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Apart from regular work and my master thesis, I have an offer from a really interesting company in Amsterdam, and I am trying to figure out if I could actually afford to move there. That may sound dumb, but the rents in that city are absolutely crazy (and there are basically no apartments under 1.5K€/month). Dutch crustaceans, any recommendations or tips?
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Not as far as I would like to, hahaha. I have most of the experimentation done and verified, now I just need to actually write everything down, so this is the tedious part. Honestly, I think learned far more things in the company I started working a half a year ago than in the master degree, but I guess that depends on a lot of personal things.
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Government jobs tend to be 40 hours or less. State government in my state has a 37.5 hour standard. There is very occasional off-hours work, but overtime is never required except during emergencies – and not “business emergencies”, but, like, natural disasters.
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I work in a city where 90% of the folks showing up to the local developer meetup are employed by the city or the state.
It’s taken a lot of getting used to being the only person in the room who doesn’t run Windows.
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I used it on and off for a class for about a year in 2003 at university but have been able to avoid it other than that.
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Most people who are complaining that they pay less are the tech workers who hustle hard in Silicon Valley or at one of the big N companies. While government jobs can pay really well and have excellent value especially when considered pay/hours and benefits like pensions, a Google employee’s ceiling is going to be way higher.
There’s a subreddit where software engineers share their salaries and it seems like big N companies can pay anything from $300k–700k USD when you consider their total package. No government job is going to match that.
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I do.
Pros: hours, and benefits. Less trend-driven development and red queen effect. Less age discrimination (probably more diversity in general, at least compared to Silicon Valley).
Cons: low pay, hard to hire and retain qualified people. Bureaucracy can be galling, but I imagine that’s true in large private sector organizations, too.
We’re not that behind the times here; we’ve avoided some dead-ends by being just far enough behind the curve to see stuff fail before we can adopt it.
Also, depending on how well your agency’s goals align with your values, Don’t Be Evil can actually be realistic.
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I will say, I once did a contract with the Virginia DOT during Peak Teaparty. Never before in my life have I seen a more downtrodden group. Every single person I talked to was there because they really believed in their work, and every single one of them was burdened by the reality that their organization didn’t and was cutting funding, cutting staff, and cutting… everything.
They were some of the best individuals I ever worked with, but within the worst organization I’ve ever interacted with.
Contrast that to New York State- I did a shitton of work for a few departments there. These were just folks who showed up to get things done. They were paid well, respected, and accomplished what they could within the confines of their organization. They also were up for letting work knock off at 2PM.
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Also, depending on how well your agency’s goals align with your values, Don’t Be Evil can actually be realistic.
Agreed. There’s no such thing as an ethical corporation.
Do you mind sharing the minimum qualifications of a candidate at your institution? How necessary is a degree?
I’m asking for a friend 😏
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That’s a pretty cynical view of how trade works & not one I generally share. Except under situations of effective duress where one side has lopsided bargaining leverage over the other (e.g. monopolies, workers exploited because they have no better options), customers, employees and shareholders can all benefit. Sometimes this has negative externalities but not always.
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Profit is revenue minus expenses. Your definition, taking more than you give, makes your conclusion a tautology. i.e., meaningless repetition.
Reciprocity is a natural law: markets function because both parties benefit from the exchange. As a nod to adsouza’s point: fully-informed, warrantied, productive, voluntary exchange makes markets.
Profit exists because you can organize against risk. Due to comparative advantage, you don’t even have to be better at it than your competitors. Voluntary exchange benefits both weaker and stronger parties.
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Profit is revenue minus expenses. Your definition, taking more than you give, makes your conclusion a tautology. i.e., meaningless repetition.
I mean, yes, I was repeating myself. I wasn’t concluding anything: I was merely rephrasing “profit.” I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here aside from fishing for a logical fallacy.
a tautology. i.e., meaningless repetition.
Intentionally meta?
