Threads for d2xdy2
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Work: building out some administration and instrumentation dashboards for a few things. Making some good time on it using Laravel and Vuejs (I might also be exercising a bit of “lets see if I can build anything useful with this stuff”).
Home/Fun: More biking. I’ve got about 500 miles ridden since 4/10; looking at adding a few hundred more than its warmed up a bit.
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Work: Waiting for the rest of my team to be hired / start working. Should start being productive next Monday. Right now is a good time to just talk to folks and see how things work. Also get to help write an ERP for some assets I currently know nothing about.
Fun: Decided to start biking again. Got a good road/mountain hybrid (cyclocross-ish) with disk brakes. Going to start commuting to work and most other places by bike. So far so good.
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Atlanta, GA, USA.
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Lots and lots of job interviews as well as presentations, then traveling back home for Easter. Not the most relaxed week ever, but definitely all for a good cause.
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Working on my final project to finish up a stint at General Assembly’s WDI. I’m creating a coding tutorial site, on a similar vein to egghead.io or laracasts. Utilizing Rails 5 API with Angular 2 (and webpack), planning on integrating Stripe subscriptions.
During the course, I’d jot down notes and re-write some of the curriculum in my own words, as well as make a few screencasts for fellow students to refer back to– I’m going to use massage that material into being my seed content and go from there. I also plan on making a few short screencasts about setting up Webpack, Rails 5, and Angular2 (as it’s currently very topical for my project).
I spent last night drawing up my mock-ups, and took this morning to set up CI/CD with Travis and Dokku (which, I’ve been using religiously for all of my projects in WDI, so I know that landscape fairly well).
One of the harder parts of this is finding restraint and making fair decisions about my schedule. It’s definitely going to be an ongoing project, but having something polished and presentable by Friday is going to be a task. I’m using it as an opportunity to play up my strengths and have a fair range of material to discuss with potential employers.
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The unnecessary SPA is really getting to me recently. For a while, it was just blogspot deciding I didn’t really need to read this article right away, and I could wait five seconds for it to grind some gears. But now I see more sites that are atrociously broken.
There’s been a good amount of sportsball recently so I’ve been trying to read sbnation.com on my phone. Too bad every single page load results in a completely blank display until I refresh. I’m sure that’s great for my data cap. Also means I may read an article if I particularly care, but I’m bouncing without mercy as soon as I’m done. Isn’t this shit supposed to increase engagement? Fail.
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So, uh, no need to write documentation? I’m in.
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I thought I was incredible. Yet, due to an overwhelming sense of Imposter Syndrome, I keenly knew that there were things I didn’t know.
I thought this was fairly confusing, especially given the preceding paragraphs. The author seemed spelled out a belief that they were awesome (that was my perception of them, at least). The sort of setup described is just asking to be humbled, either on the job or in an interview.
“This presentation is bullshit. You have no evidence, nothing valuable to show, just spurious subjective opinions. …. ”
I’d have walked out at that point. Whether they’re negging you just to see how you’ll respond or they’re serious; that’s not stuff you say at an interview.
The most “embarrassing” interview I’ve ever had wasn’t nearly this bad, though it still left me wondering what the hell I had spent so many hours preparing for. In brief, I showed up for a Jr. ASP.NET developer interview and was asked take a host of W3Schools tests on a computer and to program an elevator control-type program in PHP (?????). I stuck it out because it was my first interview after leaving my last gig. Not once did the topic of prior work experience or anything terribly relevant to the job come up.
Regardless; that was a really shitty interview– I’d have walked out after the first or second snarky comment.
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Currently working my way though the Elixir book and Jose Valim’s “How I start Elixir”, I’ve got terminal Vim opened in iTerm 2. Also have Chrome open with the Twitter app on the side.
So, nothing really interesting– pretty stock OSX experience.
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Rails generator for the U.S Web Design Standards based roughly off of the Refills package from Thoughtbot, along with helping out organize a TEDx talk in my city. Both are going alright.
