dcatx

Having lived in Texas for 30+ years and now happily living in southern California, I feel pretty qualified in saying that my personal quality of life is dramatically better in California.

The cost of living is higher, but I get a tremendous amount of value for the extra costs and wouldn't move back to Texas for any amount of money at this point. Los Angeles is a very safe city for its size, I live in a comfortable, walkable neighborhood and I just got back from a run through a beautiful, well-maintained city park. My neighborhood is diverse, my representatives care about what is happening, and the city and state government generally try to make things better for the people who live here, even if they don't always succeed. I rarely felt that to be true in my 30+ years in Texas.

Austin is a great city, but the cost of living is high enough now that it is very hard to justify it vs. the dramatically higher quality of life, access to nature and culture, and incredible weather that you get in southern California.

Location: Los Angeles

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: I'm David, a Rails dev and engineering leader, with 10+ years shipping Rails apps to production and leading teams doing the same. I started in Rails back in Rails 2 and have been in the Rails world ever since. I'm known in the Rails world for my writing (including a book) on the Hotwire stack.

I've led product and engineering at bootstrapped SaaS companies as part of product orgs ranging in size from just me to > 100, and I've directly managed teams of 18 while still keeping my hands close to the code, and close to the product roadmap.

I do some consulting with early stage founders, writing code, hiring and coaching teams, and helping get new products to market. I would love to shift back out of consulting and into my next full time role, preferably somewhere where I can wear both an engineering and a product hat, with the chance to make a big impact.

Résumé/CV: You can learn a bit more about me and read some of my technical writing here: https://www.colby.so/writing. Shoot me an email and I'm happy to share my full background.

Email: [email protected]

SEEKING WORK Location: California Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: I'm a Rails dev and engineering leader, with 10+ years shipping Rails apps to production and leading teams doing the same. I started in Rails back in Rails 2 and have been in the Rails world ever since. I'm known in the Rails world for my writing (including a book) on the Hotwire stack. Résumé/CV: You can learn a bit more about me and read some of my technical writing here: https://www.colby.so/writing Email: [email protected]

I'm hacking on Trailbound, a hiking and backpacking planning tool. The goal is combining a light version of the routing capability of Caltopo or GaiaGPS with more granular "leg" mapping based on how I learned to plan off trail trips and sharing functions that make it easy for my wife to know where I'm going to be, who I'm with, and who to contact if I'm not back in touch when I said I would be.

Its been a blast to build. At one point I was hosting my own ORS server but that's extremely silly to do when Mapbox has a very generous free tier. Learning about all of the open source tooling and open data available in the mapping world has been incredible.

The cost of the Hetzner box it runs on isn't much more than a Caltopo pro subscription with the added bonus of being much easier to share with non-hikers.

A quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/a5f7a7c23457400aa92b3f0f71a0008f

The app: https://go.trailboundapp.com

No marketing site, no onboarding, or any real UX attention paid to the app at this point, it is mostly Just For Me and will probably remain that way once I land a job again.

I'm starting to chip away at an iOS app so I can get offline access to maps and routes, but I'm not a Swift dev so the going is slow.

Big Bend National Park, a two hour drive from the McDonald observatory has extremely dark skies, as does the area immediately around the observatory. On the drive to the observatory from Fort David you’ll drive past a community of folks who live near the observatory specifically for the astronomy opportunity the dark skies there afford.

The entire Big Bend region is beautiful, remote, and very dark at night.

Central Idaho is also a dark, beautiful place for stargazing.

I absolutely love this.

I wrote a “book” (really a 30,000ish word tutorial) on Rails development earlier this year and I hated the idea of publishing it as a static PDF so I built a web app just to host the book’s content and change log, along with validating license keys/authenticating users.

I’ve never found video courses to be useful for me - I do much, much better with written word that I can move through at a comfortable pace. I’m glad to see tools coming to make text-based courses easier to build

Will give this a try and see how my book content translates over.

I posted as a candidate in one thread over the summer and got contacted by ~10 companies and did a handful of interviews — a couple were duds with non-technical founders casting a wide net but others were solid opportunities. I also applied to a few jobs from that same month's employers thread and got to the offer stage with one of those companies.

I had enough success to try again the next time I am looking for a new gig.

I don't mind the "show me something you've coded" as an alternative to code challenges, but the way it is presented in this article reads an awful lot like it is a way to identify who the interviewer likes nerding out with the most, not the person who is most likely to be the best fit for the organization's needs.

> Companies want to standardize their hiring when really they should be looking to customize it to each candidate.

This is not the right idea. You should not be customizing your hiring process to each candidate. A standard hiring process with accountability for interviewers to follow the process is incredibly important if you want to reliably hire high quality talent as an organization grows.

"Customizing" for each candidate is a great way to give interviewers permission to make the interview simple for the people they like and brutal for the people they don't. It is also a great way to overwhelm new hiring managers who are still trying to figure out how to evaluate talent as they grow their teams.

> Lots of companies want to spread the blame of a bad hire across a committee of 4 or 5 people. That is also wrong.

