oacgnol

I was laid off along with most of the engineering staff at the startup I was working at in February due to lack of funding. Since I'm based in NYC and my colleagues were very well connected people, the software community immediately reached out (like sharks smelling blood in the water, but in a good way :D) and most of us landed somewhere within a month or two.

It was quite a shock the way we were all let go and it seemed to catch many of us by surprise. I've been through this kind of event twice now in my career and it sucks, but I recognize that we are still in a really great market for software jobs right now, so there's nothing for me to cry about other than getting to work with that particularly awesome team anymore.

Echoing any recommendations for 'Scala for the Impatient' - it is a fantastic beginner/intermediate book that gets you productive pretty quickly, so much so that I'm planning on having an intern who has no Scala experience go through it this summer.

I agree wholeheartedly with you, to me it's a form of humblebragging. It's definitely a nice thing to be in high demand and 'complaining' about recruiters knocking down the door seems so arrogant and unaware.

The low quality spam I can do without, but it's never anything to whine about, filter and move on if it's a problem.

I've been through a few 'crunch modes' before and while there was a general feeling of "wow, we accomplished that" afterwards. Looking back, however, I now realize how profound of a hangover it produced in me and some of my teammates, and the hard truth is that it permanently takes a toll (e.g. sluggishness, lost trust, reduced motivation) that you may never get back wherever you are, at least in my experience. The fallout, it seems, truly underscores the 'nuclear option' moniker.

I think this is the most reasonable take I've read and encompasses the whole "right tool for the job" mindset that I like.

I've found that when starting a new project I get paralyzed with coming up with the perfect data model that will also scale in the future, so I'd rather punt, take the tradeoffs that come with schemaless DBs, and keep a plan to migrate to something like Postgres in the backlog. Holding on to our tools too tightly is IMO how projects get crippled.

Thank you so much for the hard work. I've been using Skeleton for a personal project even though it hadn't been updated in over 2 years. As a (mostly) backend developer, Skeleton has proven to be the best possible starting point for me to learn on; there's nothing tricky about it.

This is a very nice early Christmas present!

Can't a man walk down the street without being offered a job?

I've found this to be a problem with reading technical books on my Kindle. I'm constantly flipping back and forth between examples and text and it's really not as good (read: not as fast) as flipping physical pages.

Can you estimate how much faster your processing is now vs. before on MySQL? I find it interesting that your cluster is only 6 nodes - relatively small compared to what I've seen and from what I've read about. It'd be interesting to know the benefits of small-scale usage of big data tech.

Can I just say that I love your attitude? A borderline unhealthy sense of self deprecation and just 'doing it' because you can - qualities I wish more tech people had.

If you're well versed in Clojure and FP principles, the only difference for you would be in picking up Scala syntax, in my opinion.