tomg

Goodbye Hacker News.

A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.

> For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?"

"Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______?

Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those questions, plus the "budget", before even entertaining a yes or no answer. Which I think sounds like I'm beating around the bush by asking, but I'm not! :)

Just another anecdote: They’re the only airline to lose my luggage, and their complete lack of giving a fuck or competence in returning it was a tremendous and expensive pain in the ass. Only through pulling a personal favor with a friend in Berlin was I able to ever get my luggage.

There’s something wrong at Lufthansa. The queue to fill out my lost luggage form was like an hour long when I arrived, and looked to be just as long when I was done.

> Reflame will eventually try to build versions of, with a focus on speed similar to what we've done with deployment

Nice! The time I wait during builds tend to break my mental flow.

Best of luck!

Very impressive!

I am curious about who your intended user is. I’m just thinking about how most FE build pipelines I’ve used have a bunch of “checks” like linters, running various tests, maybe reaching out to some other services when the build passes or fails.

Is the idea with this that the developer would do these steps locally? I also might just be misunderstanding this tool.

Thanks for sharing this :)

> Why does this happen? No idea, but it's not lost on me that a lot of these things are backed by huge companies with giant piles of money who are using them as marketing.

Your whole post is spot-on :)

My two cents on the answer to this question:

- New tools / frameworks / libraries / etc often position themselves as “solving” some perceived deficiency of the prior generation of that thing. So it can be attractive to want to move over to something that solves a pain point. (Whether it actually does, or whether it just replaces it with a new pain point is another thing…) Monolith to microservices is an example.

- At least for me, if I’m starting a new project (especially if it’s in a space I’m not that experienced in), it’s tempting to choose what looks to be the simplest choice, which could be for example a niche database technology suited for my exact need (even if in reality a regular SQL db would be just fine).

- Engineers like to play with new toys!

I’ve bounced around between frontend and backend and devops, plus some iOS and one Android project. I’ve hopped in and out of various languages/frameworks. For the past year or so I’ve been using elixir which is my first big functional language job, as an example.

I would not worry about job opportunities. Here’s why:

General problem-solving abilities (eg. breaking down work into smaller chunks of work until you have something actionable) translate well to all kinds of software.

Skills like being able to communicate well with other engineers, product folks, etc is also similar.

Also, tech moves fast. Even if I were to have stuck with only frontend work, that landscape has changed so much in 14 years it’s not like the way I built things in 2008 is the same as 2022. Which is to say that regardless of staying in one area or moving around, I’ve always had to keep learning new things. I think other areas are like this too, eg Apple coming out with new ways of doing things every few years; Android SDKs having major changes over time.

Maybe I’m just feeling preachy at the moment but follow what excites you :)

I feel strongly that you’re likely to get another 10 years out of it if you keep up with regular maintenance. My non-Prius Toyota is 17 years old. The outside looks like a war zone from being a city car but the interior is in great shape and everything works perfectly. A family member has a Prius approaching 300,000 miles. Good cars.

[edit: Regular maintenance is key! I take mine in to my local mechanic for an oil change and inspection 2-3 times a year. For elderly cars, don’t wait for a noise or a light to go off :) ]

I don’t mean this to sound snarky but I fear it might. Earnestly:

If a job looks interesting, why not just email and ask? If the position actually excites you, surely it’s worth a couple minutes of your time?

> Not to detract from you comment, but you don't have to have a disability. Some people simply cannot do on-call, disability or not.

Imagine being a single parent; or needing to support elderly or disabled family.

Eurorack got hit hard. Lots of module makers are tiny shops, some just one person selling a few pieces at a time.

Embrace the Absurd.

> One of the most interesting things about software dev (I'm in my 50's) is that you never run out of puzzles or problems to solve.

It took me until recently to realize I needed to find new problems to work on to avoid burnout.

It feels like a paradox (avoid the well trod easy stuff to work on challenging stuff) that this adds to job satisfaction but I think it’s true.