Threads for utsav
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Don’t give aphyr any ideas….
In all seriousness, I’m not sure how I’d react to this. I’ve played Factorio a little, but I don’t think I’d react well to someone judging my abilities over it. When I played it, I was always comfortable with just small-scale quarry operations. While some people get really far in it, it seems way too much like work for me to bother with that kind of thing.
That, and the giant bugs in your codebase aren’t trying to eat you.
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This is how I feel when a company has picked a very specific library and judges me in my entirety over my skill in that one library. I think using Factorio as a benchmark of how to play Factorio is opposite of hiring for aptitude but also lazy analysis of the hiring company.
We need someone who is good at Linux I maintain Ubuntu *points to printed job description* It says LinuxCompanies making Factorio an arbitrary waterline would be surprising if I ran into it but the overall idea is not surprising.
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Yeah. This seems especially bad in Ruby shops. It’s super frustrating applying for roles that are supposedly language agnostic but then (after like 7 interviews and technicals) being required to do a substantial take-home project in Rails. I don’t think these companies realize how magical Rails is and how you’re immediately knee-capping someone who doesn’t have any experience with that particular ecosystem.
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In all seriousness, I’m not sure how I’d react to this.
Being in the process of multiple interviews and looking for a job actually, I can easily imagine myself in this situation. I would laugh, do it seriously and get along with the rest of my day. It is not worse and better than the technical interview, the ones when I have to explained my CV in length or state my defaults or focus on this specific software when I stated that I used of the alternative on my CV or any roleplay.
Feeling insulted because of a job interview was what drove me mad in the beginning of the the process and I had to work a lot on myself to not take everything personal. I ask pseudo-naive questions to get a hold of the mentality of the company and try not to judge them on their processes.
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I’d have to pause a bit to decide whether to just stop the interview and leave, or cause a scene first.
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Factorio was the first game I ever noticed occupied the new (but on the grow) niche that I like to call “not actually a game, but a job”
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I started a side project called SimpleBlog. The idea was to auto publish Google Docs as blog posts with one click. I figured there were enough people who didn’t care at all about dealing with arcane web editors with too much configuration and not enough features in their word editor. For example, Substack is all the rage right now, and it still doesn’t have inline code blocks.
I made about a third of an MVP and got lazy and convinced myself no one would use it.
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Hah, I had the same idea, and also abandoned it after building an MVP. I never had intentions of monetizing / publicizing, so for me the motivation was having a reasonable offline mobile editor (the Google Docs app) available to write trip journal entries while out in the wilderness.
I dropped the project after I realized I don’t write this kind of content generally, and it’s not due to a lack of software.
If anyone’s interested in a more complete implementation of this idea, Blot may fit the description.
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My last day at my current job is on Tuesday, and starting at a new job as soon as immigration is sorted out.
Excited :)
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Congrats! My last day at my job is Friday.
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Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Ludwig Göransson videos where he talks about his composing process, and I want to try making some movie soundtrack too. One side effect of buying a good mic (for podcasts) is that I can try recording my voice and other instruments I have lying around, like a kalimba I got as a gift last year.
But I’ll most probably be too lazy to set it up.
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Taking a good break. Cleaning up the house.
Doing some reading on some basic bazel rules.
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Restarting batch jobs at work this week. Recording two podcast episodes.
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Bash, but as soon as the logic seems to get more complex, I use Python.
Lately, I’ve been using Go for small command line tools as well. This flag library is essential since the inbuilt flag library is wonky. It’s fast to compile, nice to easily make API calls in parallel, parse/spit out JSON.
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I have a similar approach, but I have started using urfave/cli for command line applications in Go.
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Tools like Render will gain a lot of popularity.
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Weren’t these more popular in the past, when Heroku and App Engine were new? I’m not sure why there would be a huge resurgence of PaaS, or if just the pricing of Render can start that trend again..
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Waiting for mortgage refinance to go through.
More performance reviews. Two coworkers are up for promotion, so I’m obligated to be less lazy about it.
Restarted emails with a few future guests of my podcast. For the first time, I’m speaking to a professor of distributed systems, I’m excited for that.
I also learnt that the author of the NYT opinion piece on Unionization at Google (and the chair of the Alphabet Union) is someone I knew in high school. I told a bunch of my friends but no one cared.
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Performance reviews. Very little coding (mostly tweaking configs). Refinancing home loan (rates in USA going down significantly).
Spending time with family otherwise.
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Working on periodic deletion of some garbage metadata from an internal system that’s eating up ~100 beefy database hosts (not counting replicas). It’s more boring than it sounds. Might not be the best thing to do before everyone’s on vacation.
Editing my podcast episode with @voldyman. Thanks lobste.rs for introducing us :-)
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Can you develop it, dry-run it and only really execute it when everyone’s back? That’s my usual approach when I do garbage collection stuff before weekends.
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We use this as well, and someone built a tracker called “albatross” to track migration progress visually. It works by grepping the codebase for a configured grep pattern every commit, and putting the result in a db. In theory, visual progress is nice to show off progress, especially to leadership looking to de-prioritize things..
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Inviting (via cold email) a few engineers and professors to be a guest of my podcast. Otherwise it’s just going to be a bunch of Dropboxers ranting about internal systems for the next ten episodes. Have a <10% response rate so far :-(
If anyone works in distributed systems and is interested in talking about their systems, fun outage stories, etc. please reach out!
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This was a good listen. I enjoyed it.
