done it before (and lawyers specialize), and it was not especially expensive and it all worked out quite quickly.

Johnson Law Group | REMOTE | Full-time | Multiple Roles | $75k-$195k | Benefits

We're working with Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Tailwind CSS, Hotwire, Svelte, Heroku, and Salesforce developing new [almost] green-field apps to make the litigation process smoother for people injured by big companies. Very small team.

Full-stack Ruby on Rails Developer

    - Need to care about UX and be comfortable with front-end
    - Junior, Mid-level, Senior all ok: just need to be sharp and engaged
    - Outside US ok too, need some Pacific-and-Eastern working hours overlap
UX-minded JavaScript/TypeScript Developer (maybe)
    - Probably need backend experience of some kind, too, and an interest in Ruby/Rails
    - Junior, Mid-level, Senior—just need to be sharp and engaged
    - Outside US ok too, need some Pacific-and-Eastern working hours overlap
https://ruby.social/@midnightmonster/112553217164107546

This might just be the sort of people and companies I hang out with, but at my last gig two of the other three developers on my team had failed startup founder in their career history. Ditto the product manager at my current role and some chunk of my local tech friends. Job market is always changing, but it hasn't been an obstacle for people I know, and when hiring I see it as something to talk about but not likely to be a problem.

Background: I have only worked on small teams, usually in small companies. I have done hiring and firing and had one newly-hired employee dealing with burnout and others with other mental health issues.

I'm assuming the boss/company cannot afford to keep you on indefinitely if you're not productive. As a manager, how I react to you bringing some version of this to me honestly depends a lot on how promising I thought you were and how well you seem to be doing so far.

If you're doing really well and I had no idea you were feeling burnt out until you told me, I want to find ways to accommodate within whatever my constraints are and help you get on your feet. Likewise if your work quality and productivity varies a lot with some excellent and some disappointing, though it's critical that some be excellent, or at least excellent-given-your-level-and-how-long-you've-been-here.

If you haven't given me much reason to believe you're going to be a great asset to the team eventually, I'm sympathetic but it's going to seem like a bad business decision to pay you while you drag down the perceived 'bar' of productivity.

I don't think I'm (very?) autistic. Still, I share all 4 points of experience with OP, most frequently with one person with whom I've worked off and on for 15 years. We've grown over the years and learned to some extent to accommodate each other's way of thinking and communicating.

As I wrote in another comment, I think it's very helpful to notice the mismatch between how I understand myself and how others perceive me. It's also worthwhile to find ways to bridge the gap. E.g., in the "rewrite the checkout in React?" scenario, OP might be perceived as more open to the question if they offered, "That's not a small project, but we could definitely do it" before asking questions or if they started with an open question like "What might motivate us to rewrite the checkout in React?" instead of a closed (yes/no) question.

Learning to speak in a way that helps people understand your intentions doesn't require compromising your truth-seeking values: it lets you enjoy the journey more with more companions.

When you notice your self-perception is out of alignment with how other people perceive you, especially on an axis you value (e.g., intellectual humility in the author's case), I think that's a great occasion to spend some time analyzing how much truth there is to each perception.

If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.

The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.

If you had a friend who frequently spends their own money and time to help other people, those other people take credit for their work, they don't get paid, and they feel guilty if they ever resist doing these things, but they don't feel good about how they spend their time and they're feeling used--

- do you think your friend is obligated to keep acting this way?

- what beliefs would you guess your friend has that guide their behavior?

- what beliefs would you encourage them to adopt instead?

Track1099 by Avalara | Ruby on Rails Developer; Senior Ruby on Rails Developer | REMOTE | Full-time | https://track1099.com

Track1099 makes it easy to e-file and e-deliver ~40 different informational tax forms, including the ubiquitous 1099-NEC (for payments to contractors) and 1099-MISC (for all sorts of things) and the increasingly-widespread 1099-K (sent by marketplaces and payment processors to their merchants). We opened for business way back in 2011, and the business has grown considerably every year since then.

We're a small team (3 engineers, ~6 total people) acquired last year into a very large organization, and to a surprising extent it's the best of both worlds.

We have kept our server-side up to date, currently running Rails 7 and Postgres 14. On the front end we have emphasized stability and our progressive investment in dozens of large, complex forms--it's traditional ERB with Backbone.js forms and a couple SPA-style islands. We expect to (finally) start upgrading to Hotwire or React islands soon. Probably will never go full SPA.

