zumda

Location: Bern, Switzerland

Remote: Yes

Relocation: Yes (though limited to planet Earth)

Technologies: Clojure, ClojureScript, JavaScript, Ruby, Scientific Computing, [something I don't know yet]

Careers 2.0: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/featureenvy

Contact: andreas@featureenvy.com

I don't like to retire and tell people who ask me that I spent my time making it possible for people to share more cat pictures. I would love to work on something a bit more meaningful. My goal with the master's was to end up in a multidisciplinary team where I could support scientists.

Currently in the process of getting a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering (mostly doing image analysis, coming from a Bachelor in Computer Science) and looking for a new challenge. Besides the two degrees I have worked for 2 years on web applications and web security development and have a four year apprenticeship (large scale Java web application) under my belt.

Or of course you could offer me good working conditions, a mentor and some time/money for conferences and other educational things, that would work, too.

I have extensive experience in large scale Java web applications from my four year apprenticeship in a big international bank. But I also have worked with Ruby on Rails and Javascript. In my free time I like to investigate new approaches to developing web applications. For example I am currently testing the waters with ClojureScript and Om, where I am trying to visualize herd immunity with WebGL.

So if you are looking for someone who likes to push the boundaries, doesn't accept "acceptable" as a solution and loves to learn new things (not just programming related!) then you should drop me a line so we can talk.

The only relocation restriction is that I want to continue working on planet Earth.

Bern, Switzerland, Remote | Relocation, Full Time

Stack: Ruby, Clojure, ClojureScript, JavaScript, [something I don't know yet]

Careers 2.0: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/featureenvy

Contact: andreas+hnjobs@featureenvy.com

Currently in the process of getting a Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering (mostly doing image analysis, coming from a Bachelor's in Computer Science) and looking for a new challenge. Besides the two degrees I have worked for 2 years on web applications and web security development.

I don't like to retire and tell people who ask me that I spent my time making it possible for people to share more cat pictures. I would love to work on something a bit more meaningful. For example supporting scientists with visualization or replacing Excel files with a webapp. Considering my Biomedical Engineering background, biologist would be a perfect fit, but I would also accept mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists. As long as I can learn something new, preferably not just programming related.

Or of course you could offer me good working conditions, a mentor and some time/money for conferences and other educational things, that would work, too.

So if you are looking for someone who likes to push the boundaries, doesn't accept "acceptable" as a solution and loves to learn new things (not just programming related!) then you should drop me a line so we can talk.

There were people rallying against slave masters. Yes, back when it was still legal to own slaves. Do you say these activists had nothing to do with abolishing slavery? Do you say they were wrong to be mad at slave masters because it was the law back hen?

I'm surprised that none of them use Heroku. It seemed to be the darling of the startup community for some time.

So, in short, big companies still don't get there doesn't have to be a correlation between GPA, educational background and actual skill to work?

Today with the internet, blogs, Github and other such things, I just don't get it!

I could see a feature were the server side will just be a PaaS-like service, where only the client side code is needed anymore. Database persistence, handling of static assets and all that will be done by the platform, and most people won't know how it works or care.

For example Meteor goes into this direction, though there is still some server-side code involved, most of it is shared with the client, including database access.

Of course we still have long way to go to really abstract this out this far, but I think it will be possible in the future.

To be fair, especially the landing sequence (the only thing they couldn't really patch) was very well defined from the start. They knew exactly what the Rover had to do, when he had to do it and what steps were involved.*

Generally software just doesn't work that way. (But maybe that was that you implied with "some contexts". In that case, I agree with you)

* I'm not saying they weren't trying out things until they decided how to land the Rover, but when they wrote the software they had very clear requirements.

The bar code was actually just a code to initialize the code generation (I think it is based on that randomly generated seed and the time, so that then server and client generate the same keys). You could have also typed in the code by hand.

I'm always dumbfounded when these topics come up and a lot of people start saying how inconvenient it is, that it is all wrong. But these are probably the same people which later accuse Google that they didn't do enough to protect their accounts!

Yes, two factor authentication is a small hassle. Yes, two factor authentication requires a bit to set up. But do you realize how much actually depends on your email account being safe?

For one, how many times did you use Googles OpenID provider? Yes, that's your Gmail account! Or for how many services did you use your Gmail account as the email address? You know that password resets go to that account, right?

Don't do that? Maybe you use Google Calendar, then. So yes, there is actually a lot of sensitive data in there. If you don't believe me, try to get a hold of a friends calendar, and see what you can guess about that person just from the calendar.

Or should someone just post some slander about you on you G+ profile? Or buy some apps from the Android Market? Of course this things never happen to you...

So just take the time to, besides looking at the time or the latest message on your phone, open that stupid app and type that stupid code in! It's not THAT much work!

There is also a (proposed) file API. http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

I see there is a lot of nostalgia in that post that I (and others like me) will probably never understand. But, I still don't see the point.

It's nice that we could buy and old machine and program something on it. But at the same time we could do it in Javascript, on the web with a very pretty interface. So why should we trade all the knowledge, the tools and the languages that we (well, people like you how tend to get all nostalgic over this topic) have built and and write something on an archaic system?

I never had such an old system, yet at the same time, I understand the constraints more or less, I now a bit of assembler, C and still question where this knowledge is really benefiting me. (Though I do find it very interesting!)

If I want to have a constraint environment, I could join a JavaScript 1k challenge and also work with artificial constraints (at the same time I could still enjoy the modern tools, environments and even graphics).

Maybe I just really don't see the point.

And to your last point, I think a better approach would be to show our children either PyGame or even modding tools for modern games. I just don't think a young child would really be that interested in the archaic inner workings of a slow machine, but could be really interested in making mods. I'm not saying there are no such children around (I'm sure there are), I'm just questioning the approach here.