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I got burned by this on my hobby project. The self-updating command line tools started warning me that my database was wrong for technical reasons and needed to be updated (I wish I’d taken screenshots - if you see this, please do). It walked me through steps of updating to a new db with no mention of fees - I was thinking this was like the infrequent updates from deprecated app stacks. A few weeks after I did the update, they started charging me for both the $9/mo db I had and a new $50/mo db, backups stopped working, it’s not clear which db is even in use, support was shocked, shocked that their tool had told me to update to a more expensive thing, and rather than resolving the issue they closed my ticket.
I’m looking into the various “heroku in a box” tools and will migrate my hobby project to a $5/mo VPS with SSL this weekend, contest the charges with my payment card, and start moving my employer’s consulting clients over to whatever that tool is. Even if the card doesn’t chargeback my lost $100 Heroku’s will lose that in… uh, about an hour given the size and number of clients we have.
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I didn’t keep it running much longer than it took to push an app and see how it works, but DigitalOcean’s Dokku prebuilt image was pretty easy to get going. IIRC I just needed to add a plugin for PostgreSQL support if I wanted to manage that through Dokku’s interface, but there were more than one to check out with different features in terms of how they separate accounts/dbs/instances, or had backup/restore helpers.
(I don’t think Dokku is hard to set up, I’ve also toyed with it on local vms, but the one-click app image on DO is how I learned of the project at all, so here’s my plug for DO. ?)
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This just prompted me to migrate my (~5) personal apps from Heroku to Dokku on Digital Ocean. Super easy to do, and on a $10 Digital Ocean droplet, it’s already more cost efficient than if I wanted Heroku to run them all 24/7.
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I’ve had reasonable success with using Dokku on a $5/MO DO Droplet. I’ve considered looking at things like Deis or self-hosted OpenShift, but Dokku is really the simplest / lightest one that fits my needs (it also helps that there’s even a Dokku app stack on DO).
While I haven’t experienced that level of WTFery with Heroku as you’ve mentioned, I have definitely been hit with a bill I wasn’t expecting (same for AWS..).
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I got burned in a similar way where I logged in and it told me to fix my db, but it only gave me options for the more expensive databases, so I clicked cancel. Next month, behold, I was now the proud owner of a $50/mo db on a free grandfathered heroku stack. I contacted support and they were adamant about how ‘you can’t sign up for a new service without going through the process’ and told me it was my fault. Their story was that because I initiated the upgrade I was no longer eligible for the grandfathered db and therefore signed up for the paid db which I agreed to by clicking a button like “Resolve Issue” or something. I backed up my hobby projects, cancelled the service (though they still charged me). I then contacted heroku (again) and told them I would be filing a chargeback on the charge if they didn’t refund it. When they didn’t, I provided Citi with the email chain, the original support ticket chain, and the charge. Because the support was started so soon after the charge was made and the support was ended so abruptly, they decided in my favor. Used to like Heroku, but they literally destroyed their reputation with one interaction. I don’t have clients, but the company I used to work at was looking at GCloud vs AWS vs Heroku and I made sure none of that very large amount of servers went to heroku.
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perpetually trying to get past 80% on a nonprofit project with no real due date. local co-op/hackerspace is trying to team up with other nearby hackerspaces to get their monthly hackathons coordinated and where they can keep state-wide stats (as well as give corporate sponsors and other investors names of the kids winning these things).
sort of feel like I threw every buzzword in the book at it, but there again they more or less gave me complete freedom to “do whatever”. multitenant rails app with ember, with some webrtc stuff in for team co-op and voting. contestants sign in with github and stats are pulled in via the github api. ive had one or two people want some google slides integration for presentations, but i think itd be a bit of a pain to add that for such small demand.
been doing incremental real-world testing on it at various hackathons in the area… i just keep steady at around “80%”.
really ready to be done looking at it, at this point.
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- Committed to that secret project I’ve been thinking about for a while. Maybe you’ll see it next week :smile:
- Keep going through the Rust stdlib’s module docs and improving them.
