aato

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
17
Submissions
19
Member since
Jun 30
meet.hn/city/ca-Old-Toronto

Socials: - linkedin.com/in/alexalksne - github.com/aato

Interests: AI/ML, Art, Fitness

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Came here curious to see if you'd post; was not disappointed.
Comment · 3 years ago
Can you elaborate on how Jira helps you estimate?
Comment · 3 years ago
The John Carmack interview with Lex Friedman - it reminded me that becoming a specialized IC can be a viable terminal career state; that moving into management needn’t be the ultimate goal.
Comment · 5 years ago
Nest Wealth | Toronto/Remote | Full-Time | https://www.nestwealth.com

We are empowering financial firms and institutions to provide better advice to more people than ever before.

You will be building a platform that will increase our ability to scale by 100x; one that provides the best possible B2B wealth management experiences. We have been chosen by some of Canada’s largest financial institutions, including the National Bank of Canada, to modernize their platforms. Founded in 2014, Nest Wealth created Canada's first SaaS-based wealth management platform to ensure investors have access to sophisticated, personalized, and transparent wealth management services.

We are looking for Senior Software Engineers who have experience with: - Domain Driven Design (DDD)

  - architecting message-based systems

  - building ETL jobs

  - working with messaging queues

  - CI/CD automation
Tech Stack: AWS (ECS, CloudFormation, RDS, Glue, Lambda), GitLab CI/CD, Postgres, Kafka, Docker, Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, Angular

Get to know the team: https://www.beforeyouapply.com/team/engineering-at-nest-weal...

Apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/nestwealth/ccda5d14-a426-460d-8a0a-802...

Comment · 5 years ago
Nest Wealth | Toronto/Remote | Full-Time | https://www.nestwealth.com

We are empowering financial firms and institutions to provide better advice to more people than ever before.

You will be building a platform that will increase our ability to scale by 100x; one that provides the best possible B2B wealth management experiences. We have been chosen by some of Canada’s largest financial institutions, including the National Bank of Canada, to modernize their platforms. Founded in 2014, Nest Wealth created Canada's first SaaS-based wealth management platform to ensure investors have access to sophisticated, personalized, and transparent wealth management services.

We are looking for Senior Software Engineers who have experience with:

  - Domain Driven Design (DDD)

  - architecting message-based systems

  - building ETL jobs

  - working with messaging queues

  - CI/CD automation
Tech Stack: AWS (ECS, CloudFormation, RDS, Glue, Lambda), GitLab CI/CD, Postgres, Kafka, Docker, Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, Angular

Get to know the team: https://www.beforeyouapply.com/team/engineering-at-nest-weal...

Apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/nestwealth/ccda5d14-a426-460d-8a0a-802...

Comment · 9 years ago
I might get a lot of flack for this, but the one option no one ever seems to mention in discussions like these is to “simply” cancel both your wifi and data plan. I did this almost nine months ago and neither my tech. career nor my social life has been impacted by any meaningful margin. Granted, I make more trips to Starbucks/other free wifi locations now, but my evenings are my own - they’re also significantly more peaceful.
Comment · 9 years ago
Very broadly speaking, I would say yes. Again this is just my take, but I argue that different sets of behaviours are indicative of different identities.

For example, at work I may keep to myself and be very quiet - in that setting my actions would define me as an introvert. With my friends I may be more outgoing and talkative, which is more characteristic of an extrovert. So I have two identities depending on my behaviour. I am not my introverted self when with friends, and not my extroverted self when at work.

Comment · 9 years ago
Interesting! I would say that I am living both normally and abnormally since "I", in this case, is referring to two entities which are indistinguishable in terms of their behaviour.
Comment · 9 years ago
This kind of stuff is fun to think about. In my opinion identity is based on behaviour, not composition. So long as an entity matches a given behaviour profile, then for all intents and purposes that entity IS the thing that the behaviour is normally attributed to. Kind of like Duck Typing: "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck."

So my response to your car example is that both vehicles are "the same car" since both get you around and both are owned by you.

In that sense, as your behaviour changes so does your identity. If you were able to 100% accurately encode all the actions you could ever take into a Markov Chain, then I would argue that Markov Chain is what makes you "you" at that point in time.

Comment · 9 years ago
Hey All! I spent the last couple of months building Mosho.ws. Essentially Mosho == Bitly + Emojis + SAAS. Specifically it's a service that can shorten a URL into a link composed of emoji.

It keeps track of detailed analytics (clicks, sources, mediums, cities, countries, browsers, platforms, and devices) and supports 888 modern-day emojis (unintentional; also I'm now reluctant about adding more emojis as I want to hold on to that number haha).

You can use the service as is, or brand it under your own custom domain. As a dev this is my first time delving into sales, design, and marketing; I'd love to get everyone's first impressions as I'm always looking for feedback!

Comment · 10 years ago
Last week I saw a comment by @runnr_az re: his emoji domain registration engine (https://xn--qeiaa.ws). I was immediately excited by the prospect of building something novel and after some brainstorming settled on an emoji URL shortener registered under http://xn--dk8h6i.ws (text-friendly name: http://Mosho.ws). My hubris was great - this was clearly an original idea that no one in the entire history of the internet had thought of. I immediately began working on a prototype using the MEAN stack (minus Angular as that seemed overkill for something so simple) with full confidence that I was to be the Mark Zuckerberg of emoji URLs.

The original version simply mapped a given domain to a randomly-chosen combination of Unicode 6.0 emojis (the ones that your original iPhone 4S supported) - nothing more. I was about to start sharing around the site when I came across http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws (Linkmoji) and http://xn--cr8hhg.ws on Product Hunt - two great emoji URL shorteners that had already beaten me to the punch - doh!

After my ego finished deflating I began to think of ways to improve on the original concept. I assumed that the most-desired feature would be custom emoji combinations so I added that first (your custom alias can be between 1 and 100 emojis). I also noticed that emoji URLs don't play nice with social media - like, at all (Twitter being the only exception at the time of this post). Through a lot of manual testing I narrowed down the URL formats that would be supported (and autolinked) by all the major players (Product Hunt, Hacker News, Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr) and displayed them in a tabulated list upon shortening.

I also added detailed analytics. Originally I was just tracking clicks but ended up adding sources, mediums, cities, countries, browsers, platforms, and devices. Finally I added support for Unicode 6.1, 7.0, and 8.0 emojis which are what all modern phones offer - it currently supports 888 emojis (not intentional but awesome nonetheless).

All in all it took about three days to build the core functionality and another four to polish the User Experience (I'm a backend dev by trade so frontend work doesn't come as naturally to me). I'm sure there are many ways in which Mosho can be improved and I look forward to everyone's feedback! Finally I'm greatly thankful for http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws and http://xn--cr8hhg.ws - their efforts inspired me to really push myself with this product - it wouldn't have been as polished had it not been for them.

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