doppel

I feel it's completely acceptable to wish to stay in an IC position, but to refuse outright to give advise or share the experience (it's hard to tell from your short paragraph) seems... odd?

It's acceptable to want to stay in a specific role, but I am not certain I feel it's acceptable to eschew an increasing responsibility or mentoring role as you gain experience. That way lies the "genius programmer that works alone and writes code no one else wunderstands".

Bacs in the UK will alert the account holder that a debit has been set up, but to set it up just requires knowing the sort code (routing number) and bank account number. Much like ACH.

The account owner can at any time go in and cancel that mandate, but they do not have to pre-approve it have it set up.

I imagine the free plan also doubles as a trial for a paid subscription. Moving issue trackers can be a hassle, so having unlimited time to test out the workflow and features for a small team or project makes good sense, and if you decide to switch it should be easy enough to upgrade.

I can't know where you're working or worked, but please don't think that this is every tech job in every company. There are plenty of smaller businesses doing great work where you get to have your say, good colleagues and some (at least) moderately interesting problems to work with.

My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.

Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.

I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.

I really don't believe that to be true. For our application(s) at work, the database is always the hardest part to scale and tehrefore also the biggest performance bottleneck, and the difference between good and bad SQL can be magnitudes of order of performance impact (on the query itself and locking up the DB for other queries).

Only in a "Every database has 2 TB of memory and 64 cores"-world is SQL (and database design) a negligible skill.

Having done something similar to transcode h264 to fragment mp4, there are a ton of pitfalls, weird settings and flags that need to be set to get a "correct" output that will play in most players. FFmpeg/libav provides a ton of functionality, but sometimes it's like reading javadocs, where you get the interface but have no idea of what to put in.

Same situation with private beta features, which "can not" be officially supported in the official SDK for the product.

Related: In Denmark (where I live), we have an officially designated "NemKonto" (translates to "EasyAccount"), which is where most employers, public institutions, etc. put paychecks, payouts, etc. automatically. So if you change banks, you can simply designate the new account your official NemKonto, and the money will automatically be routed there - no need to contact anyone.

This, in addition to how easy our PBS (DK version of ACH) is to use means switching banks is something that can be done easily. I know of people who will regularly contact 5-10 banks with their current mortgage details and ask for a better deal, and then go back to their current bank and tell them "match this offer or I'm switching".

We also have a simple interest on overdraft (usually 8-15% annually on any amount over draft), though excessive overdraft will get your account locked. But beyond that, no fees for hitting negative $0.05. Is there any US bank that offer a similar fee structure? I imagine people would migrate in droves if that was already the case.

I read this article a few months ago about being a Principal Engineer, https://blog.dbsmasher.com/2019/01/28/on-being-a-principal-e..., and ever since it’s been my designated career path / plan. I am in the lucky position of working in a small-but-growing team of developers, so I get to choose my career advancement and have support to follow this road.

I think a principal engineer is the right mix of (still) developing, planning, mentoring and potentially leading small teams, while staying out of a full-on managerial role.

At my previous job, we had Fastly as a potential new CDN provider set up against our existing CDN provider and two other new potentials. After a few rounds of calls for bids, Fastly won out.

Based on my experience with the other providers they were also, by a large margin, the most modern - it felt like moving from a 2008 integration to a modern, fully RESTful API with great documentation and decent UI.

This is all anecdotal, but they did combine a great technical platform with great support. If transit prices are the same or similar for all providers in that size category, they have to fight on features and support instead.

When would you say you are "done" for a given period with "not having a catastrophic data breach", regardless of OKR? I know some tasks, such as this, is never really done. But for a given period (such as a month or a quarter), it does not help to have a task that just says "Don't have a catastrophic data breach" - you have to turn that into something you can actually do, within a given timespan, and that works fine with OKRs (and should be done without OKRs as well)

I can understand the dilemma if you intend to go to Melbourne and "test the waters" and potentially want to move back again. But if you move to Melbourne permanently, I would expect you to sell your house in the EU.

As Apple says in the article, they put quite a few resources into making the whole App store platform, including in-app payments. The issue is that there is no opt-out for the end user - you cannot use a different app store to install applications for your phone, and jailbreaking is getting harder while at the same time border-line illegal in some jurisdictions, not to mention being quite technically challenging.

Imagine buying a car sold by a gas station chain saying "We made the BEST gas stations you can imagine, but you can ONLY buy gas here. It's a fair marketplace, everyone who wants to sell gas at our stations can do so equally, and we'll take the same cut from everyone!".

You can track the money going from the cold storage wallet into an account that the mixer service owns. Say it's 10.000 coins.

The mixer then transfers 37, 185, 205, 1002, and other random amounts to other accounts, which in turn transfers it to other accounts, and at some point they get funneled to one or more accounts owned by the person who originally transferred the money into the mixer.

Couple this with a lot of other people doing the same at the same time for the same mixer service, and you cannot say who owns the coins being transferred between the accounts. It is public what money was transferred back and forth, but without some serious analysis it's practically impossible to track who is likely to own the accounts where the money end up.

I am sure if someone really, REALLY wanted to give money to the government it would be possible with some effort. But it is actually fairly difficult to just give money (at least, in quite a few western countries) to the state that it does not ask for - everything has to fit within a system and match a budget, tax reason, invoice, etc., and you can't just have "EXTRA - From Bill Gates" somewhere in there for 10 billion dollars.

The same goes for Azure. Set up the wrong country / VAT / thing? Better migrate all your cloud services to a new account. No dropdown, no changes, no nothing.

Jurisdiction is a tricky concept in cases like these where we are dealing with digital content.

AggregateIQ could have ignored the GDPR-request, ignored any rulings and keep chugging along as long as they stuck to Canada (assuming Canada was not going to side with the EU).

