amorphic

Australia here also.

I'm a Tech Lead with a solid CV looking for a new gig. I'm finding it noticeably more difficult to get recruiter attention (let alone interviews) than I'd expected.

My gut feeling is that there are likely more candidates applying for any given job than there were late last year.

I highly recommend joining your local makerspace:

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

A makerspace gives you a place to explore + learn new skills and hobbies as well as a place to make new social connections.

A lot of people here seem to take the "Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and therefore is worthless" line.

I don't hold any bitcoin and I don't feel strongly either way. But this piece by Lyn Alden provides some good insights into situations where Bitcoin might be valuable and why it may well have a strong future. Particularly compared to other, less widely-held cryptocurrencies:

https://www.lynalden.com/gold-and-bitcoin/

I second this approach.

I often find myself in similar situations as OP's, working with a client to understand a complex or ill-defined problem space and developing solutions in an agile way.

Neither you nor the client has a (functioning) crystal ball and so all that you can do is make the best decisions that you can with the information available at the time.

I've found that documenting Architectural Decisions as Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) helps build a shared understanding and ownership of these decisions amongst all concerned. They also prevent me from becoming bogged down and second-guessing myself: Here are the available options, here's what we decided and here's why.

No need to make ADRs overly long or complex. I use this "Lightweight" template:

https://github.com/peter-evans/lightweight-architecture-deci...

Making and fixing things is a very rewarding way to spend your time. A great way to develop your maker-fu is to join your local Hacker/makerspace:

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

The availability of equipment and expertise at a makerspace allow you to accelerate your learning, enhance your skillset and create things better and more quickly than using just your own gear and learning from YouTube.

Perhaps more importantly, a Makerspace turns making into a social pursuit. You'll meet new people with a genuine interest in your projects. You may even be able to help others learn things that you're already good at!

In an ABC (Australia) news story this week a journalist who was involved back in 1989 recounted that families were only allowed to collect the bodies of victims from hospitals and morgues if they agreed to sign a document confirming that the victim had died under "accidental circumstances".

This was one means by which the official bodycount was understated.

A lot of comments here bemoan "Full Stack Engineers" as being Jacks of All Trades but Masters of None. But that misses the point. Don't forget that the full quote is:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

In a startup or smaller organisation an Engineer with a deep understanding of a single area (frontend, backend, devops etc) is far less valuable to the business than an Engineer with "T-shaped" skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), a solid understanding of fundamental best practices and the ability to quickly understand new things as required.

This article nails it:

https://angel.co/blog/what-skeptics-get-wrong-about-full-sta...

Apparently because their special phones have "new, long-range radio hardware" that makes this all possible.

But radio technologies are pretty widely understood and while I'm no expert I've not heard of anything that could achieve what they're suggesting. So I'll remain skeptical until I understand better what that "long-range radio hardware" is and how it makes such a mesh network feasible.

Join your local makerspace. If you don't have a local makerspace, start one.

"If the industry and government would reach a solution that would enable access that doesn't go to removing electronic protection, and doesn't attract that prohibition against systemic weaknesses and vulnerabilities, if the industry player was mindful to challenge that, there's a very robust judicial review process in Australia," Ingle said.

"They can very well go to the courts and determine that arguably this notice is not reasonable, proportionate, technically feasible, [or] practical, or say that it will introduce a systemic vulnerability, and is therefore unlawful."

That's fine for Google and Apple. Where is a bootstraped or VC-funded communications startup supposed to find the money for that particular legal battle?

The answer is that they avoid the whole scenario by not starting said startup in Australia or hiring any Australian employees.

Frame situations in such a way that you're happy with whichever outcome eventuates.

Simple example: Tomorrow's Saturday. If it's Sunny we can go on that family picnic we were talking about. If it's Rainy we can stay inside and watch that movie we've been wanting to watch. Positive outcome either way.

More Complex example: Tomorrow I have an interview for a job that sounds great. If it goes well then I get the job. If it doesn't go so well it'll be great experience for the next interview. Positive outcome either way.

Sometimes it can be a stretch to find the "silver lining" in a given situation but there's usually one there even if you can't see it at first. See also "Good, Bad, Who's to Say?":

https://www.ted.com/talks/heather_lanier_good_and_bad_are_in...

Highly recommend joining a makerspace. Our makerspace (sparkcc.org) is quite tech-focussed and attracts a lot of people with a professional or hobbyist interest in tech. I've been working remotely for > 3 years now and always enjoy going along on Tuesday night to talk with my fellow makers about projects I've been working on and technology I've been working with.

+1 I used Tornado in the past because it had an async event loop before it was native to Python. So much simpler than having to set up wsgi servers etc with the added benefit of easily-configured background tasks (like having cron jobs built in to your application). This is really good when you're building an application that you want other people to be able to install and run easily.

It seems that Tornado is now offering the choice of its own event loop or the asyncio event loop. I built something recently in aiohttp because it felt like it had been built on asyncio from the ground up but will explore Tornado again.

Andrew gave a great talk on this very topic at PyCon AU in August. Still at the formative stages it seems...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7taKQnndfo

I used aiohttp for a small project recently and found that it to be very good.

Combined with aiohttp-json-rpc I had a very effective websocket-based JSON RPC backend service up and running in a very short time and with very little boilerplate. I'll be using this pattern again for sure.

What would have been the advantage of me using Sanic instead (I haven't RTFM for sanic yet but I'm about to...)?

