sbraford

Thank you so much.

I was trying to work with a local firm up here in the PNW but they have little experience in this area.

I now have an appointment for a consult with that firm you linked. You rock.

Ouch. Yes, this sounds exactly like what happened to me.

I am on an installment plan. Have been paying this down for a bit now, but it is becoming an increasingly difficult financial burden to bear.

I have hired the one guy who said he might be able to do something to help for $295 for him to do some "research." I'm probably just screwed.

Location: Portland, Oregon

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, AWS, HTML/CSS, PostgreSQL, etc

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shantibraford/

Email: shantibraford [at] gmail.com

Hours: 15-25 per week (flexible schedule)

Backend Ruby on Rails developer and "Virtual CTO" of sorts for early-stage startups. I can do it all from backend Ruby on Rails apps/APIs, frontend UI (though limited SPA experience), deployment / devOps, etc. At my last engagement, I was the 5th hire. I played a pivotal role in growing that healthcare startup to a $1.2 billion valuation in ~2 years. Looking for a small team of either just founders or 3-5 employees, where I can have a major impact in the development and growth of the company.

Thanks. I'm actually a huge fan of Muhammad Yunus' microloans program. I've had ~ $400 on a loan rotation at kiva.org for some time now.

That would be cool if that's all a project needed to get off the ground.

Also wouldn't be surprised if someone just needed it to buy ramen noodles or hosting for a few months.

I'll accept that it might be "dumb" to you, but it's definitely not a joke.

More than 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 per day. Sure most of them will not have computers/Internet access. But $200 USD could mean a lot to some poor community college kid in India, for example.

Or even a struggling, aspiring (or down on their luck) coder in America who doesn't have a cushy software gig.

Thank you.

Hi. Shanti here from The Shanti Fund.

I'll just leave this here for more visibility.

I've always been passionate about startups and working with founders. Wanting to get involved but not having "Angel VC" type of money has been my issue lately, so, I decided to start The Shanti Fund.

I know $200 isn't much (to you and I). But it IS to some people. They may be down on their luck, or they may just live in a part of the world where $200 goes a long way.

I know some might criticize my efforts here, so I'm 100% open to feedback. Please tell mw how I can improve The Shanti Fund. Thanks.

Hello. Can you send me your info? shantibraford @ gmail

I'm looking for a designer who can collaborate on jobs with me.

Indeed. I once spent several hours debugging a desktop client application that relied on a correct system time.

Finally, we noticed the user's system time was set to several weeks in the future. "Oh yeah, that?" He showed us how he uses the system calendar to check dates in the future. When he was done, he'd click the "Ok" button, thereby setting the current date in Windows to some future day.

Lesson learned.

Pinterest has recently banned pro-Ana/Mia pins.

I could see something like Pinry being useful for creating communities that respect freedom of speech / information / image posting, so long as the content is not illegal.

This article is so laughably bad, I had to doublecheck and make sure I wasn't reading The Onion.

Let's try to find some common ground here:

First: If you use a Master Lock (heh or an old pen-hackable Kryptonite lock) on your Bank Vault, obviously you are at fault. Doesn't matter what kind of world you want to live in, you need to secure your wares adequately.

Second: It's a dick move of these guys to release all this info. They are hacktivists, or so they claim. (If they wanted to profit off this they'd sell the hacked db to Russians and not release the data) People like MLK and Gandhi also pissed off a lot of people. For example by sitting at white lunch counters, getting spit on, etc. Sorry, that's the idea behind civil disobedience / hacktivism / etc.

Third: this has been stated before, but how do you not know that this database wasn't already cracked 2 years ago by malevolent forces who've been using it for evil, but not telling you about it?

I think it's safe to say Statfor probably wasn't using a Master Lock, but clearly they didn't do enough pen testing or whatever it would've taken for them to more securely lock down their shit.

(Thought experiment: if a YC company got owned, do you think pg would blame the thieves, for their smash & grab kind of job? Or the coders who left a gaping security hole / social engineering attack vector open?)

