Tarential

  Location: Vancouver, Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby/Rails, React, JS/TypeScript, Postgres, Linux, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL
  Résumé/CV: https://tarential.com/preston-st-pierre.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

Full stack senior engineer with 15+ years of experience in multiple languages and platforms, including server administration. Can learn any new tech, but specifically wish to work more with React, Node.js, Go, Elixir, or Kotlin.

Looking for full time remote work.

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Typescript, React, Linux

Résumé/CV: https://tarential.com/preston-st-pierre.pdf

Email: [email protected]

Predictable Revenue | Vancouver, Canada | Full Time | ONSITE

Senior Software Developer | Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, PostgreSQL

Predictable Revenue is a profitable, fast growth international technology company with offices in the Gastown area of Vancouver, BC and Santa Monica area of Los Angeles, California.

This is a full-time local role with meetings in our Vancouver office, but your working hours are flexible and we support telecommuting.

More information: http://predictablerevenue.com/about/careers#op-50880-senior-...

Carburetor (carb.io) is hiring a remote Ruby on Rails developer. We're a small (~15 employees, 4 devs) profitable bootstrapped startup creating tools for automating the Predictable Revenue Cold Calling 2.0 method promoted by Aaron Ross (our cofounder).

Salary Range: $60k-80k (Cdn). Remote: Optional. More info: http://carb.io/careers.html#op-50880-senior-software-develop...

While this is very interesting, the profiles may need to be "tweaked" a bit to be realistic. For example, the first profile it generate for me was a:

-Female

-Fitness instructor

-Weighing 205.9 lbs

-Standing 5 feet 1 inch

Individually, any of these things might be ok. Any three could even be possible. All four, however, just doesn't seem to work.

It is so good for productivity that I've completely stopped using "staying up late" as a method to get things done. If I have a lot of work to do that's a good sign to get to bed early and start in the morning when I'm fresh.

Problems that I spend hours on the night before seem to solve themselves magically in minutes. After a while I got the hint: Just go to bed and sleep. You save time and feel better.

"When I was on acid I would see things like beams of light, and I would hear sounds that sounded an awful lot like car horns." --Mitch Hedberg

I have a Dell Vostro 2420 I got with Ubuntu for around $50 less than the same machine with Windows ~6 months ago.

However, it seems this is no longer possible. I've searched Dell's site and the only Vostro 2420 I see with Ubuntu has different hardware (i3 vs celeron). Very disappointing. I will not pay the MS tax.

Actually, for me it was the other way around. It was only natural to use Debian for my servers when I used it already at home :)

Debian has been my home for 5+ years. It was the only distro I ever tried where the package manager didn't eventually (or immediately) fail on me and require me to fix either the package or my whole system manually.

I have tried my share of distros in the past [0], but haven't felt much need to go outside of Debian recently. Perhaps things have changed, but now I'm happy here :)

[0] http://www.linuxtoday.com/author/Preston+ST.+Pierre/

I've heard the "hype" about vim for years, sometimes from people who clearly (in retrospect) didn't understand what made vim so good. It was not a selling point for me!

I switched to vim about a month ago and am more productive now than I ever was before. I'd fight to keep vim in my toolkit. Modal editing, jump commands, chained actions, macros, tiling, windowing and configurability are just a few of the features I would miss if I had to switch back.

Non-vimmers: Don't get blinded by the hype, vim rocks for practical reasons.

Yes. Tarential is me, and I am Tarential. I've used it for virtually every site/forum/game/system I've ever created an account on. I registered the domain for my personal site.

I completely understand and respect the need for anonymity in some people and some circumstances. For my own part, though, I think having everything publicly associated with me helps temper my somewhat extreme personality.

I experienced this phenomenon. I've been working hard to get in shape, and I told all my friends. The net result? They all think I'm trying to lose weight!

The ridiculous part is I've never had weight to lose. I started at 140 lbs! After considerable effort I'm up to 165 lbs now. An hour on the weights every second day and I eat ~4,000 calories / day. My goal is to reach 180.

Mitch Hedberg :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg

I've done something similar with inotify for compiling/concatenating CoffeeScript/SCSS/Haml in case anyone wants to use it: https://github.com/Tarential/autobuild-client

I met my co-founder at the very first Ruby on Rails user group meeting I attended. His previous partner had left him high and dry with a customer and no product, so he was at the meeting looking for a technical co-founder. I didn't know RoR then, but I figured it would be a perfect chance to learn.

We were both wary enough not to agree to anything long term up front. It started with a simple quid pro quo 2 week contract after which we decided to test the waters further by continuing to work together unofficially. After about a month we negotiated a reverse vested stock agreement with a short cliff (already passed) that satisfied us both.

Version one of our product (voltagecrm.com) is nearing the end of the beta cycle and will soon be available for purchase. In the meantime we've been bootstrapping the product using a custom theme on top of an open source CRM to start building a customer base and stay profitable.

I think the partner I found by complete luck was better than I would have found if I'd gone searching. His skills complement mine in every way. He is a salesman, a people-person, who is willing to talk to clients, lawyers, mentors, etc. He has the proper "better to spend $10 than waste 3 hours of your time" attitude that I can't seem to manage. He goes out to ask current and potential customers what features they need and what problems they have with our current system. In short, he makes sure that all I have to do is write software.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I actually like my partner. We can sit and have lunch and talk about things besides the company without feeling uncomfortable.

From reading about the experiences of others, I'd say I got very lucky indeed.

I had to log in just to reply to this because it very well could be me writing this post. I taught myself PHP in grade 7 (around fifteen years ago, it must have been near the v3 release) and sold websites in high school. I hand built everything on web servers I compiled from source.

Then I made the terrible mistake of taking a long break from professional programming through university (I worked as a tech writer instead, the money was good). When I came back two years ago I found that I had to learn a whole new set of tools. Javascript was now the norm instead of a disabled annoyance. Browsers supported incredible display features using stylesheets which made my table-and-images based designs obsolete. All the sites were built using some sort of CMS.

I spent a year learning front end design, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal theme design. Then I went back to my old do-it-yourself ways and wrote my own CMS [0]. Suffice to say that it wasn't necessary. I learned a lot about back end programming and MVC related design patterns while creating it, but the most valuable piece of knowledge I gained was "Don't reinvent and try to sell the wheel when other people are offering it for free." It should have been obvious, but it seems I'm much smarter in hindsight than I was in planning.

I'm still learning today. Now it's the Ruby on Rails world and a whole plethora of new technologies come into play. I'm using Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript on top of the RoR / PostgreSQL back end. My first web app will be ready for release soon. After that it's on to learning Haskell and RethinkDB.

The irony of all this is back when I stopped programming I thought I had a pretty good grasp on everything I needed to know. I figured I'd step right back into web development and continue on the way it had been when I left it. I wouldn't have let my skills atrophy if I had known how important it was to stay up to date. I think after two years I'm finally catching up, and I don't intend to let them get rusty again.

TL;DR: Don't get cozy because you think you know everything now. Even if you do, the state of the art changes quickly.

[0] http://saintcms.com

I have to weigh in here. It does not stop the abuse. Separating opiates from acetaminophen is extremely simple (look up cold water extraction). All it does is kill people who aren't aware of the danger or the alternatives.

There are many good reasons not to abuse oxycodone. The government doesn't need to add to the damage of people who are only hurting themselves.

FWIW I have terrible handwriting and have only used it when forced to in high school. For everything else, I type. That was certainly not true of most others in my age group (I'm 27 now), but I think you're correct. It will be soon.

I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.

I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.

This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.

By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.

P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.