This is not why multiple people are involved in a hiring process. Leaving hiring entirely in the hands of one person guarantees biases make their way into the hiring process and result in a lower quality team.

This feels like an odd assumption to make about my comment. I don't think all meetings are a waste of time and I certainly don't think people with different work preferences than me are dullards.

My experience has been heavy on people who skip reading in favor of a meeting even when the reading is to provide historical context, summarize learnings, and present what we know about a situation. Not reading turns what should have been a productive, forward looking discussion into a meeting rehashing old information for the folks who didn't do their homework.

In my professional life, I've encountered far more people who prefer to have meetings that could have been emails than I have people who think a strategic decision isn't worth 30 minutes of time for a discussion but perhaps my use of "default behavior" was a bit strong.

I suspect the meeting-heavy cultures and aversion to reading I've encountered are largely driven by discomfort with writing, not reading which is where articles like this one could add some value.

So tiring to get those responses. My old company was forced to go remote when the pandemic hit and the anxiety that the founder had about remote resulted in meetings about meetings to prepare everyone for the meetings.

Everyone has different learning styles, some conversations are definitely better in real-time and in-person but the default behavior being refusing to read an email longer than 3 sentences is rough.

Yes, it is important to write and I wish that many folks I've worked with in the past had been better writers (and readers). I am job searching right now after leaving a very, very meeting heavy culture and one of my top criteria is finding a company that values asynchronous discussion and written communication whenever possible.

I'm totally aligned with the author on the value of writing as a tool for thinking, learning, and exploring and I agree that there are blockers for some folks that make them less likely to stretch their writing muscles, especially in professional settings where the default is often "let's jump on a quick call".

Sadly, the article is poorly written. I don't expect professional-level editing on a personal blog, but I would hope for a higher standard when the piece is written by someone who is building and (presumably) charging money for a course on writing.

I publish on my own website (https://colby.so) which I host on Netlify and publish with Jekyll.

For the first year or so I also published every new post on Medium and dev.to (with my site as the canonical URL on both) so that more than zero people would read my articles.

I was lucky enough to get a few of my code-heavy tutorial posts ranking well on Google for the niche I focus on and now that I have a couple hundred organic visitors to my own site each day, I've stopped bothering with Medium and dev.to.

Glad to hear that. Giving them another look is on my list, I could tell they cared about their docs but it was clear they were still filling in the gaps in some areas.

Render is the closest I've seen to the simplicity of Heroku.

Fly.io is also good, but when I tried it (6 months ago) it had a bit more of a learning curve and the documentation was still pretty sparse.

The folks building the internet are very, very good at exploiting our weak points to keep us scrolling.

I've recently gotten way more aggressive about managing my screen time because I realized I had become incapable of just sitting in silence and peacefully focusing on a single task — even while working I was constantly using my phone to open Reddit or Twitter or Discord, for reasons that I couldn't explain. My brain needed constant dopamine hits to function and spending more than a few minutes on any particular task was extremely difficult.

I've had a lot of success recently by leaving my phone in another room and replacing as much of my non-work screen time as possible with slow, screen-less activity — writing in a notebook, reading real books, walking through the neighborhood (with my phone left at home), gardening, cooking. Basic stuff, but all things that had gradually disappeared from my life as my smart phone and laptop took over every part of my brain.

The first few weeks of this were pretty tough, I was constantly looking to where my phone normally would have been and I had to relearn how to just focus on one thing at a time. Now that I'm in the groove my brain feels dramatically more clear and calm and the urge to grab my phone every 30 seconds has mostly faded away. I'm getting more comfortable feeling "bored" again. As a bonus, I've regained my ability to read novels — I've read more fiction this year than I did in the last 10 years combined.

Interesting to see the process and royalty rates from a big (tech) publisher.

I wrote and self-published a book (really a web app structured like a book) on Ruby on Rails to Gumroad earlier this year and so far I have made ~$4,000 after Gumroad's small cut. Based on the royalty rates quoted here, I expect self-publishing is probably going to produce more raw dollars for most people, even those like me with no name recognition or built-in distribution channel for their book.

Of course, even with more money in self-publishing, the hourly rate I've made from writing is a small fraction of what I would have made filling that time with consulting work instead. I expect that in the long run, going with a traditional publisher would be more valuable just from the prestige attached to publishing a "real" book rather than going the self-publishing route. I've gotten a few consulting leads from my book, but a self-published book carries very little weight with most folks.

Thank you for sharing this piece. Navigating a loss like this in a purely remote environment must have been incredibly challenging — grieving feels like an exercise that we do best together in the same physical space. Sometimes you just need someone to give you a hug.

The hardest thing I have ever done as a manager was gather my team into a room and let them know that one of our team members, a young woman just beginning her career, died in a car accident. The accident happened the night before my wedding. I came back to work 36 hours after my wedding, and a few days before leaving for my honeymoon. The first email in my inbox was from a friend of hers telling me what had happened. I walked into work to an office full of people wanting to hear about my wedding and instead I had to tell them that someone they knew and cared about was gone.

She sent me an email sharing her joy about my wedding that I didn't read until after I had already learned of her death.

Six years later and the memories are still painful.