Want to understand what's going on here psychologically?

To some people, whenever anyone is making a profit, however small ... some people believe that someone, somewhere, has to be getting the raw end of the deal.

Note: I'm not saying putting Amazon links on your blog means you can be still be 100% objective (you can't), but rather pointing out a deep-seated belief that I have noticed among some, especially those who've found a way to make a living on GPL'd code, for example, and think iPads should be free.

They say most successful CEOs score highly on tests for being a sociopath.

I think this guy could be on his way to the Fortune 400!

Just came here to mention the article says he is "down to" $10 million.

I understand he nearly lost "everything," but boy would I love to lose everything and be down to "just" $10 mil.

So how often does a commit get checked in that causes a test (or tests) to fail?

It just seemed to me like you were bragging that tests get run over and over again. They only need to get run if any new code is committed, of course.

And what kind of commit is being checked in every 9 minutes? How big is the dev team? Seems like an awful lot of commits. Is each one a full-fledged feature / bug fix for the site, or are many 1-line changes to the code?

Just curious - who maintains the Selenium tets, and how big is the development / "QA" team?

I've never worked in a team big enough that it could devote resources to maintaining all of the following kinds of tests: * unit * functional * AND acceptance * plus writing the actual code

IMHO, a neutral third-party group like QA should be responsible for writing & maintaining acceptance tests.

While the "one in a million" better is a cool blurb, what does it really mean?

Let's say your team makes 25 commits per day.

25 * ~300 working days = 7,500 commits per year

That would take 133+ years to reach 1 in a million.

The more interesting metric to me is how often the build gets broken.

If any system (attempting to solve this problem) allows one to add 2,433 emails to an "inbox", then it is doomed to fail.

Sometimes, it's the tool user, not the tool itself, that is to blame.

Do it man!

Honestly, it really is a weird feeling. I always hated working for other companies, but felt that I "had to" because I was afraid of taking the leap. (and yes, of course, it is more secure/stable/etc)

But yes -- I definitely did not go into this blind. Freelanced in the states for 2-3 months to make sure I could get enough work.

It helps that I had a buddy who lives here. Otherwise I honestly would not have had the balls to do it. (foreign language + trying to score an apartment? ouch)

congrats!

I am just in a mode right now where I see victimhood for what it is. Glad you're not letting yourself be a victim.

quit?

It feels a little weird saying it, but I feel exactly like the uncaged lion paul describes.

My "hack" to achieve this:

* quit the job to pursue part-time freelancing

* the idea is to work on a startup / projects the other part of the time

* moved to Bucharest where I can live for $2k / month (I only have to "work" 4 days a month)

* while experiencing a foreign culture, it helps give you perspective, because you see many of their customs/etc. to be silly, which also makes you realize your own are silly as well

* european chicks have sexy accents (if the carrot is big enough...) =)

I would suggest working part-time as a freelancer as another option. (i.e. if you can't get into YC)

I'm a recovering SBCer (now AT&T, again?).

IBMers and SBCers compete over whose company was the basis for Office Space & TPS Reports. (i.e. the TPS Report zero that started it all)

I also heard Enron was much like this (amazon + the defense co).

This is great stuff. Thank you for posting this!

I normally have a dual-screen setup powered by desktops plus a nice keyboard + mouse.

But I'm in the process of moving abroad and will be living out of my laptop for a little while.

You see some people at startups working straight off their laptops, day in and out. After 1-2 days on my raw Macbook, I have no idea how they do it.

Congratulations, guys!

I know you were mostly kidding, but it made me think.

Yes -- the Dark Side of rails is the (obvious) realization that it's still just a framework (built on the ruby language), in which just as crappy code can be written as any PHP, Python, Java, C++, etc application.

There is no panacea. No escape 100% from the ability to shoot yourself in the foot. No silver bullet.

Nor has any rails fanboi (to my knowledge) said rails was ever any of that... but Yes, the Obies of the world really should just ignore the flameboys at this point in the RoR lifecycle.