jacobian

> I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper.

That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.

Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.

There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.

Not exactly. Development on what become Django began sometime in 2003, before Rails was released.

Certainly the release of Rails — and, more importantly, the questions in the Python community about what _our_ web dev story would be — inspired us to extract the framework from the rest of our code and release it. And over the years we’ve taken some inspiration from Rails (as well as anywhere else we see good ideas). The biggest one probably being the basic ethos that web development should be easy — the focus on what we now call “Developer Experience” is the best thing Rails gave the world, I think.

I’m chuckling at your advice because I tried those things! Went part-time, wrote, lots of local volunteering. (Didnt try picking up trash; that’s a good one!) Unfortunately, didn’t work for me. In fact, the more I cut back my hours and did other things, the less I wanted to be working the work hours I had left.

I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.

Thanks for your perspective. It’s a very real concern I have — am I trading one kind of burnout for another?

I do think there’s a difference between approaching EMS as a first career, and coming to it later in life (I’m 43) as a second career. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done what I’m doing and a higher percentage of them are happy with the decision vs those who started younger.

I’m also not going in with rosy glasses. I’ve been thinking about this for at least seven years, and have had plenty of time to talk to folks at all levels of emergency healthcare, including right here where I’d be working. I think I have a pretty realistic view of what I’m signing up for.

Only time will tell, though. Maybe I’m making a terrible decision; only one way to find out.

I'm curious: if you hired a contractor to, I dunno, paint your walls, would you accept "I don't know" as a time frame or price quote? If not, what's different about software development that makes "I don't know" a reasonable answer in our profession?

I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.

I drew them by hand on a tablet (a Remarkable)

> Suggesting stimulants as the first line of treatment rather than cardiovascular exercise, good sleep, and a healthier relationship with food is at best dismissive of the body of modern research and at worst introduction of a dangerous 'just pop a pill' crutch.

Literally none of this is true. The research overwhelmingly shows that stimulant medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD, and second place isn't even close. Show me a single paper that shows that "good sleep" is a more effective treatment for ADHD than medication and I'll eat my shoe.

> inconvenient fact most of the time you're fat because you consume too much

This is not, in fact, a fact.

If you're a software developer, and your goal is to maximize income, then yeah, don't work for the federal government. If your goal is to do meaningful work that has a tangible positive impact on average people's lives, while being paid a fair living wage, then these jobs are unbeatable.

Can you actually buy these? I've wanted to plant them for a while, but as far as I can tell they're not actually publicly available in any way.

This is not true. Growth hormones are not approved for us in chickens by the FDA. All chicken sold in the US is hormone free.

See, eg, https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-hormones-used-for-livesto...: “No steroid hormones are approved for use in poultry”

It’s certainly true that today’s meat birds are MUCH bigger than heritage breeds, but that’s a result of selective breeding, not hormones.

No, there aren't. Knives dull over time; even the most durable steel formulations need sharpening eventually. Those ceramic knives are pretty robust, but they too will dull. More importantly, they're extremely brittle; my experience with them is that they chip very quickly and are really unsuitable for anything other than very light use. For your use, they might be ok, but I think you'd end up being annoyed when they break sooner than you want.

I recommend something from the Victorinox Fibrox line to folks like you who just want to cut stuff and not think about knifes. They're very sharp out of the box, quite durable, and will last a long long time before going dull. When they do, they're so cheap (like $25) that you could just get a new one rather than messing around with sharpening.

I think part of the dynamic here is that when people give advice it often comes from one of two very different modes:

1. There's a piece of advice I want to give, and I'm going to give that advice to some degree regardless of the question or situation. Maybe I'll wait for a question where my advice fits, or maybe I won't, but it's a play _I_ want to suggest, so I'm going to suggest it. For example, "use Django" is advice I might give to anyone who asks anything about web apps because I know Django and it's easy advice to give.

2. I really listen to what someone's asking, and give them specific advice for their situation, without letting it be colored by my own experience or the moves that have worked for _me_ in the past.

The second is a lot less common! It's really hard to pay that level of attention, and force yourself to question your own assumptions. But it's also a lot more useful, since it's specific and tailored.