Reciprocity is a natural law
Yup. No arguments here. However, reciprocity is not profit. In fact, that’s the very distinction I’m trying to make. Reciprocity is based on fairness and balance, that what you get should be equal to what you give. Profit is expecting to get back more than what you put in.
Profit exists because you can organize against risk.
Sure, but not all parties can profit simultaneously. There are winners and losers in the world of capitalism.
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So, if I watch you from afar and realize that you’ll be in trouble within seconds, come to your aid, and save your life (without much effort on my side) in exchange for $10, who’s the one losing in this interaction? Personally, I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with playing positive-sum games and sharing the profits with the other parties.
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For an entry-level developer position, we want either a batchelor’s degree in an appropriate program, with no experience required, an associate’s degree and two years of experience, or no degree and four years of experience. The help-desk and technician positions probably require less for entry level but I’m not personally acquainted with their hiring process.
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I don’t, but I’m very envious of my family members who do.
One time my cousin (works for the state’s Department of Forestry) replied to an email on Sunday and they told him to take 4 hours off Monday to balance it off.
That said, from a technological perspective I’d imagine it would be quite behind in times, and moves very slowly. If you’re a diehard agile manifesto person (I’m not) I probably wouldn’t recommend it.
EDIT: I guess it’s really what you value more. In the public sector, you get free time at the expense of money. In the private sector, vice versa. I can see someone who chases the latest technologies and loves to code all day long being miserable there, but for people who just code so they can live a fulfilling life outside of work it could be a good fit.
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(Ha, nice. I’ve wondered about doing these previously but wondered if it would be too granular given the weekly what-are-you-doing threads technically cover the weekend. Nice to see someone else had the thought—and tested the theory out. ✌🏻)
I picked up a secondhand gas BBQ tonight, and have cleaned it so we will have to fire that up Saturday evening to give it a test run. Also got a friend (& future colleague) coming to stay for the weekend, his one request is I take him sailing so that’s pretty much our plan once he arrives tomorrow.
I might see if I can flush and refill my car’s manual transmission fluid at some point too. Had a lovely big syringe and hideously expensive oil turn up in the post today.
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As someone who has been working remote for almost 4 months now and it has been an interesting experience thus far.
Previously I was commuting 50-60ish minutes each way to work, so I was fairly excited to not have to put up with that drive and the traffic.
A few times I’ve felt really strange being in my house for the whole for a few consecutive days, so going out and grabbing a coffee helped me a lot. I would work at a coffee shop or something, but my employer sent a desktop as opposed to a laptop.
I also no longer enjoy spending time in my room - I also believe it is important to have a separate room/space set aside for remote working, but I don’t have that luxury right now. I work about a foot away from where I sleep so just “relaxing” after work isn’t very appealing anymore.
I still do sometimes feel like I am on an island since I can’t turn around and ask a question, but I’m trying to over-communicate more to solve for that.
Those are just some of my thoughts on remote work thus far thanks for the post! :)
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NusterCacheServer
nuster cache server creator
2 months ago
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link
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What are you working on this week?
working on a big feature of open source cache server nuster
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active cache
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Continuing to work hard every day on my newsletter Morning Cup of Coding. I thought that a newsletter would only be reading and curating articles, but it’s almost a full day job what with replying to emails, fixing and automating workflows, taking action on feedback, etc, etc. The very positive reviews make it worth it though <3
Plus, I’m very happy that I am in talks with three authors who’s work I really admire to collaborate with me. If anybody knows someone that would be interested in a collaboration I would love to get in contact with them.
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In an effort to decrease my smartphone dependace, I’m starting a project to print out all relevant information I need on a receipt using a thermal printer. The goal is to use a raspberry pi to gather stuff like
- weather
- some headlines from the news
- unread news count
- astronomical data
- personal appointments
- public transport information
- todo notes
- … and bind this all together into a modular shell script+awk postprocessing system, for the printer. So that’s going to be what I will be working on until I buy the device.
Has anyone here have any experience with Adafruit’s thermal printers? Is there one should pay attention to, or some common mistakes one can easily avoid?
