vpfaulkner

Blackbird | Dev Shop | Remote (US) | Contract

Blackbird builds web + mobile apps for startups and innovative companies. We work on interesting, greenfield projects, and rely on small, veteran teams who have lots of autonomy. Everyone is a remote contractor, and our work culture is low-drama and highly collaborative. No pointless meetings, no bureaucracy, no egos and lots of time spent building things.

We’re looking for senior full stack engineers / CTO consultants / data scientists. We value engineers who are strong technically as well as great communicators. We work with lots of freelancers who appreciate the steady, interesting work.

Our typical stack is TypeScript, React, Postgres, and AWS although it will vary project to project.

If you enjoy moving fast, working with great engineers, and building something from the ground up, you’ll fit right in.

If interested, reach out directly to me at vance [at] blackbird.us. If you have an hourly rate please include that + any other freelancer / agency work you’ve done.

Website: https://blackbird.us/

Blackbird | Dev Shop | Remote (US or Europe) | Contract

Blackbird builds web + mobile apps for startups and innovative companies. We work on interesting, greenfield projects, and rely on small, veteran teams who have lots of autonomy. Everyone is a remote contractor, and our work culture is low-drama and highly collaborative. No pointless meetings, no bureaucracy, no egos and lots of time spent building things.

We’re looking for senior full stack engineers / CTO consultants / data scientists. We value engineers who are strong technically as well as great communicators. We work with lots of freelancers who appreciate the steady, interesting work.

Our typical stack is TypeScript, React, Postgres, and AWS although it will vary project to project.

If you enjoy moving fast, working with great engineers, and building something from the ground up, you’ll fit right in.

If interested, reach out directly to me at vance [at] blackbird.us

I like the analogy that code is like weight to an airplane (“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight” - Bill Gates). You want enough code to achieve your business objectives but no more since code carries a maintenance cost.

I suppose you could say the net value of some code = contribution to business objective - maintenance cost.

This also implies that code could have a negative value depending on its business value and maintenance cost

The labor force participation rate ("percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work") has been declining for 20 years and had a big drop at the beginning of the pandemic. Consequently, part of the low unemployment trend has been driven by people dropping out of the workforce/not looking for a job.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

I'm all for trying to understand these phenomena and running these experiments. Just trying to get a sense for how much of a grasp we have on these phenomena.

Based on the other responses, it seems like we can mathematically model these phenomena very well and make very good predictions. However, when it comes to explaining why these phenomena exist in the first place, we are like a medieval doctor trying to explain why antibiotics work.

From a layman’s point of view, it seems like we grasping at straws when it comes to these thorny quantum questions. Is fair to say, for example, that we are about as clueless as our ancestors were with the bubonic plague?

To a non-expert it can be difficult to separate which theories lay on solid ground and which theories are highly speculative.

I've had a good experience using AWS SQS. It's fairly straightforward and can be paired with SNS if more complex workflows are necessary. I recently migrated to SQS from Rabbit MQ since we didn't need all of the features of Rabbit MQ and wanted something simpler.

Consider all of the "free with ads or paid without ads" products such as YouTube. It's pretty clear that a substantial number of people understand these tradeoffs and are willing to accept them as I imagine the percent of paid subscribers is miniscule.

Obviously people would prefer, for example, a YouTube that is free, without advertisements, private, etc. But, my point is that developers tend to have different preferences than the general population and, thus, we shouldn't be surprised that the Internet has evolved in a way that reflects those differences.

I agree that, with time, I think/hope many people will realize social media actually has a lot of adverse effects.

However, to say, "most people will come to the same conclusion I have given enough time and evidence" seems a little naïve, and overlooks the spectrum of preferences that people have for the various things developers consider "hostile."

For example, while a lot of developers (myself included) love the minimalism of, say, Hacker News and hate the bloat of, say, nytimes.com, I think it's unfair to call nytimes "hostile" to the user. Frankly, it doesn't grate the typical user that much and the decisions made by NY Times designers/developers reflect that reality.

