hansef

This - if you have to fetch data from or output data to outside of the AWS ecosystem, the 512mb /tmp limit pushes you into the additional (relative) complexity of having to run on Fargate pretty quickly. Just had to deal with this for a content ingest job involving pulling a couple GB of data from an FTP server, processing it and pushing it into an RDS database on an hourly basis. Would have been super simple if the file was on S3 already.

I live in LA and travel to the Bay for work frequently. I can walk to a Metro station from my house in Highland Park in 10 minutes and be at Union Station in 13 minutes. If I could spend 3 hours on the train to SF from Union instead of driving to Burbank, arriving an hour before my flight, and then spending an hour on a plane, I would do it every time.

But the COST of the interest is in year 0 dollars. I may be buying Cokes in 2015 dollars, but if the price is set in 1900 dollars I'm getting a shitload more Cokes.

But I'm buying a $500k house in 2015 dollars. If we peg the appreciation of the house only to the long-term inflation average of 3.22% over the next 30 years and I purchase the house today at current 30-year fixed rates of 4.09%, I'm going to pay a total of $868,713 over the lifetime of the loan for something which will be worth $1,178,775 (in 2045 dollars). I will have made $310,062 in 2045 dollars, while also having a place to live the whole time.

Even if we factor in other costs during that period beyond loan servicing, such as insurance, taxes, utility repairs and maintenance it seems unlikely I will have LOST money in the process.

It's not a terribly GOOD investment, but it's not a financially asinine choice either.

Poverty may be a necessary condition for "startup" success in the somewhat narrow definition of a startup common in our industry, but the idea that it's necessary for BUSINESS success is total nonsense, which is a useful thing to remember when you're feeling artificially burdened by being over 30 and middle class(!) The bulk of new wealth in human history has been created by people who already have some modicum of existing wealth, or access to it.

I'm as much a grammar-and-spelling nazi as anyone and can quote you chapter and verse the difference between it's and its, your and you're, effect and affect - but considering I've misused every one of these within the last week in email and sundry comments scattered across the interwebs, I'd argue this is not much more than "sometimes we all type fast and fuck up" ;)

Anyone want to speculate on how many years it will be till we see a similar announcement on a trial program for e-hailing self-driving Uber cars in SF? The future is a cool place to live.

Pet projects? Absolutely not, although never a minus. ;) More: are you engaged with the community enough to be aware of the current ecosystem, (handwaving) "best practices", libraries/gems, etc. If someone claims to have been building Rails apps for 5 years, but has never heard of Devise and Carrierwave, it's definitely a red flag for me. If you're trying to get a job on the Google search team and can't whiteboard a quicksort it's going to be an equivalent red flag for them. I'm trying to attract a specific type of developers for a specific kind of programming work where caring about this kind of stuff is useful as a signaling factor to me.

It's not about requiring everyone who works for us to be a 23 year old with no family or life who spends every night hacking on shit, just about a baseline standard for community engagement. Lack of Github account with some level of activity (even if that's just starred repos, forks, etc) is a pretty strong indication someone wouldn't meet that level of engagement, and so wouldn't be a good match.

Depends on what stack you're working with, and the associated broad engineering culture. I haven't hired anyone who didn't have a Github repo in 2 years, out of 18+ FTEs and contractors - but we're a Rails/Scala/node shop building fancy web apps for startups. Not having a huge OSS track record is fine, but not having a Github account at all would be kinda weird these days. If we were doing embedded systems stuff or financial modeling software or game development, probably a lot less relevant. The "show us your Github, not your resume" line in a lot of job posts is more about the specific engineering culture in a particular kind of startup development, not a hard and fast rule for every software firm everywhere.

That said, if you're a Rails developer and you don't have a Github account, I'm still probably not going to read your resume.

Kept hitting the next button until I realized it was not, in fact, the play button. Nice concept and work though! Would eat again.

Compassion is a great one, a trait I feel like we don't spend enough time talking about as an element of success. I've worked with many extremely talented, genuinely bright people whose business skills suffered because of a lack of compassion and empathy: for their users, coworkers, or people they generally (and probably correctly) considered less intelligent than themselves. Making a conscious and genuine effort to understand someone else's position and needs will get you MUCH further than dogmatic self-righteousness - even if you really are right. ;)