ritchiea

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript/Typescript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a popular Ruby billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS and Digital Ocean as well as writing IaC in Terraform.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: [email protected]

CV and references available upon request.

I'm already a freelancer and posted in the most recent monthly freelance thread.

Ask HN: Are there any companies friendly to developers seeking part time work?

11 ritchiea 3 years ago 19 comments

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS, and Digital Ocean.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: [email protected]

CV and references available upon request.

Sort of agree though I would argue "joining an exercise group" is a healthy way to create shallow connections with the aim that one or more of them becomes deeper. Finding deep connections is difficult and requires significant effort from at least one party. You have to work at it. And attempts to create shallow connections shouldn't be dismissed because you generally can't try to create deeper connections in isolation and separately from trying to create shallow connections.

The difficulty of growing a shallow connection into a deeper connection is a large part of why so many people are lonely. We can't just ignore shallow connections because it's unrealistic to only ever aim for deep connections. Connections are experiments that grow.

The post I was replying to asked if he could play against 1800's and gain rating. Players in the 2500s are much more capable of forcing a draw. It'd be unlikely he'd gain much rating playing against them because wins wouldn't move the needle much and draws would be very costly.

Technically he could, I believe FIDE has a minimum rating increase of 1 point for the winner of a game with > 400 ELO advantage on their opponent. But if he broke 2900 by playing in minor tournaments against low rated amateur opponents no one would take it seriously that he broke 2900. Realistically many, maybe even all of the top players could push for record ELOs by only playing against players well below their level. But not only are the optics bad and the records would be looked at as illegitimate, it would take a lot of time playing long classical chess games against inferior opponents. Which is a major opportunity cost since their time would normally be spent playing in and studying for professional tournaments.

Secret Hitler is a board game the writer is referring to. They're not actually talking about Hitler.

Actually right now in Europe most (maybe all?) flights can be rescheduled for free in response to the pandemic. Is that not the case elsewhere?

"World champion" is also a bit of a title.

Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.

The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.

It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.

It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.

Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.