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I’ve seen a few of these projects before - I can’t find the source for this one, but there are some photos on this account: https://twitter.com/paultag/status/966786313662935046
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I enjoy seeing articles such as this where people make their editor of choice work for whatever language they need. I wish I wasn’t so tied down and spoiled by msvs and autocomplete. I’m curious why autocomplete is pretty much either love/hate for most people too.
EDIT: Also under the “About” section I can’t reach the link for Indigo: https://chapters.indigo.ca/ - IP Address could not be found/ DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
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Omnisharp for emacs autocomplete works very well. I’m not saying vscode isn’t better but as someone who uses emacs every day, the c# experience is more than passable.
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Hmm. Does https://indigo.ca work for you?
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I hacked up a small tool the other day that would buffer output from a command into memory until it receives a signal to reconnect to stdout, when it would dump everything that was output in the interim. I want to integrate this into dtach so emacs can have resumable shell sessions on remote hosts for TRAMP workflows.
Let’s just say it’s a huge distraction from the work I actually need to do and I hope I don’t make too much progress on it.
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Oops, had no http on it: https://github.com/codemac/sigbuffer
It’s a dumb tool, but it was just a proof of concept that I knew how to use dup2+pipe again.
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This week I start my new (remote) job - super excited about it, and I hope it’s a good learning experience! I’m curious how the on-boarding process will go since I am waiting on my machine to arrive still.
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Finishing up working out my second week of my two week notice at my current gig (being required to work 7 days a week is not something I want to do…and also working later on weekdays). While I enjoyed all the people I’ve worked with the lack of structure, no room for growth, among other things is why I decided to take this new opportunity. Since I am the last full time non-contract developer here I’m curious to see how this will go.
I start my new job next week working remote, so I am beyond excited for that.
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Last week:
Work:
- Last week was a tiny bit stressful, but everything to delivered on time for soft launch today
- At our weekly report emails I got to talk in broad strokes about Touhou music, so that was quite nice. One of the bosses actually asked for a playlist on that haha. (We do company-wide update emails, I do my report and then take big liberties with what I talk about of interest that week. I often share music and other interests.)
Other:
- Continued reading bits and bobs of The Pragmatic Programmer. Watched a couple tech talks I think. Plenty of Joe Rogan and other podcasts
- More game dev stuff, though not as much as would be ideal to make real progress
- Relaunched my website! https://greduan.com Hopefully a blog post about it soon
This week I’m not too sure, but:
- Fixing kinks after the soft launch, improving documentation and fixing other bugs, and then expanding functionality
- I hope more game dev (get acquainted with OpenGL itself)
- More work on my project RoarSS, just a tiny RSS web client. Of course I’ll share when I do put it out somewhere.
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Much to the dismay of some, a Node.js server. Very simple and basic though.
Using Koa for HTTP handling and good olde Handlebars for the template rendering. Using a home-made rendering function assigned to Koa’s
ctxobject.Right now, actually, I can already give it feeds and look at them, but it fetches the links live (no DB) and it doesn’t fetch the feed’s content, it just shares a link to the original post (a way which I personally prefer).
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I finally doped out an issue in my wiki/notebook software that was keeping me from being able to simply
make runto get it up and going. I’ve also added and edited that wiki some, though not quite as much as I was doing in the first few days after setting it up. -
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I just wrote a personal wiki in Erlang (it’s currently a little over 400 lines, and is designed for a single trusted admin, but public facing ideas). That project was motivated by me wanting to pick up the basics of Erlang (I picked up Learn You some Erlang when it was part of a Humble Bundle, and wanted to try to put it to use), and to expose a list of ideas I’d been collecting in a markdown file.
Features include
- Single Trusted Admin, which means I can use any HTML/JS I want on indiviual pages.
- Writing everything in HTML.
- Tag based navigation
- Being very Artisnal software(TM).
Pages that might be interesting:
- Obscure programming languauges I’m reading about, but not necessarily using.
- More spare time projects I have in mind
- A WIP Retrospective on making this project.
