pmiller2

Summary: Backend web/distributed systems engineer with nearly 10 YoE. Most recently, I was a senior staff engineer at Neuroflow, an East Coast Series C mental health startup.

Location: USA, West Coast, SF Bay Area

Remote: Very interested in full remote, but will consider a hybrid situation.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-x-miller/

I'll be happy to send you a nice, printable (or, executable -- your choice) résumé, if you email me.

Email: pwmiller74@gmail.com

Willing to relocate: Offer me a big stack of cash, or some other really compelling reason, and anything's possible. :-)

Technologies: Linux, OSX, Python, Django, Flask, Pyramid, various AWS backend services, git, Github, Gitlab, Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra, Redis, Memcache, Kafka, multiple LISP dialects. I also know enough C and C++ to be dangerous.

I would love to work in some variety of Lisp. I use Emacs, so I work with Lisp on a daily basis already.

About me:

* If you need someone who can quickly get up to speed with your backend systems, I'm your guy.

* If you need someone to be the voice of experience and help build, shape, and mentor your team, I'm your guy.

* If you need someone to lead major projects and cross-team initiatives, I'm your guy.

* If you want someone who's gotten himself into, and out of, basically every weird state a git repo can be in, I'm your guy.

* If you want someone to fix your printer... well, I can be that guy, kind of, but you're really better off hiring someone who's better at it. ;)

I am most interested in working at late stage startups (think "5 minutes from going public"), public companies, or startups that can compete in liquid compensation with public companies.

Location: SF Bay Area.

Remote: Yes, preferred.

Willing to relocate: Unlikely.

Technologies: Python, Django, Pyramid, Flask, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, AWS, and a few other web technologies. I'm very willing to branch out and work with others, such as Ruby, Node.js, Golang and others, so don't consider this an exhaustive list.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741/

Email: pwmiller74@gmail.com

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you've emailed me a few weeks ago and gotten radio silence, it may be because I've been having technical difficulties. My @yahoo.com email is suddenly starting to reject a significant number of legitimate emails as SPAM, so, I'm switching to an @gmail.com for my job search communications, and I'll dig what I can out of my SPAM folder. TL;DR: If I didn't write you back in the past several weeks, please feel free to try again at pwmiller74@GMAIL.COM

I am most interested in working at late stage startups (think "5 minutes from going public"), public companies, or startups that can compete in liquid compensation with public companies.

Location: SF Bay Area.

Remote: Possibly.

Willing to relocate: Unlikely.

Technologies: Python, Django, Pyramid, Flask, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, AWS, and a few other web technologies. I'm very willing to branch out and work with others, such as Ruby, Node.js, Golang and others, so don't consider this an exhaustive list.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741/

Email: PWMILLER74@GMAIL.COM (note the change).

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you've emailed me a few weeks ago and gotten radio silence, it may be because I've been having technical difficulties. My @yahoo.com email is suddenly starting to reject a significant number of legitimate emails as SPAM, so, I'm switching to an @gmail.com for my job search communications, and I'll dig what I can out of my SPAM folder. TL;DR: If I didn't write you back in the past several weeks, please feel free to try again at pwmiller74@GMAIL.COM

I am most interested in working at late stage startups (think "5 minutes from going public"), public companies, or startups that can compete in liquid compensation with public companies.

Location: SF Bay Area.

Remote: Possibly.

Willing to relocate: Unlikely.

Technologies: Python, Django, Pyramid, Flask, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, AWS, and a few other web technologies. I'm very willing to branch out and work with others, such as Ruby, Node.js, Golang and others, so don't consider this an exhaustive list.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741/

Email: PWMILLER74@GMAIL.COM (note the change).

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you've emailed me recently and gotten radio silence, it may be because I've been having technical difficulties. My @yahoo.com email is suddenly starting to reject a significant number of legitimate emails as SPAM, so, I'm switching to an @gmail.com for my job search communications, and I'll dig what I can out of my SPAM folder.

TL;DR: If I didn't write you back in the past several weeks, please feel free to try again at pwmiller74@GMAIL.COM

I am most interested in working at late stage startups (think "5 minutes from going public"), public companies, or startups that can compete in liquid compensation with public companies.

Location: SF Bay Area.

Remote: Possibly.

Willing to relocate: Unlikely.

Technologies: Python, Django, Pyramid, Flask, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, AWS, and a few other web technologies. I'm very willing to branch out and work with others, such as Ruby, Node.js, Golang and others, so don't consider this an exhaustive list.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741/

Email: PWMILLER74@GMAIL.COM (note the change).

I am most interested in working at late stage startups (think "5 minutes from going public"), public companies, or startups that can compete in liquid compensation with public companies.

Location: SF Bay Area.

Remote: Possibly.

Willing to relocate: Unlikely.

Technologies: Python, Django, Pyramid, Flask, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, AWS, and a few other web technologies. I'm very willing to branch out and work with others, such as Ruby, Node.js, Golang and others, so don't consider this an exhaustive list.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741/

Email: pwmiller74@yahoo.com

Damn, you beat me to it.

Reveal codes is the ultimate hammer against screwy formatting. No more wondering why your layout went screwy 10 pages away from where you made some minor change to your text, a graphic, or a table. With "reveal codes" available, you can see directly what's going on and fix it right, instead of fumbling about with the formatting tools in Word.