In short, if you're not in the EU, do not care about EU and never will, you can largely ignore the GDPR. Same as if some banana republic dictator declares you persona non grata - if you never intend to visit and otherwise have no business in that country, who cares?

The difference is that the EU is not a banana republic (opinions may vary), and so many choose to respect and accept this their judgement in cases like this to stay on good terms.

Queues are indeed nice, but please consider modern solutions such as nats.io and others instead of "just" Kafka / RabbitMQ and similar.

We had our first child ~3 months ago. We had a room to ourselves and nurses/midwifes would only come in once or twice a day unless they were paged (which we did, they were a godsend). This made the stay as comfortable as could be, and we could get all the quiet time alone we wanted, although sleep was in short supply for other reasons.

This was in Copenhagen, Denmark, so the entire stay was free. Sadly, the central hospital is removing this practice and kicking out patients after 4 hours.

A Tesla is much more expensive than a Prius, but I think the Tesla is set at a rational price point, even if I could never afford it. Being able to afford an item does not necessarily correlate with whether you think it's priced fairly or not.

I feel that Kubernetes has a lot of "upfront" cost that needs to be tackled - containerization, manifests for all the pods you want to set up, potentially setting up the right persistent storage if needed, user access, logging, etc. And this is still if you use a "hosted" solution with Amazon/Google/Microsoft, if you set it up yourself there is a ton more complexity.

Using something you are familiar with, even if it's just a 10-line bash script, a simple virtual private server and the adding an nginx config there, is usually faster than having to orchestrate everything. If you want to invest the time in setting up Kubernetes for all your personal projects, it would probably make sense.

Basically, is it worth it? https://xkcd.com/1205/

In Denmark, and probably elsewhere, we have the term "helicopter parents" for parents who constantly hover near their kids, never letting them out of sight. Similarly, we also have the term "curling parents", because they do everything to clear the path of their offspring (to the point of going to job interviews with them).

Both are obviously used in a teasing-not-quite-nice way to signal that maybe these parents should take a deep breath and assume that they raised their kids well, and that scraping your knee or getting frightened is something that happens in life sooner or later, and the parents' job is to guide and comfort their kids when they do happen.

There was a very high profile case (in DK at least) from 1997 about a mother who left her child outside the restaurant where she was eating (with line-of-sight to the stroller): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/26/anette-soren...

I might not want to do the same in New York, but in Denmark no one would bat an eye if this happened.

But the cost is the same for both companies inside and outside of EU, so US companies "not being forced" just mean they have the luxury to decide whether EU customers/visitors are a concern to them - EU companies HAVE to do it, even if 95% of their userbase is in the US (but I think those US users will appreciate it still).

Imagine a law that forced all companies in the EU to be polite to their customers no matter what or face fines. In that case you could also say that users would be pushed towards EU companies because they were "forced" to be polite, but I think that would be deserved and US companies could just do the same. Similarly to GDPR, if one side is forced to treat my data with respect and actively have me consent, then I would chose them, law or no law.

I think Windows and Stuxnet are sophisticated in different ways.

Windows has to cover a huge area and a lot of "known" unknowns and be able to recover (somewhat) reliably. Stuff breaks, you get weird error messages, that driver for your Wi-Fi never really worked right, but at the end of the day you have a computer that works pretty well, and that's quite remarkable. The same is of course true of Linux and other operating systems.

Stuxnet is a hyper-specialized piece of software (malware) that cannot fail or it loses it's purpose. The authors clearly knew they had to have multiple fallbacks for every step of the process, but I find it very impressive that it reached it's end goal successfully and without being discovered. A lot of software (including malware) break because of regular software bugs, environments that differ from the expected, interference by the user, the list goes on. For Stuxnet to have avoided all of those, that is quite sophisticated.

> First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules.

How does this play into a global scope? I assume the US can tell it's own people "You can do this", but I assume the Europen Union or other countries might not allow it, regardless of how Americans feel about it. Is the idea that IF a US agency can get a hold of the data, then it is not subject to whatever rules the country dictates for data privacy?

For me personally there is a huge gap in "working for others" and "working for myself", with freelance work falling in the latter category. I do well in an office environment where I have influence in setting my own tasks, but having others rely on me finishing my things and meeting deadlines. Of course it helps that I find my work interesting.

When working on my own projects in my free time, motivation comes in bursts - I can have two evenings where I can hardly keep myself from working, and entire weeks where I cannot seem to get started or do anything constructive - my mind wanders off and I start procrastinating instead. I am fortunate enough that it does not matter financially to me what I complete in my spare time, but it is clear that waiting for motivation to hit me is not a viable strategy (for anyone).

First off, I find that starting is the hardest part. Once I sit in front of the code, opened and have written the first words, I can keep going for at least a couple of hours. So make sure you always start a task, even if it means dragging yourself in front of the computer.

Second, find a way to motivate yourself. For me, it is communicating clearly what my deadlines are to the people depending on it - this means I commit myself to finishing it publicly. At the same time, make sure you do not say "This project will finish in 3 weeks", but break it into chunks - "In two days, I'll have a prototype of the admin module, where you can test. Friday I expect to have all the functionality working, implementing your feedback along the way. Wednesday next week we'll have a meeting to discuss changes to module Y", etc.

There's no silver bullet, and I certainly do not envy this part of being a freelance developer, but it is possible. And remember, everyone struggles with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk

I find mentions of “deployments”, but unlike a platform like Kubernetes I can’t seem to find any mention of how to set up the “serverless servers” anywhere. And until then it’s just a really neat local CLI

It is kind of missing the point though. If everyone was competing to make electrical single-person planes to help people commute to work it would also increase demand for renewable/electrical energy - but can we agree, that just using electrical cars instead of planes is going to take a lot less electricity overall?