- A page for tracking where I am in each of the webcomics I currently read.
Once I get a couple of hard-coded values removed from the code, I’ll stand up a fossil repository for the code. (Though it’s not especially good code, being the first big ball of Erlang I’ve written).
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No, this isn’t a rewrite of my blog. For one, this is way more simplistic. It has a lot less styling, for one, no comments, no markdown parsing(yet), not much linking to/from tag and home pages, and it outsources auth to nginx. Another difference is that the bar for content on this wiki isn’t going to be super high (since it’s mostly for me, with occasional sharing to friends), whereas on the blog I usually try to write content that others would find useful or interesting. Actually, once I have a chance to sit down with it and polish it up, I’ll be moving the retrospective to my blog, for example.
For me, they serve distinct purposes. My blog is a place for me to talk to the world, the other is built to be a place for me gather my thoughts.
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Oh! My apologies I clicked on the first link in your OP which took me to your blog site ( In a green and white color - I’m getting an invalid cert on my end too for what it’s worth)
By removing ‘https’ it correctly took me to the actual idea.junglecoder.com (the wiki) - that’s why I was confused.
Any tips in learning Go with a C# background? I’ve been trying to think of things to build or work on.
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No, thanks for pointing out the broken link. It should be fixed now.
As far as learning Go from a C# background goes, (bear in mind, my path on this has been meandering)
- Go Standard library documentation is excellent. It’s your new MSDN, but the source is also included
- Read the source to the standard library if you’re curious about how something works
- Go has two major strengths: Servers and command line tools. If you want to learn go for what it’s good at, these are the types of things you’ll want to start with.
- If you can afford it and haven’t already, look into getting a VPS, if you’re interested in Go servers. There are a lot of nice single-purpose servers like linx, Syncthing, Mattermost and gitea. I’ve administered all of these servers for work (mattermost, gitea’s upstream gogs) or personal use (linx, syncthing), and if you know some basic nginx, they’re very low effort.
The operational simplicity in getting most of these set up is an awesome thing. It’s not 100% unique to Go, but it’s more common in Go programs. You’ll want to learn nginx and
nohupif you do this. - If you want to also learn fossil, and check out something rather curious, I have been working on a programming language called PISC.
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Thanks so much for the links!
Getting a personal VPS is actually one of the things that sparked my interest in Go. One of my small goals is to write a CLI tool or a server of sorts. Coming up with a decently useful idea is the more challenging part. Or writing something I can run/leave running on my VPS.
I’ve been reading bits and pieces about PISC on your blog - I’ll keep thinking as well.
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One of the really different things about go is that other people’s badly written code is pretty easy to follow (assuming they haven’t done anything especially clever with reflection, which go makes very hard to do).
I’d recommend finding a small go project to use & modify (I’m hacking on a wiki I found called cowyo)
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I’ve done mostly ruby and frontend; I’ve done a year of go professionally and prefer to use software written in it on my servers (because it tends to be very stable and requires less frequent patching).
As far as language specific stuff: you shouldn’t use any of the go-specific stuff (goroutines, channels) in most applications code; let that wait until your app mostly works.
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You can always go with the classic yak shaves in terms of servers: Blogs, wikis and task-trackers.
For the first task, I’d focus on something that’s been done before, but that you might have a personal spin on. That’s why I wrote blogserv, the software behind the main Jungle Coder blog. It was a complete yak-shave, and the code isn’t super pretty or super correct. (As of right now, it doesn’t check HTTP methods when routing, for example. Thankfully, anything administrative has to be authenticated).
There are lot of fun little things I’ve done with my server and domains over the years, if nothing else, throwing up a basic web page and static files directory allows me to serve content from my server during events like game jams.
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Just sent a request :)
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Having never worked remote (yet!), but having a 70+ mile round trip commute each day really sucks. Since I’ve moved to the new office I sit about 3 feet from the restrooms, so I can hear everything. Sadly people like it warm in the office, so the thermostat is normally set to around 77-80F. Most recently speakers were installed in the ceiling, and constantly stream Pandora Business (~$30 a month).