Sorry, but that doesn't explain why admin specifically decided to call out the fact that I called out a "celebrity CEO." And, this disagreement is necessarily personal. Although I'm glad you agree with me, I'm not trying to convince anybody, nor do I care what amount of discussion my own, personal disagreement generates.

Guess what? It can happen to you, too, if you dare criticize a celebrity CEO. I got flagged & chastised for “breaking the guidelines” over a comment that stated facts about a certain CEO whose initials are TK.

Remember when y’all kept saying there’s no free speech on Facebook or Twitter? Well, it’s worse here, because if you don’t toe that line and bend the knee, you might get your user privileges limited.

Edit: here it is. +3 points and flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977

Edit 2: and here's the dressing down I got:

Regardless of how wrong or badly-behaved other people (be they HN users, celebrity CEOs, or imperialist bullies) are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Other people doing bad things is a poor non-excuse for setting this place on fire.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938019

See? Don't criticize "celebrity CEOs," folks. You're breaking the code, and the insiders will circle the wagons if you do.

BTW, "Boober" is a direct quote said directly to a GQ reporter: https://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions

Why do people always want to fix problems arising from capitalism by doing more capitalism?

The people named in one of your examples didn't actually encourage, incite, or support violence; people in the other example did.

Charging for things just because you can is a capitalist mindset, however.

Besides, hospitals will never be more competitive than an oligopoly in most cases, simply because only so many are built in any given geographic area, and most people can only travel so far for medical care. There are some services the “free market” simply can’t deliver efficiently.

... the thought process of capitalism in some countries.

FTFY.

If they’re already not paying attention, what’s left to lose?

That’s very close to what Triplebyte does.

How is that relevant to anything?

Stop being pedantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Char...

Edit because I'm apparently only allowed like 5 comments a day: Refusing to spend 30 seconds to find out that "yes, there is a roughly equivalent right to free speech in Canada" is just lazy, if you didn't know that, or pedantic if you did. Which would you rather be?

I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.

You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.

You don't think selective enforcement is about exertion of power?

Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

From that perspective, the drug war makes perfect sense, and was a spectacular success, not in terms of submission, but in terms of control.

Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power.

Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.

Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of putting the Pi into the toothbrush. I was thinking of it as a separate device: literally a pushbutton that toggles a GPIO pin that triggers hitting a web API to text you a congratulatory or encouraging message.

That sounds like a job for a Raspberry Pi[0] with a pushbutton wired up to a GPIO pin. Push the button after you brush, have it text you a congratulatory message. It's slightly less functional than a Bluetooth toothbrush, but respects your privacy a hell of a lot more.

---

[0]: Okay, technically, a Pi is a bit overkill, but I'm not sure if it's simple to, say, hit a web API with an Arduino.

Taking away a few percent of a company's profit, while still leaving a quite substantial profit margin is not "killing the company." There needs to be some teeth behind these fines to make companies respect them. You may not have heard of repeat fines for the same offense, but all that shows is that they fix things after they're pointed out. Wouldn't it be better if they thought about how they're handling peoples' data before they got caught doing it wrong?

Somebody needs to be made an example of, and a company like Facebook that not only can absorb the hit but is not well known for respecting peoples' privacy is a great target, IMO.

I'm sure they report their revenue like that, so, yeah, probably?

That's the thing that really gets me. GDPR fines can be anywhere from 2-4% of annual revenue (not profit, revenue), yet none have even come close. I guarantee you if you took 4% of Facebook's gross revenue right off the top, they'd notice.

For 2020, their gross revenue was just shy of $86B, so, 2-4% of that would be about $1.7-3.4B. Considering that 2020 EBITDA was $39.5B, that would represent 4-8% of their profits.

Tell me that's not going to affect the stock price. Because that's what you need to do to actually get these companies to do something is materially affect their stock price and piss off the shareholders.

I describe what I do in different ways, depending on who I'm talking to and how I feel about work. Sometimes, when I'm feeling good about things, I say "I make the internet," or "I tell computers what to do, and they do it." Other times, I say stuff like "I let a computer tell me I'm a fucking idiot for 8 hours a day," or, "I tell computers what to do, and they do it." :P

The truth is really somewhere in between the two extremes.

Another thing I often say is that most of the real hard problems in software development these days are social problems. What I mean by that is that you have to account for the characteristics and limitations of not only yourself, but the users of the software, the rest of your team, and your organization as a whole, when writing code or designing systems. In other words, don't get in over your head, make it usable, document what you've done, think about the consequences of what you're about to do (and write that down), and many other things. This is inherently a humble perspective, because, if you notice, you are the smallest thing that needs to be considered in all this.

I wouldn't. A humble, untalented (I'd rather say "unskilled" here) programmer is one who knows they're unskilled and wants to learn. I'll take someone who knows they have a lot to learn over someone who thinks they already know it all, any day.

Except that's not true. There are 4 endemic coronaviruses already that cause the common cold, and we can most definitely get reinfected with them: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/common-cold-coron...

You just described the entire food service industry. Chipotle is far from the only offender, or even the only big offender.