Critically, in a blogging context, only the first mode is really possible. There isn't someone asking for the advice, it's just me writing a blog post for some imagined asker. This is why most unsolicited advice isn't that useful, which absolutely includes whatever blog post you're reading. Including one of mine.

Thanks for the pointer - that's a great resource. I'm adding a link to it to the article.

You're right: I was doing my math wrong. I'm fixing the math in the article right now. Thanks for the correction!

> Is this ironic?

No.

Hey, thanks for levels.fyi! It makes this kind of accurate compensation math possible in a way that really wasn't before y'all came along. Thanks again!

You're right - I was doing my math wrong. I'm fixing it now. Thank you!

I'm very curious about the "major attack" against Django you mention. I'm unaware of in-the-wild attacks targeting Django itself, so I'd really like to know what I missed. Can you share more details with me? Public or private is fine, send me an email if you prefer.

You seem to be saying that Thea isn't a "real" woman. That's insulting, gross, and incredibly inappropriate. It's not "controversy"; it's insults and hate hidden under this plausibly-deniable veneer of "conversation". It's bigotry and bullshit. I'm glad those comments are dead, and hope yours follows.

Ha, I'd totally forgotten that Five Dysfunctions talks about MBTI -- I think I'd blocked it out. I completely agree that MBTI is total bullshit. Thanks for pointing it out.

I think this illustrates something about business books in general: even when they contain a really good idea, they often also contain other less-good ideas. I think I tend to read business books really critically, and am comfortable remembering the lessons that are useful and ignoring the ones that aren't.

But I should add a note to my reading list about MBTI, least others think I'm recommending it and take it seriously.

Thanks for the list! The one that I've read (about half) are great, which makes me want to read the rest. (Just Culture and Accelerate, in particular, are so great I think I'm going to consider adding them to my list as well.)

This is so cool, I’m really glad to see someone doing this. Best of luck!

There isn't a hard policy; it'd be a case-by-case decision. If there wasn't rough consensus, it'd be up to the release manager and technical board to decide. So far, this hasn't really happened: there have been a few bugs that have delayed releases by, like, a few days or a week, but nothing so severe that has seemed to warrant pulling a feature down.

That’s not really correct: beta marks feature freeze for the release. So there will be bug fixes before 3.2 final lands, but no new features.

Author here: weird, I've never experienced that (10+ years doing this silly exercise, on both sides).

Various vendors have offered their own compliance frameworks - PCI reports, SOC2, whatever -- and I'm happy to read those instead; they tend to have (most of) what I'm looking for. I've never been charged for the pleasure, though. Guess I have something to look forward to!

(Author here.) Well, you could always use this questionnaire as a starting point itself: ask yourself these questions, and if you're not happy with the answers, do something about it.

Another reasonable security practices starting point would be another article by Latacora: https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html

It's semi-oriented towards SOC2, but every item on that list is practical, doable even for small teams, and has real solid security impact.

I tried to get at that in the "who this is for" section:

> [This assumes that] you have a security person (or team) who can evaluate the answers and is part of the decision-making process. If nobody’s going to read the answers, don’t waste your vendor’s time.

So yeah, totally agree. If you can't adequately evaluate the answers, it's not worth anyone's time to ask 'em.

You're right to be concerned - it is a red flag. It's something I'd ask about if I were interviewing you. However, it's _not_ a dealbreaker: I've hired people who've been fired, with longer gaps than yours. You can recover from this.

When you get asked about this, your interviewer is going to be looking for a few things:

- are you honest about what happened self-reflective about the causes, and take ownership of the parts that were under your control?

- what have you learned from the experience that might help prevent something similar from happening again?

Definitely don't shy away from it, or claim that you quit. Getting fired isn't a dealbreaker, but dishonesty is.

So, if someone asks you "why you'd leave Company X?" (which, if they're a good interviewer, they will), you'll want to be able to say something like:

"Actually, I was fired. I had some medical issues that I let get out of control, and my work suffered. I've got the medical stuff sorted now, and I've learned how to take better care so that my work should stay consistent in the future."

I obviously don't know the specifics of your situation, so that's fairly vague; it's better if you can share specific work strategies that you've since learned, i.e. around managing your priorities/task lists or whatever. You don't need to -- and shouldn't -- go into specifics about the medical side, but you certainly can talk about things you've learned to keep yourself engaged and focused at work.

Good luck!