I think a similar argument can be made about privacy. Some people would pay for a product that is private and without advertisements; others are fine with the tradeoff.

I honestly wonder how much the typical user actually shares the concerns brought up here and in other hostile web arguments. Most people I know care much less than the Hacker News community about privacy, bloated web sites, web advertisements, etc. and would gladly trade these for free software such as Facebook, Gmail. I'm not saying I agree with them, but I recognize that reality.

If that is the case, then I feel less comfortable with the idea that this is simply evil corporations commoditizing users.

Rather, I think the more nuanced explanation takes into account the fact that the web's users today (now at 5 billion people) and the people shaping its content (eg marketers, designers, business people, etc.) simply have a very different set of values than those active at the web’s infancy.

In other words, perhaps it has become democratized...it's just that that means it looks very different than you would prefer it.

I agree that using error monitoring service like Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, etc. is better than a naked log for "exceptional" situations. They provide a lot of nice features including alerting, additional debugging info, the ability to mark bugs as fixed, etc.

I also agree that too many log statements can actually be counterproductive by providing a lot of noise.

But the idea that logs have no value is silly. Every developer writes bugs and will run into situations where the code is behaving differently than they thought in production. Being able to follow the logs to understand what happened is extremely valuable.

I agree that “separating concerns” is generally a good thing.

However, the issue is that the traditional division of concerns is more difficult to maintain in today’s web apps. Compared with web pages 20 years ago, web apps today are dense, interactive and complex. You might have dozens of UI components in a single page, each with their own piece of state, business logic and styling. Moreover, state, business logic, and presentation are oftentimes tightly coupled by design: eg, dragging this slider changes its shading using a complex algorithm.

Therefore, it’s becoming more advantageous to decouple individual ui components, each with their own state/logic/styling, than it is to, say, stick all of the state your web app deals with in a single place.

In other words, it makes sense to encapsulate all that code related to that crazy slider in one place, even if that includes state, styling, algorithm, etc…

Sorry, should have clarified: I was suggesting that if the government decides to regulate it should apply to all social media platforms, not just FB. Updated the original comment.

A lot of these issues seem difficult to regulate but one that seems more realistic is usage by minors.

What if social media platforms required all minors to have their account associated with a parent account? The parent could monitor activity, institute time limits, etc.

My gripes with traditional CSS styling are:

- Styles are global

- Styles are targeted via brittle, untyped, and opaque "magic strings” basically. This means mistakes are more likely to be caught at run time than compile time. Eg, I wouldn't get a compile time error if I did `position: oops` or `class="oops"`.

- Styles are often "far away" from their target which makes mistakes more likely; ie this deeply nested HTML element in one file is coupled to a deeply nested style sheet in another file

- It is easier to perform complex manipulation of styling if it is made up of JS objects. Eg, if I wanted to do math or I wanted one style to be a function of another (eg `marginLeft: PAGE_MARGIN`)

That being said, I’m sure there are some better ways of doing traditional CSS since I last tried it that I’m unaware of...

As far as the performance trade off, I'd love it with styled components did not come with this but, at least for my use case, it is usually worth it

I’ve found Cypress generally better than other alternatives such as Selenium. The screenshot feature is nice and it seems to be a little less flakey, although E2E tests using a browser are always going to be more prone to flakiness than unit tests.

This last project we’ve actually been running true E2E tests by spinning up the backend in GH actions (looking for a branch with the same name or falling back to master), seeding it, and making snapshot-style assertions about the UI. It’s more complex and slower but tests a lot more code now that the backend is involved as well as the API layer. It has helped a lot in major refactors.

I'd checkout Square 1 Bank: https://www.square1bank.com/. Like Silicon Valley Bank, they are geared towards startups, and they have an office in NYC. Disclaimer: my brother works there.