desmondmonster

Joined 15 years ago

Karma

Submissions

Member since

Sep 22

founder of EMPEX, cohost of ElixirTalk, founding member of Erlang Ecosystem Foundation.

I like to play music, surf, and work on my motorcycle.

@desmondmonster

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago

I build Tiki Tube Amps - hifi stereos inside carved tiki heads. The tikis are carved from solid logs and hollowed out before I wire up all the circuitry inside. It's all analog vacuum-tube-driven circuits soldered point-to-point.

They're really difficult to make but super fun to listen to. When I'm carving I have to plan out how the circuit will be laid out, ensure there's enough space inside for the transformers, consider grounding schemes, etc. Plus mounting components and soldering inside a cramped log is not easy. But when they're done they have such personality. No other stereo listens to music _with_ you.

I love them because they combine many of my disparate interests - woodworking, tiki, electronics, soldering, music, vacuum tubes, metalworking. They're also an excuse to have friends over and throw parties.

edit: here's a video where I build one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xo-TGkFvOg

Comment · 1 year ago

What editor did they use to write this code? I think this predated vi, and folks were probably using older tools they were familiar with. ed? How much of the source code could they see at once? Was there such thing as a "full screen editor"? If anyone can illuminate the development environment/workflow from the late 1970s I'd love to hear about it.

Comment · 5 years ago

> A cybertuck is a car for programmers who make too much money and want to feel like Robocop.

And Rivian trucks are for folks who want to feel like Bomberman.

Comment · 5 years ago

Payitoff | Fullstack/Backend Engineers, Devops/Sysadmin | USA | FULLY REMOTE - US Timezones only

hi! We're Payitoff, and we're making a dent in Student Loans that affect 46,000,000 Americans. Our main products are an API and embeddable widget used by fintechs and larger institutions to power in-app student loan experiences. We also built our own infrastructure around loan aggregation and automating outcomes, including plan enrollment, certification, and payment processing.

We're looking for fullstack engineers and a network security specialist. The company is ~15 people, mostly engineering, and we're well-funded.

Tech stack: * Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView * Postgres * AWS - Cloudformation * TailwindCSS

We're happy to teach you Elixir. Bonus points for fintech/payments experience. We have great benefits including half-day Fridays, extensive time off, family-oriented culture, health/401k/529/student loan contributions, and a professional development budget. Women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups are especially welcome.

Please email desmond [at] payitoff.io if interested. Thanks :)

Comment · 5 years ago

Payitoff | Frontend & Backend Engineers, Devops/Sysadmin, Product Manager | USA | FULLY REMOTE

hi! We're Payitoff, and we help borrowers pay off their student loans. Not through refinancing (though that's one option) but by doing the hard work of understanding and codifying federal repayment programs and awards to give borrowers the best possible guidance on their journey. Our main products are an API and embeddable widget used by fintechs and larger institutions to power in-app student loan experiences. We also built our own infrastructure around loan aggregation and automating outcomes, including plan enrollment, certification, and payment processing.

We're looking for frontend and backend engineers, a devops/sysadmin to help with compliance, and one product manager to accelerate our team ahead of payments resuming in February. The company is ~10 people, mostly engineering, and we're well-funded.

Tech stack: * Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView * Postgres * AWS * TailwindCSS

Please email desmond [at] payitoff.io if interested. Thanks :)

Comment · 5 years ago

Ironically, Europe has a higher concentration of Elixirists given Erlang was invented there. My hiring attitude is that paying for senior developers is cheaper in the long run given their ability to make better decisions.

> I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers.

Emphatically no. Having more servers costs more than just hosting, there's maintenance, orchestration, and communications complexity.

While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use?

Comment · 5 years ago

It sounds like you're recruiting from a pool of junior developers and convincing them to use Elixir instead of attracting folks who are already interested in the language. Not only is that community sizable, but it's experienced- surveys of attendees at my conference (https://empex.co) consistently show that 50% have >5 years and 30% have >10 years in the industry.

Elixirists really are senior developers and Elixir is usually their fourth or fifth language. If it's taking your hires years to get up to speed, then I would look at your hiring practices before blaming the community.

As for libraries, I challenge anyone to name an unmet dependency in Elixir that is 1) trivial to implement and 2) not for some niche application.

My company has built a scalable platform with 3 engineers. I don't even think about maintenance, I just think about delivering new features. So business wins are higher velocity + lower hosting costs + less downtime + senior team. You don't need to be WhatsApp to appreciate those benefits.

Comment · 6 years ago

Payitoff | New York, Los Angeles | Software Engineer | Full-time, Remote/Onsite, USA | https://payitoff.io

Payitoff is a Student Loan API that crunches government regulations to save borrowers tens of thousands of dollars on their student loans. We're not a refinancing company. We do the hard work of simplifying the complex world of student loans so borrowers have an ally along their journey to pay it off. Our customers are fintechs, financial advisors, and banks who consume our insights and leverage our infrastructure to provide student loan tools to their users.

We're a small (<10) engineering-focused company (the CEO wrote the MVP in Elixir) and we'd like to stay that way. We're fully remote across the US, but if you're in New York or LA you're welcome to share an office! If you're looking for a chance to dig into a dense domain that makes a huge impact on ordinary people please get in touch.

Our tech stack: Elixir, Postgres.

We're looking for experienced Software Engineers (5+ YOE), preferably with Elixir/Erlang experience who have been impacted by Student Loans (either you, a friend, or loved one). Fintech experience preferred, but not necessary. Also open to the right Product Manager, but as we're an API-driven company this isn't a fit for some.

If interested please contact me directly: desmond [at] payitoff.io

thanks and have fun!

Comment · 6 years ago

I've been using Elixir professionally for the last ~5 years on over a dozen projects.

I was originally drawn to it because of its superior support for websockets. It can trivially handle shitzillions* of simultaneous connections and thus make fully realtime, dynamic web applications within reach of small teams of developers. Other languages _can_ do this, but with much more complexity and cost to host and develop.

Currently I'm working on a fintech API that doesn't use websockets :). Elixir is a great choice because its syntax is the perfect balance of being expressive but not dense. I find that describing a solution in my head translates almost perfectly to a series of functions. It's my go-to language for any task outside of scripting.

I'd compare the experience of using Elixir to drinking a glass of lemonade on a warm summer day. Everything seems to happen very easily.

* technical term

Comment · 7 years ago

SEEKING WORK | Product, Software, and Culture

Location: Los Angeles, California

I'm an experienced consultant who brings product ideas to life, trains up teams on engineering processes and skills, and builds cultures of fun, respect, and empathy. I've led large teams and small ones; my specialties are listening and helping.

My primary language is Elixir - I founded the EMPEX conferences and cohost the ElixirTalk podcast. If you're thinking of getting the next big realtime platform off the ground, let's talk.

Other languages: Ruby, Javascript, Objective-C, Swift, Clojure, C Datastores: Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, MySQL, MongoDB (Please don't ask me to use mongo) Other tech I've used in production: AWS, nginx, various Linuxy stuff, Rails, React, React Native