I haven’t heard of any horrible remote work experiences, but everyone that I know who has tried it loves it. Hopefully I am able to at some point as well!
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I haven’t heard of any horrible remote work experiences
The linked article seems to be a comprehensive list of all the things you can possibly do (or have done to you) to make remote working not work. But even then a lot of it doesn’t even seem that specific to remote working; like having three different people trying to talk to you at once–if you don’t know how to stand up and say “no” when unrealistic demands are placed on your time, you’re going to have problems whether you’re remote or in an office.
A lot of the things in the article also come down to “people in my company don’t know how to deal with the fact that not everyone is in the office” which you can’t really do anything to fix other than “take care when deciding where to work”. If your company uses “how responsive are you to chats” as a measure of how productive you are, that’s a huge red flag and indicates some serious dysfunction in the organization.
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A lot of the things in the article also come down to “people in my company don’t know how to deal with the fact that not everyone is in the office” which you can’t really do anything to fix other than “take care when deciding where to work”.
I don’t think you have to surrender to the dysfunction. You can try to explain to your manager and / or colleagues how things could be better for remote team members (over video chat, not email, so they can see and hear that that you’re being constructive, not whinging).
If you try that a few times and it doesn’t work, then, yeah… I guess one potential joy of working remote for one company is you can work remote for another :)
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I can’t talk about my work, but I am immensely enjoying solving each day’s Advent of Code problem.
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Day 3 kicked my ass but day 4 was easy. If you didn’t know, we have a GitHub group/IRC channel for doing it with your fellow crustaceans.
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Yeah, I cheated for the second part Day 3 by looking it up in OEIS. That’s because I’ve been doing them at the end of the day and was afraid to miss the “deadline”. But once the pressure to get an answer quickly went away, I went back and actually redid part 2.
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@home: working on a Django app/integration for Dramatiq. It’ll have a run command and task module auto-discovery built-in, as well as an optional admin interface to manage tasks.
@work: pairing w/ some people to improve our local dev. story.
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Just if the real world problem domain is compelling.
- If I’m writing some bogus web service for some bogus business goal => unhappy.
- If I’m writing something (anything!) that I know will make people’s lives actually measurably better => happy.
Code style/language/libraries/development process is a minor factor added or subtracted from that.
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I haven’t, at least not consistently. I am not happy.
I don’t think there are very many pure software jobs that accomplish this, so I am trying to balance a desire to start my career more or less from scratch with a need to continue supporting my family through the transition.
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What about a bogus web service for a semi-bogus business goal (i.e. you don’t fault anyone for the goal existing) that reduces the number of annoyances in the life of the person doing the manual part of the work on the same goal?
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Well, the same thing as the last time: porting my IRC daemon from C to Go. I’ve had some problems with motivation, though that has sorted itself out and now I have before me the task of rewriting about 4000 lines of fairly straight-forward “business logic” code. It’s mind-numbingly boring and fairly time-consuming.
Since this is part of an over-ambitious project where I replace most GUI/TUI applications that I use, this rewrite being a warm-up exercise for Go in a problem domain that I’m comfortable with, I am considering starting a blog-of-sorts. I’m not sure if I could keep it alive for long as one needs to remember to describe the steps he takes and put them in context for readers which, needless to say, takes its time, but also as a side effect often provides interesting insights. There’s definitely a lot to write about.
What does one use to share a stream of short updates? I don’t feel like spamming an aggregator with them would be very productive and summarizing events at fixed time intervals seems like a hassle.
I’d recommend http://jrnl.sh/ if you want to quickly do streams of updates directly from command-line.
I personally like my fork which has one additional feature: native exporting directly to HTML https://git.timetoplatypus.com/timetoplatypus/jrnl
Keeping a log/record of things you have learned, wanted to share, or ran into in an issue tracker for the project would work probably. Possibly just a markdown file? Makes it easy to at a later date write about the process from beginning to end.