jplahn

I'm the manager for the team that owns our code host integrations. You're correct that we support non-git code hosts via a conversion to git.

We're currently exploring what it means to support non-git VCSs natively in Sourcegraph, but we're not there yet.

I'm an EM at Sourcegraph and happy to chat with anybody who thinks they might be interested in helping us grow. We're stacked top to bottom with high quality people that truly care about building a great place to work and leading with empathy. This is the place to be if you're tired of experiencing Sunday scaries every week and want to enjoy what you do and who you do it with.

Please send me a note if you have even a passing interesting in any of our roles! You can find my info in my bio.

I recently finished reading the book Never Split the Difference and I would highly recommend it. It's a slightly different take on the traditional negotiation tropes we've all heard.

I've managed to employ many of the techniques in my day to day as a PM with success, but his discussions on salary negotiation resonated with me. I'm sure you can find some notes on the book to derive 50% of the value, but the author's stories and explanations drove it home for me.

This is tangentially related to something I've been struggling with for the last year. I began getting into photography about a year and as an attempt to surround myself with inspiration, I followed many of the top landscape photographers on Instagram. While their images are beautiful and they tend to position their photographs from the perspective of "environmentalism", I can't help but feel like they've done as much damage as anything else.

Two examples come to mind. Last year, the USFS extended the lottery permit season in the Enchantments by six weeks due to increasing popularity, no doubt fueled by the incredible pictures of it littered across Instagram. Iceland is a top destination for photographers (for good reason) and I traveled there two months ago, no doubt influenced by the pictures I've seen. But it felt like the country was beginning to get ruined by me and my fellow tourists.

It feels like we're beginning to lose the hidden gems as more and more photographers rush to be the first. But even the non-hidden gems are beginning to get exposed more and more often. But I see the same spots being visited by all photographers and I don't see how they'll handle the continued influx of people:

  * Banff NP
  * Dolomites
  * Iceland
  * Lofoten
  * Greenland

It's great that people are interested in seeing the world, but I'd say the set of people that love photographing amazing locations and preserving them is much smaller than the set of people that only care about the former. That said, I'm probably more of a contributor to this than I'd care to admit.

I know Amazon gets a generally bad rap around HN, but my organization at least pays for all SDEs to attend one conference a year. While not everybody takes advantage of it, those that have typically provide several brown bag sessions to disseminate their learnings to the team.

I've found it very useful both to attend and to learn from those that attended, particularly when I can get the highlights (and potentially new ideas!) of a conference I'd never attend personally.

You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday alone would count for something..

I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.

I can't disagree. I love Gitlab but it would be hard to take a > 50% pay cut if I were to work there.

That being said, I have full confidence in Gitlab and know they'll continue to improve these things!

A lot of people ask why Instagram took off and get a lot of different answers; I think that's the beauty of it.

I wasn't much of an Instagram user for a long time until I started getting into photography. I'm still a total photography noob, but now my feed of pictures is a combination of friends and amazing photographers that serve as inspiration. I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Whereas I spent time on Facebook scrolling through vitriol, my time on Instragram is a constant stream of friends lives and beautiful pictures.

I've realized a shallow social network is all the social network I need.

It's the standard in vim.

This is tangentially related (and wholly anecdotal), but one thing I've noticed is that when dealing with other engineers or managers, it's often very easy to tell who has kids and who doesn't. I find myself drawn towards those who have them because they have a knack for understanding people better and can approach mentorship on another level. Easily the best engineer I've ever worked with had a couple of kids, only worked 30 hours a week, but did more to grow team members than any other engineer has done in 20 hours more per week.

It's not a perfect 1 -> 1 to between kids and age obviously, but working with older engineers (and managers/TPMs) has been invaluable for the growth early in my career and I wish we had more of them.