mikeappell

Stories like this make me glad my company has yet to accept VC money.

We're a five-person legal tech startup and the work environment is far and away the best I've ever experienced. Granted, I've only been a developer in total for four or five years now (including almost three here), but of all the jobs I've had it's the best.

My CTO/supervisor is amazing: smart, funny, likable and with a management style that works for me amazingly well. Mostly hands off, but fully available for deep dives on technical subjects when necessary. At this point I've earned enough trust to be able to just get shit done with minimal oversight, though we do check in daily at least, and keep each other apprised of what we're up to, or interesting things we've come across.

The lack of external forcing agents is probably a win for us at this point. Obviously there's benefits to having a pile of money to burn: we'd probably hire several more developers and really work to hone our product. But for a team with two full-time developers and a really great designer, not to mention extremely smart and talented leadership and sales teams, we're doing great, and ship features at a pace that seems to put to shame similar companies with much larger teams and far more money. Honestly, I have no idea what they're doing with their time.

Still working on that product-market fit though...

Anyway, tl;dr I feel like I hit the jackpot here.

I tend to open multiple windows instead. Though, to be fair, I usually do that on a per project basis. I try to close tabs once I realize I'm not going to be using them in the near future.

Basically the exact opposite of my browser habits, where I easily have 100 tabs open at any time, lol.

I wonder what it would take to get us to the point where we can oxygenate sufficiently without needing to use our lungs at all. Tons of applications there.

I think this is only partially true. There are aspects of coding which can be abstracted away, either because they're essentially boilerplate or because a simpler description of the solution is sufficient. Ideally if a more complex description is required, one can drill down into the simplified low-code description and add sufficient complexity to solve the problem.

I mean, couldn't many of the existing frameworks be described as low-code wrappers around more complex work flows and concepts?

> That's where the volume is. There's a big demand for programmers to do web stuff. That demand may or may not continue. It's so stylized that it should have been automated by now. Have an exit strategy.

This is highly variable. The more rote aspects of web development are indeed automatable: the parts that feel like repeating boilerplate because that's what they are. Creating duplicative controller actions, state updates, etc.

But then there are the parts that would be extremely difficult to automate. Creating rich, unique UI elements with lots of custom logic. Anticipating the user's needs before they realize they even have them. These take a lot of skill and experience, and are truly fun to work on – assuming they're your jam. Lucky for me, they are.

Funny point, but I assume they mean ten years for a problem they throw whole, enormous teams at.

Fascinating. I'll do some research; appreciate the input.

Huh, fascinating. Re: the salmon roe, do you take a supplement which contains the lysophosphatidylcholine, or do you just down the eggs?

Ice baths: that's for mental acuity, or overall physical health? I know it's used frequently in high-level sports for recuperation purposes.

I actually decided to try vaping nicotine to test whether it indeed was a cognition enhancer, and here I am months later addicted like it's nobody's business. Turns out trying this with an addictive personality isn't the greatest idea – appreciate the suggestion though!

Also, the balaclava is interesting: I can imagine the benefit is almost similar to that people get from using a gravity blanket. The weight and "hugging" effect might be very comforting.

Really sorry to hear about the sleep apnea; that's an awful problem to deal with. Hope you're able to find a treatment which works for you.

Only tangentially related, but: has anyone found a drug/supplement/etc which aids them in memory retention, cognition, alertness etc?

The only thing I've found effective is modafinil for alertness and some general mental sharpness. Especially after a night of poor sleep, the mental alertness it provides is a god-send.

I'm pushing back on describing them as 'mental self-gratification', as that seems like it implies a lack of value in them, potential if not immediate.

> until there is confirming evidence that assertion is just mental self-gratification.

I'd say this is a bit overly negative. There's value in developing theories and frameworks which aren't yet provable but should be as soon as technology or other theoretical frameworks catch up.

> If you laid all the people I contacted end to end along the equator, they would die, and you would be arrested.

Possibly the best line in an article full of really fantastic lines.

Aaand now I can't un-hear it. Thanks a lot.

Gonna disagree there: green circuits (and their descendents) are needed often enough and in high enough volumes that it absolutely makes sense to bus them. I've got four full lanes being almost completely consumed, much by red circuit production.

Certainly if you need a very small volume in one specific location and already have copper and iron present you can slap down an assembler making copper wire and another making the circuits, but that's generally far less space efficient than just pulling them in from the bus.

> Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.

Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.

This was my experience as well.

When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.

You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.

At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.

No clue how important they are in the ecosystem, but from the perspective of insects which piss me off, I'm on board 100%.

I've heard that mosquitoes are believed to be completely replaceable in the food chain of the various species which prey upon them. Considering how mosquitoes are a vector for _numerous_ diseases, malaria being the most deadly but still one of many, what's stopping research into eradicating mosquitoes entirely? A lack of research and surety on the overall effect on the ecosystem?

Honestly, fuck mosquitoes. If the mosquito laser system were ever actually viable/purchasable, I'd happily drop thousands of dollars to keep those bastards out of my bedroom at night.

Oh hey, just saw your response =)

Not something I'm likely to be looking at in the nearish future, but the next time I need to do some refactoring/rolling out a new Stripe feature, I'll definitely drop you a line with my thoughts. Thanks for the heads up!

> - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure.

Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when looking for recipes/tutorials you run into a lot of seemingly duplicative content which makes it confusing to figure out which is right for you. I had this issue trying to create Connected Payments, specifically.

That's really cool. I wonder what would have happened if you'd called that number.

I know AE offers different types of soles, including some very weather resistant ones. You probably know this, but just in case; and you might have more options for different soles if you buy online.

That said, I've heard their QA and service have gone downhill dramatically over the past year or two since their aquisition.

Not only that, but it blindsided European leaders. You'd think one would want to communicate an incoming travel ban to our allies before announcing it on live television...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2020/03/12/many-europ...

I think it's important to learn and understand, absolutely. But a default installation/configuration which both works correctly and is easy to set up is pretty damn valuable.

You can set this up as a shortcut. I forget exactly how I did it, but here's what seems to be a similar guide on macos:

https://coderwall.com/p/h6yfda/use-and-to-jump-forwards-back...

From what I was reading, many of the people responsible for reporting the results hadn't even downloaded the app until the night of, or if they had, hadn't ever logged into it on their phones.

Ridiculous.

So what you're saying is, they're "not even wrong."

I'm not sure if it was so much the flavor profile as it was being used to thin out the product using an inexpensive thinning agent. THC concentrate is very viscous, and needs to be cut with something to be viable for cartridge use.

Iirc terpenes are used in higher quality products.

It's funny: we were required to do a Google Sheets integration recently where we had to get a list of all the user's sheets as a part of the flow, and I didn't even realize there was a way to do so using a non-drive endpoint.

This is because I was apparently only perusing the v4 api docs, which I'm glad of since it would mean had I done this using the more appropriate v3 /feeds endpoint I'd have a really ugly migration ahead of me.

We've had users break their experience by refusing the 'drive' scope of access because it's so permissive, and security-conscious users balk at it before we explain that we're only using it to get a list of all the user's sheets rather than download all their files. And even then, some still choose to not use this feature. It's unfortunate, but as the api stands there's no way around it.

Fyi, if you want to query a list of only the user's sheets files, the following endpoint with this specific query param works: https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files?q=mimeType='applic...