If you like having an office, Avalara headquarters are in Seattle, WA and we have 20 other offices around the world. (https://www.avalara.com/us/en/about/locations.html)

Ruby on Rails Developer https://app.jobvite.com/j/?cj=ou9Ehfwi

Senior Ruby on Rails Developer https://app.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oJcEhfwA

Sounds like temporary appeasement.

~6 years ago I switched from full time remote freelancing/consulting to full time at a local startup with just a handful of employees and 1 day/week in-person.

Then 1 day became 2. Then we got a real office and 2 became 3 with a worse commute. Then 3 became, unofficially, if you want to be taken seriously, you should come in every day, or at least 4 days/week. You could still leave early on Fridays! I stayed at 3 days/week until I found a new, fully-remote employer.

As soon as I get up, put in airpods and listen to Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours: Morning Prayer and Office of Readings (Scripture-based prayers on a 4-week cycle, Scripture and spiritual reading on a 1-year cycle). That continues while I stretch/move/do a tiny workout, pause for shower, turn it back on while shaving and making coffee.

Then, ideally, I spend 30-60 minutes in personal prayer, usually in the form of journaling, and sometimes study of scripture and/or spiritual books. I have given this short/no shrift most days the last couple weeks and I’m missing the intimacy with God that I have when I do it more consistently. It’s like when my wife and I get over-busy with work: we still see each other, exchange enough words to coordinate schedules and household matters, still love each other of course, but we’re not as close and I miss her. Same with Jesus right now. He’s still caring for me and I’m still trying to follow him, but I’m missing out on that warm connection.

Five minutes before the hour every waking hour, a notification pops up on my watch with a prayer to draw closer and dedicate the next hour to God. I change the text of it periodically to reflect what God is teaching me currently and to keep it from becoming too routine for me.

Whenever I’m stuck or frustrated or sad, I try to (1) notice it and (2) talk about it with Jesus. There’s not a scheduled time for this, but it probably comes up at least daily.

Wherever I am, whomever I’m with, the closer I am with God, the more automatically I notice how beautiful the sky is, or how lovely it is that people have developed the craft of making a beautiful tabletop like the one I’m typing on, or how happy it is that other people are happy. E.g., I find noise very unpleasant, but the other day a very loud car with temporary tags drove by, and I gladly shifted from annoyance to being happy that the driver was able to afford transportation (if the engine noise was incidental) or that the driver got to enjoy their very impressively loud engine (if the noise was something they had sought on purpose). Then the noticing and the joy bring me back to gratitude to God, which draws me closer to God and reinforces the joy, etc..

So the joy God has in creation becomes, in tiny part, my joy, and the love of Jesus begins to become love I have for others. I’ve been a practicing Christian my whole life, and generally tried to do what I thought I ought to, but this growing intimacy with God is a new development for me since August this year. I find myself approaching interactions with others not to get them over as quickly as possible or say the appropriate things or to demonstrate my cleverness but with love for the person, gladness that they exist, and curiosity how I might be able to bring them some bit of love/happiness/blessing in the conversation.

Why do you feel like you "need to get [your negativity] out?" What's the connection between thinking these thoughts, like evaluating worst case scenarios, and blogging them or saying them to your spouse?

Does it bother you that other people may be content with things that you see flaws or risks in? Are they wrong? Do you need to make sure they are informed of the same problems for you to be at peace?

Key word "desired". Make the slow channel the longest reasonable time that any of them want. If they want shorter, well, there's medium channel or slow. You pick. If they want even longer, well, there's slow channel, and it's good enough for these 10 enterprise customers.

I got a Uniterra Nomad—a different take on a manual espresso maker. The website looks like a fake store, but I found enough reviews on blogs to convince me it was legit.

It's really hard to make a bad espresso with this thing. I sometimes hand-grind but mostly have been using pre-ground espresso in cans from Lavazza, Illy, and (latest discovery, cheaper and surprisingly good) Medaglia D'Oro.

Anger Management 5 years ago

In this article:

* People are angry about different things. Maybe different kinds of things, but a taxonomy isn't important to the exploration.

* Telling people they SHOULD NOT be angry and should calm down is common.

* Telling people they SHOULD be angry (about some injustice) is also common.