The point isn't the security mechanism, but for consumer products the point is physical location. Without two factor authentication, a sweat shop in China could hack you (and thousand others) easily. With two-factor authentication they would need physical proximity to you, so they won't even try.

Interesting to see that P2P has gone down 6% and downloads up 3%, whereas physical media has stayed the same. It's clear where the growth market is, now the RIAA just has to read their own numbers.

The one thing that puzzles me is that the numbers for burning have gone up. Who in the time of wireless networking, huge disk drives and USB sticks burns a DVD? I just can't see this segment growing 6% in a year.

A very interesting post! Thanks for sharing that!

I have one question though: Did you grandfather your old customers in? So you still charge them the old price and give them all features?

Do you have an ETA when you will officially release Meteor with auth?

Mostly training and consulting. There is no better indicator that you know a framework best if you made and maintain it.

Another way, that the Meteor guys are trying (probably on top of training and consulting) is to sell an enterprise solutions. This solution will probably be an all in one appliance that enterprises can buy so they have an easy way to deploy and manage Meteor applications internally.

(can't answer you directly, so I'm doing it here)

My point was, that, for example, language recognition doesn't need human intelligence, a statistical model is enough.

Or driving around a confined space only requires a particle filter, not human intelligence.

You are right, but to solve most problems, do machines really HAVE to think like humans?

That's exactly what I was going to ask. That's the one thing keeping me from building something serious with Meteor.

The rest I tried, and it does look really nice for real-time webapps, as soon as the Javascript development environment grows up a bit more.

If I understand Pingdom correctly, they just want to monitor the Twitter API for all their customers that use the API. Pingdom doesn't send tweets for their customers, they just want to notice them when Twitter is lagging.

I took the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng some time ago. And it was a really great experience.

The lessons are interesting, and I really like their concept of quizzes in the middle of the lessons. They just show the question on the video, he explains it, and they stop the video and you can choose which one is right, or type in the number.

The homework is also well done and enhances the knowledge from the course. I had a lot of fun doing the lectures each and every week. You probably want to put aside a set day and time when you will do it, though, or else it is easy to do other things and "do the lectures later".

If they continue like this, there is soon no reason to go to a university anymore. :) (which is a catch-22 since the lecturers are payed by universities...)

One thing I think you should do is don't just concentrate on the technical aspects of programming. Really great programmers aren't the ones which know more languages and more obscure features of a framework they work with. Really great programmers know the domain language of the problem they try to solve. They understand the people behind it (and sometimes they understand the processes better than the guys working on it).

So learn a lot, even if it doesn't have anything to do with programming. Find something else that interests you. And then solve a problem in that domain with your programming skills.

Good luck, you seem to be on the right track!

Just to pile on another "me too" here. I fully agree that you should limit what you do, no matter what. I, for example, always tend to overdo things. For example I once was heavily into Starcraft 2, but played so much that after just 2 weeks I had enough and haven't touched it since.

Limiting yourself can be refreshing and ensure that we will still like the things we do in 10 years.

And beeing also a fellow introvert, I have to say, not geeking around on the PC doesn't have to mean going out with friends (though it should occasionally... ;)). There are a lot of great books and websites out there with fantastic content. For example I never knew so much about the whole skeptics movement (and the science behind it) without limiting myself from geeking out.

Limiting yourself can be a great thing!

I agree with you. There are things that the experts don't want to talk about (because it's too easy) and then there are things that a beginner can explain in a simpler way than an expert.

Staying in a beginners mind is hard once you have spent some time with a technology. It also sometimes offers great points for the experts what could change, because it could be easier or is simply unclear.

Of course there are very simple-minded blogs with practically no content, but there are also simple-minded Github accounts that offer practically nothing. There are CVs for the same purpose. I don't think this has anything to do with blogging per se.

They changed the handling of multi reddits to use normalized hot sort last month: http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/s79pl/reddit_chan...

Ah I'm sorry, I should have rechecked before posting this. I meant no offense.

There you see how closely I follow this story... :)

To summarize it: Someone upgraded from Rails 2.3 and had an issue, since xhr? stopped returning a boolean but 0 instead (the regex index of the first match). But he used the return value of that predicate in javascript. In Ruby 0 is truthy, but in Javascript it is false. So he made a pull request to change the behavior back to a boolean instead of 0.

@fxn then said that's not needed, and the predicate did return a truthy value and the contract never specified that it would actually return a boolean, so no contract was broken, so there is nothing to fix. (The Rails documentation uses monospaced "true" and "false" for the singletons and normal "true" and "false" for truthy and falsey values.)

Then Tim Pope suggested an alternative solution that would actually return a boolean. It got merged by @tenderlove but quickly reverted by @fxn again.

And so the bike shedding continued...

Find driven people. Go to conferences and other such events where the really passionate people are. Now? Just copy them!

It might not be a one on one coaching, but seeing how much others do while slacking of on the couch and reading about all their doings on Twitter should make you more productive.

I think this comes down to timeboxing everything.

1. Goal: Keeping fit. Invest 30 minutes each morning to that goal, which leaves 3.

2. Goal: Your job. Again, this is timeboxed until 5 pm, so do whatever it takes. Which leaves 2.

3. Goal: Play guitar. Not it gets tricky, because you could do both. But I think, again, timebox them. Monday through Friday you concentrate on your guitar, which leaves only 1.

4. Goal: Udacity. Now that you can do on the weekend. You will probably still play some guitar (I know I do), but thats not "learning", but playing (which is also important).

I think if everything is timeboxed and planned, I at least don't have problems keeping up, because I don't feel overwhelmed.

If you have zero things out there your chance of "luck" is exactly zero.

(I'm not saying you are wrong, I just think this is a paltry excuse.)