Circa-2000 I was in my final year of university and working as a Windows service desk monkey in the SysAdmin team of a Sydney-based company that developed a platform for hosting (legitimate, regulated) gambling websites.

Sun Microsystems happened to be across the road from us. My mind was blown the first time I saw the value of the invoices for servers and Solaris licenses that we bought both for ourselves and on behalf of our customers. That's where a lot of those dotcom-era "investment" dollars ended up - at Sun.

One day we needed a router + firewall for some internal service. One of the Unix sysadmins in the team grabbed a spare i386 desktop PC, stuck a 2nd NIC in it, installed Slackware Linux and configured ipchains. Job done: no budget, no managerial approval, no licenses, nothing. I couldn't believe it.

I asked him about Linux and after learning more came to the conclusion that it could basically do most things that Solaris could do but was 1) free and 2) ran on cheap, commodity hardware.

That was the writing on the wall for me. I taught myself Linux and pretty soon had my first bona-fide Linux Sysadmin job. Linux went on to become the OS that runs the world and I've never struggled to find relatively interesting, well-paid work since then.

Living in a share house in London (I'm Australian) with my fiance while earning decent money working for a tech company and taking every opportunity I had to go to gigs, travel Europe and attend music festivals.

Wouldn't change a single thing... :)

Any fans of Bosch's work should also check out Dave Patchett (http://davepatchett.net/).

I'm not sure if Dave's been active recently but he's best known for the use of his paintings as album covers for seminal UK doom metal band Cathedral.

I was fortunate enough to meet Dave in 2005 and purchase one his paintings. Chatting with him he confirmed my suspicion that he was heavily influenced by Bosch.

There is now potential for side-projects involving small-scale manufacturing thanks to recent advances in 3D printing.

A friend and I created Enstaved [1] ("Customized Staves and Accessories") after a prop that we designed and 3D printed for a talk I gave at PyCon AU proved really popular.

We did put in quite a bit of up-front work designing a product line and a website. Now most of our job is promotion and manufacturing the staves people order. Frankly that doesn't feel like "work" at all...:)

[1] https://enstaved.com

Several people have mentioned Flask. Eve is a well-written and actively-developed Flask framework for building RESTful API services: http://python-eve.org. It's most at home with a MongoDB backend but can also use SQL RDBMS, ElasticSearch and Neo4J.

I co-founded and run a makerspace called SparkCC (http://sparkcc.org).

It's not-for-profit but I've met lots of amazing people. I've been able to use my skills and knowledge to help many of them and many of them have used their skills and knowledge to help me. It's fantastic...:)

You can also train your brain to be better at coming up with ideas. In his book Choose Yourself (my review here: https://jimter.net/book-review-james-altucher-choose-yoursel...) James Altucher talks about training your "Idea Muscle" by sitting down every day and writing down 10 ideas, no matter how stupid they seem. It sounds a little cheesy but over time it works.

The more people you talk to and experiences you expose yourself to the more ideas you will have.

I spoke at PyCon AU 2016 on "Controlling a 3D Printer with Python" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvnPB_77z8). I wanted a 3D-printed prop and came up with an idea for The Pythonic Staff of Enlightenment - a staff with the Python logo on top. A friend designed it, I printed it and it was a big hit with the Pythonistas. A few asked "where can I buy one?".

A year later we're about to launch Enstaved (https://www.enstaved.com). It's a service that lets you design your own staff using a range of toppers and colors which we then print and post to you.

After using kanban for Dev and Ops work and really digging it I started using a Trello board for my personal tasks and found it to be invaluable

Each task gets a Trello card and goes in one of four columns: Backlog, Ready, Doing, Done. I also have a bunch of labels (which Trello colour-codes) for things like "house", "blog posts", "projects" etc so I can see at a glance what type of task a card represents.

If I have a random idea for a project or something I might get to when I have some free time I stick it in Backlog so I remember it and can add notes etc. Things that need doing like "Mow the lawn", "Put down a batch of home brew", "Get the car serviced", "Call X about Y" go into Ready in rough order of priority. If something has a hard deadline I can add that to the card.

When a project or a blog post idea is at a point where I'm ready to start it I move it from Backlog to Ready, also roughly prioritised amongst the other cards. When I start a task I move it from Ready to Doing. As is generally the goal with kanban I try not to have too many tasks in Doing at once. Try to finish one thing before starting the next.

When I finish a task I move it to Done. Very satisfying...:)

Trello is free, has a great web interface and an excellent mobile app that will give you notifications when deadlines are coming or if other users comment on your board (if it's shared).

Wow, the pony might be tricky but we have a great designer. Send us an email via the address on the website and we'll see what we can do!

Should've mentioned that for the Rubyists we've created the Ruby Staff of Development (https://gallery.enstaved.com/#14902801969539). Happy to create staves for other languages/technologies if there's demand!

An industrial design friend of mine and I started https://enstaved.com after I had a really positive reaction to the Pythonic Staff of Enlightenment (https://jimter.net/pythonic-staff/) at PyCon AU 2016 (more than one person asked me "where can I buy one?").

We've just started selling customised modular staves to people who use them as props, novelties or promo items. We've become good at 3D printing via much learning at our makerspace (http://sparkcc.org) and so with a couple of printers we can basically run our own small-scale manufacturing business.

Currently we just take orders via email and word of mouth but we're building a website that allows people to customise their own staff (like in a video game).

I concur. If you want to burn fat do resistance training.

Think about the energy it takes to move something heavy from one place to another. That's the energy you're burning when you do resistance training. Cardio is great and necessary for fitness, but it's not the key to burning fat.