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This is the worst article I’ve ever seen on the front page of Lobsters. The author decides that he doesn’t like some of the more political assertions in some of Paul Graham’s writings on his blog (since, of course, any critique of the American left is “reactionary”):
Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.”
…and decides to go fisk through everything Graham has ever written in order to find incorrect opinions on programming languages of all things as a way to discredit him and to prove some nebulous point about why Graham isn’t such a great figure to look towards. The author spends a handful of paragraphs basically bullying Graham because his pet project, a programming language called Arc, didn’t take off (except it sort of did: Hacker News is written in Arc, and that’s all beside the point: Paul Graham is a venture capitalist, not a programming language designer!)
The article then concludes:
This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.
Like, what are we supposed to get from this? Some kind of self-congratulatory gratification at how big of a smackdown the author gave Paul Graham by setting him straight on programming languages? It’s hard to find a more obvious case of motivated reasoning. I thought people on Lobsters were smarter than to fall for this nonsense.
I’m not sure how this arrived at the front page of Lobsters. This is really torrid stuff. This is some guy who feels threatened or offended by some of Paul Graham’s political takes and decided that it’s time to discredit him through thinly disguised bullying. There’s no other substance to this poison-soaked article.
Get this off the front page. Honestly.
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I had never heard of the SOX Act before this, so I’m pretty curious what people here think of this strategy with regards to the “we started doing this for SOX compliance” angle. Is it possible the employees were subject to gaslighting by lawyers?
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Wow, you’re young ;)
SOX was a HUGE issue about a decade ago. Any (US) publicly traded company had to do a ton of internal processes to ensure (for example) that devs weren’t introducing code paths that would skim revenue.[1]
If you’re not publicly traded, SOX doesn’t apply to you (of course, if you plan on going public in the future, you need to have these processes in place, so it “bleeds over”).
Is it possible the employees were subject to gaslighting by lawyers?
Not sure what you’re referring to. Do you think corporate lawyers are inventing rules to mess with company’s employees for the hell of it?
[1] amusingly enough, the act was written in reaction to the dismal failures of some of the Big 5 auditing firms in keeping fraudulent companies in check - but who was responsible for ensuring compliance with the new rules? Auditing firms!
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I helped with my company’s efforts to get to SOX compliance. Admittedly, I haven’t looked at our mobile app repositories, but I don’t think it was extremely painful for them. Most of the work was in ensuring the right set of teams had reviewed changes to parts of the codebase that fall into SOX criteria.
SOC and SOX compliance is actually a pretty low bar imo. Requirements like audit logs to ensure you only push deployments that have been tested - are actually fairly reasonable. They’re also always negotiable too - for example, you can make an argument that in emergencies, you can’t run your 2 hour test suite to push out a small hotfix, so you will ensure that the tests pass within 24 hours at the revision that was pushed, and you will track this via a Jira ticket. Lawyers are okay with that.
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Not sure what you’re referring to. Do you think corporate lawyers are inventing rules to mess with company’s employees for the hell of it?
I’m not sure either, I was simply repeating this question in hopes of an answer not constrained by character length. I’m assuming what Pierre meant is that their own process at Square is much simpler so he thought that the apparent complexity of Trello’s new strategy was a result of lawyers doing lawyer things.
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Lawyers and auditors tend to err on the side of caution. No-one wants to be the defendant in a SOX-related lawsuit and find out that the judge’s reading of the statute requires you to have an immutable copy of your source code throughout all time.
Square is publicly traded too, and they might have made another decision with regards to this. If it ever goes to court we’ll get clarification. Ain’t US legislation fun?
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Gave an internal talk about our company no longer pushing for microservices, but instead, launching an internal serverless system where logically related routes are deployed independently as a lambda of sorts. A central team takes care of operations, like pushes. Maybe someday we’ll publish a tech blog about this.
Worked on a quick newsletter on Go for Internal Services.
Hopefully recording my first episode of SRE Podcast.
Finally, baked a cake with one of my friends to celebrate Biden’s victory.
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They’re not lambdas in the AWS sense. What we did was wrap the existing Python controllers with gRPC, which made every controller an RPC service. Then we grouped these RPC services into logical components, and made each component its own deployment. And then we use Envoy to transcode http requests to gRPC.
This gives us push independence (one route’s breakage doesn’t block the entire monolith’s push) and isolation. Gives us a bunch of benefits of microservices for “free”.
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Waiting for immigration paperwork to come in so I can start my new job. In the meantime I’m just vibing and working through my blogpost backlog.
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immigration paperwork is a pain… And 2020 doesn’t help. Good luck.. I need to do the same cause my visa will expire next year.
Anyway this week I’m mostly working on group chats in Jami and file transfer. I also continue some personal projects, bots, fix my oven and start to create a christmas gift for my parents.
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A random company idea - make it dead simple for a company to hire a remote worker in a new country, by acting as an intermediary. It seems silly that every company has to figure out 401k and other equivalents for every country they need a presence in. This probably already exists.
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I follow someone on twitter that’s running a business sorting this out for people, although the name of them and the business has entirely escaped me.
I seem to remember seeing tweets about the legal hoops they’ve had to jump through to sort this out, and they were only available in a couple of countries at the time. USP is basically what you’ve described though, they take care of the paperwork for business and employee so it works out easily for both ends.
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Playing with my new Oculus Quest 2. Maybe spending some time writing a post on https://reliability.substack.com/ about some tips on running Go in production and sharing some protips.
Migrating our codebase at work to use esbuild so that we can move fast without breaking things.