danielna

Hi Mehr,

I'm a leukemia survivor (AML) and was diagnosed when I was 21 and in undergrad, roughly 8 years ago. I started www.cheekswab.org in 2012 to educate people, especially ethnic minorities, about the exact complications facing minorities who need bone marrow transplants. I also wanted to fill a need that I saw around direct communication around what it's like to be a donor, what the statistics are, what the process is like, and interviews with real people who have gone through the donation process recapping their experiences. I haven't done much with Cheekswab in the last several years but my new years resolution for 2015 was to figure out a path forward with it.

I live and work in NYC as a software engineer and have a lot of experience running these sorts of drives, particularly on college campuses. Feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to talk, whether about leukemia or bone marrow drives: username at gmail.

Please delete this. This is in poor taste.

I was being sarcastic, which admittedly is lost on the web.

Software dev is reduced as easily to an overly simplistic implementation as business savvy is. I think we're making the same point.

I had a lawn mowing business when I was 16. I had marketing, a service and collected payments.

What's the point of business school?

I'm in the summer batch. I put in my notice yesterday at work and saved for many months to have enough money to live in NYC and not starve.

Attending hackerschool is not solely a matter of circumstance but intention. If you want something enough you'll do what you need to do in order to get it.

While it is a very easy "excuse" to hide behind, I believe in holistic admissions qualifications. I think charts of SAT score x race x admissions are as good of a metric of assessing a potential student as college GPA are of assessing a potential employee. To some degree there's a baseline expectation for the practical purposes of filtering (with lots of outliers for various reasons), but at the end of the day it doesn't say much about how intelligent or capable someone really is. Intelligence and capability can't be reduced to a test-taking skill.

I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.

FWIW, a friend who writes for a popular online food publication says gourmet donuts are the new cupcakes.

Cool idea. I'm a diehard Washington Wizards fan (sad, I know) and tend to unfollow a lot of players in favor of reports/beat writers/bloggers. The tweets are just more substantive for basketball junkies. A couple of random thoughts:

1) Remove the directed tweets -- i.e. "@user blah blah blah"

2) Beat writers/bloggers act as a filter and tend to retweet interesting player tweets anyway

3) It'd be awesome to see a real-time, in-game twitter dashboard like how you're displaying things now, but with those bloggers/reporters. It can be hard to keep track of it all on a single-line twitter feed... maybe a tweet that gets a lot of "action" somehow (retweets, replies, not sure how you'd measure it) could be displayed more prominently.

I think part of the problem here is that many devs often don't understand how much power they yield over their own situation. If you're good enough to be depended upon in every panic situation, that means you have more say than you think in the circumstances surrounding your work -- specifically regarding pay, scope creep, working environment, etc. If you don't assert yourself nobody will coddle you, because that's how capitalism works. The goal of the company is to maximize profits, but the cost (both time and $) in finding a talented, hard-working employee is huge and employers know that. So you have to stand up for yourself because you hold more cards than you think. If you have a passive personality where you never push back and don't stand up for yourself you will get completely rolled over.

I've met devs who only consider one side of the employee-employer agreement -- "don't get fired, don't get fired, don't get fired." What about the other side? "If ___ quits, we are screwed."

This is the reason why we invest in our skills, this is why we read things like HN, this is why we make ourselves indispensable. Because a higher level of skill, both technically, socially and in business, not only makes you a greater employee, but it gives you more autonomy over your own circumstances.

I don't agree with the comments here that encourage people to half-ass their 9-5 because "you owe the company nothing." I encourage you to do the opposite -- become so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. Be such a valuable perspective/contributor/asset that they shudder at the thought of losing you. Be great and the power will follow.

And if they still treat you like shit, leave. If this doesn't apply to your industry, leave the industry. Good, smart devs are hard to find and someone else will pay good money for you.