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Anyone else remember when Vercel was called Zeit? Thought this was related somehow.

I loved that branding for them.

Location: Austin, TX / Barcelona, Spain

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Contract work preferred for now (but open-minded to FT)

Willing to relocate: Unlikely but open-minded

Technologies: Full-stack development, Typescript, Javascript, Svelte, React, React Native, Vue, HTML/CSS, MySQL, Postgres, Electron, NodeJS, Ruby, Java, Rubymotion, Android, iOS, PHP, WordPress, Nginx, Redis

I also have a substantial amount of experience doing UI/UX/Design (Figma/Sketch).

Résumé/CV: Email for Resume

Email: [email protected]

The very first online game I ever played was an amazing multiplayer space shooter called Silent Death Online on AOL Games. It was incredible and I blew through over $100 a month paying $1.99 hour to rank up my character, upgrade my ship, communicate with and eventually lead my clan.

With 56k modems, it took so long for the "shoot weapon" request to make it to the server that if you wanted to kill someone, you had to shoot well ahead of their actual ship. If you wanted to get good, you had to open up the debug console and use your ping to determine how far ahead to "lag shoot".

Suddenly, certain players began becoming well known for stacking up hundreds of kills in a game and ranking all the way up to Commander (max rank) within a few days. Over time, people began learning the secret: those were the first players to get ISDN and DSL and with their super-fast internet connections, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Those players were my introduction to the world outside of the AOL internet and I became eager to join it.

Around that same time, EA bought Silent Death Online and folded it into their online gaming services. That brought a new era for SDO which came to an end probably not much more than a year or two later when EA for some reason shut it all down (if I recall correctly, people started running credit card scams through the game).

What a time to be on the internet. I am still longing for someone to buy the rights to SDO and relaunch it.

The other thing we find with our 3 year old is that he can have his tablet and watch movies or shows on Netflix/VLC, etc. and it's pretty much all positive.

But he always prefers YouTube and when he's using YouTube, he mostly watches 3-5 minutes of something before getting enticed by another thumbnail.

At times when he's had free reign to YT, it really seems to drastically affect his general attention, patience, temperament and even ability to sleep (he wakes up super early asking for his tablet).

Once we cut it off hard, he goes back to normal.

We don't really believe in complete abstinence of those sorts of things (I think it will just make him even more sensitive to those algorithms in the future) but being aware of the effect, reducing YT and prioritizing actual movies/series has made a noticeable difference.

I think most blogging drifted towards affiliate marketing and as a result, Google drastically devalued that content (for that and other reasons).

As a result, I find it so hard to find genuine experiences through web search now. It's all just USAToday, CNN, NYTimes, Webmd, etc. media sites (which are themselves mostly just affiliate marketing/advertising plays, so maybe that wasn't Google's motivation).

I miss the days of searching the web and finding content written by real humans.

The only search I find that satisfies this consistently is Reddit (especially searching google with site:reddit.com)

I use Svelte full-time and absolutely love it, but I do have to admit I sometimes wonder what lead to the decision of {#if}{:else}{/if}, {#each}{/each}, etc syntax. Seems like there had to be less verbose, more consistent approach... But, I'm probably not fully-aware of the constraints and missing something.

I sometimes miss the brevity of the React way (which can also be good and bad) for handling conditional code-blocks {visible && <Component>} or {visible ? <Component1 /> : <Component2 />}

Love it! Looking forward to using it in future projects!