- Go to Colombia to present at a conference
- Go from Colombia back to NYC for 12 hours, then go to North Carolina for another conference, though that’s technically early next week, I guess…
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I like it that way :)
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It is! Please do :)
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Rad. Are you presenting? If not, is there a certain booth or whatever that you’ll be associated with?
Luckily, I’m not presenting this year, so I have complete freedom to wander around and meet people and check out other talks. Last year I was working on my talk until right until time to give it, so I didn’t get to do as much wandering around as I would have liked. :-)
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I am giving a talk on Rust, so yeah, come say hi after. :) Or whenever. I’m usually the only person in head-to-toe black…
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My company pays for a laptop and display of our choice up front (there’s a limit, but it covers a decked out 13" MBP and Thunderbolt Display). They also allow for $1,000 in incidental office equipment (desk, chair, keyboard, etc.). I don’t get reimbursed for Internet service, but can file monthly for a flat $50 toward my cell phone bill. My company will also pay up to $500 monthly for co-working space, but I haven’t taken advantage of that perk.
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They’re generally unspoken job requirements in most of the work I get, though I don’t remote for a specific company; I’m just a freelancer that works for the same 3-4 companies over and over again.
There’s been two occasions where some software was required, and I either couldn’t afford it or couldn’t run it. If I couldn’t afford it, I negotiated the cost of it into the contract. If I couldn’t run it, I’d find the closest alternative I could, or request office-time to use it.
I generally maintain my own hardware, educational / research sources (Safari Books Online is a life saver), software, and project tools (basecamp, freshbooks, etc).
As far as personal office-space is concerned, on of my clients does provide a desk / area for me to work at whenever I want (and for whatever I’m working on)– free wifi, nice view, and access to the kitchen. I really don’t utilize that as much as I should, though– it’s quite a bit out of the way to get there, and I generally end up running triage for other developers working in there.
Stuff like travel / conferences, I report as education, so it’s not really a big deal. I’d rather a client send me along with some of their internal people, if only to get some discounts on travel and lodging, but its no big deal.
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Project for my local makerspace; they want a web service that showcases the First Friday Hackathons they and others host. Building it in Rails using Neo4j. Coming together really nicely, though there are still a few ambiguous details and requirements from sponsors.
Connecting contestants/users’s GitHub profiles to the service and allowing them to select project repos and submit them for scoring/voting; creates a running report of who’s doing what and winning with what for sponsors to look at newhires.
I work there doing internal development stuff, so I don’t feel bad using “company time” to do exploratory stuff on this project.
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I’ve been picking up Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter a bit this week. It’s been several months going now, but I quite enjoy forays into abstract thinking.
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After having read GEB, this has been in my to-read list for ages. I read the chapters about Lisp, and they were fantastic.
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Look at each change to your requirements, platform, or tool as a new challenge,
Caveat: Letting product owner make whimsical requests without any thought of consequences is also a recipe for disaster. It’s a ‘challenge’ that you won’t meet in the long run.
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Work: Trying to come to grips with S&P / Legal taking a somewhat simple application and making it into a nightmare. My team produces internal applications for several other teams within the company. One of the teams we serve wants to replace an external vendor that warehouses user information with regards to event RSVP’s and mailing lists. I thought the hardest part of the app was going to be the web UI builder we’re making for them to quickly author landing pages for the events (which I am stoked about)– no; its endless meetings and phone calls about nebulous S&P / Legal stuff regarding data storage and leveraging other vendors in really awkward ways to safely store an email address for a user.
Certainly a bit of a buzz kill.
Play/Work: Tinkering with Go as well as building out some work-related CI/CD stuff for our internal deployment system. Being able to test and warehouse docker containers in our private registry, and then have other deployment systems interact with everything has been unheard of so far, and is sort of working now.
Play: Got a new mountain bike yesterday. Certainly planning on putting in some miles on it (along side my daily commuter road bike).