* These are both kinds of the titular "anger management".

* Anger seems to involve moral insight: e.g., one is (at least sometimes) angry _in response to_ "reasons to be angry" that one perceives.

* Anger seems to involve a corruption of moral vision: e.g., revenge and maltreatment of the offender seem good when one is angry.

* Callard (the author) has an impulse to resist both kinds of "anger management" and believes others do, too. (And that we're not exactly wrong to.) Why does one not experience the call to calm down as help to dispel the corruption of vision, nor the call to be angry as help to see truths about injustice?

* Callard argues we are split in our ability to respond to [in]justice: "the more perfectly one attends to the gravity of the wrongs done, the less sensitive one becomes to the gravity of the wrongs one is poised to commit in response. The perspective of the angry person is sharply divided from the non-angry one: each can see only the side of justice they are looking at."

* "This anger divide lies at the heart of our political predicament, and structures our interactions with one another at the deepest level. And yet, for this very reason, it is itself difficult to recognize."

* We can understand the society level anger divide better by considering the anger divide in oneself.

* Personal story beginning with "A few weeks ago" illustrates the incompatible values of the angry self and the non-angry self: we can't really rank the values or even hold both at once, only switch between them.

* No wonder people angry about issue A can't see eye to eye with people not angry about A. "There is no rational way to adjudicate their conflict—the best a third-party mediator could do is flip back and forth between who they want to side with."

* "The anger divide is frequently experienced as a political disaster: How can we ever hope to get everyone on the same page? Why are people so impervious to having their minds changed, anger-wise? ...it is because they are rational, and care about justice, that ... [they] are refusing to allow others to banish them from their property, the truth."

* There is truth in anger and in not-anger. Justice may be "something on the wrong scale to be taken in by a single human response." Instead of wanting (and trying to make) everyone to feel the same way, we should recognize we are not individually emotionally complete and be glad that others cover our blind spots.

* Callard's personal story dilemma was resolved in favor of love, away from vengeance in part because her son was around, and she would have felt ridiculous explaining her vengeance to his impartial position.

* "The very presence of other people can make us better, even when they don’t make us more like them, or change us, or even understand us. Sometimes other people help us exactly by not feeling what we feel, exactly by remaining resolutely who they are."

Congrats on launching. Page is only working intermittently for me, and the demo hasn't managed to load.

I've been tracking my own time for the last ~month using progressive versions of my own in-development app that has a similar reporting style but is meant to innovate on the data entry, making it much more flexible and convenient (for people who happen to think like me and want the kind of tracking I want, anyway!)

Hopefully I'll be "show hn"-ing it soon.

Unless they meant literally a calorie, not the more common large calorie or kilocalorie. In which case they'd be claiming that 1km ride burned ~10 calories, which is at least at the right order of magnitude. I weigh 73k, and according to my watch I burned 136 calories riding my bike for 6.4km yesterday, for an energy usage of 0.29 calories (not kilocalories) per gram-kilometer.

Firefox 75.0 6 years ago

I love the new address bar. I'm on the developer builds, so I've been seeing it for a while. I use both Safari and Firefox, and the new Firefox address bar makes me want to use it more. I haven't analyzed what I like about it--I just really like it.

Doesn't seem like I can edit this post now, but please don't contact me about it any more. I got an overwhelming response and more than enough qualified candidates.

I reply to everyone but starting today I won't reply to new messages on this topic. Thanks!

SEEKING FREELANCER | Florida | REMOTE OK (really remote only)

Looking for 3 freelancers:

1) Classic webmaster for probably 2-4 hrs/month doing HTML, markdown, light photo editing/graphic design, very light PHP, git.

2) Repeatable, inspectable setup of (Ubuntu, 'cause I know it) Linux servers (email, web, web app) via automation tools of your choice. 2-5 different configurations to build; Targets are Linode and AWS EC2.

3) Web app testing/QA work on a sporadic but pretty frequent basis.

Reach me at my-handle@gmail.com

In Florida individual HSA plans (with a large network) are still available, and they actually make sense for families with chronic health conditions. It's still a jaw-dropping amount to pay, but you pay even more any other way without a larger employer sponsored plan.

Source: I spend >$30k each year on my family's HSA plan premiums and deductible, and I run the numbers on every option that has the network we need every year, and this really is as good as it gets.