seekup
Some years after the turn of the millennium I was a CS student at UC Santa Cruz. I was taking various classes for my major and I ended up in a Comparative Programming Languages class, which was a quarter-long survey of different modalities - I remember Haskell, OCaml, C++, and there were maybe two others.
Anyway I had started noticing a particular student showing up in some of my classes. He stood out. Firstly because he was always asking questions, sometimes to the point of annoying other students. And then because he was older than the rest of us - in hindsight he probably wasn't older than his early 40s - but I was ~20 and as I came to learn, he'd lived hard. He had a stout, platinum blonde beard that seemed yellowed from the hand-rolled cigarettes I always saw him smoking outside the computer lab.
After class one day I started chatting with him. I wasn't much of a question-asker, and I found his willingness to do so in the face of obvious annoyance to actually be kind of brave, so I think I probably opened by complimenting him and asking if the reactions from other students bothered him. His answer, gravely-voiced, was clear: he was paying for these classes same as anyone else, and he wanted to get his money's worth. I found it a refreshingly self-centered take. I decided I liked the guy.
Over time we became lab-mates, working on projects together. He always reeked of tobacco; his fingers too were yellowed from those rollies. I learned that he'd never finished college his first time around, instead getting hired into industry and riding the wave of the dot-com boom. When the crash eventually landed, he washed out and found himself living the surf bum life in Mexico, soaked in alcohol and seawater. When he eventually decided he had to get his life together, he sobered up and moved back to the States. But he was unemployed, homeless - living out of his VW van - and a 40-something college student. He was a misfit.
So, let's see..right, Algorithm D. So for our Comparative Languages class, the OCaml project was an arbitrary-precision calculator. We worked through addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and then as the project deadline approached we turned our sights towards division. Me, I took one look at Knuth and decided to start instead with a brute-force implementation. But once that worked, we began tackling Algorithm D. Around 2am, still not done, I threw up my hands and said I was going home - I'd take whatever grade was coming. My partner also went home - to his van parked in the Engineering lot. I knew he didn't own his own computer, so imagine my surprise when I saw him the next day and he told me he had finished the Algorithm D implementation overnight.
Turned out he had gone back to his van that night with a pen and a ream of paper and worked the code out by hand, only typing it up in the morning. We were lab partners but I wasn't going to copy something I'd had no hand in; I got whatever grade I deserved and he got the perfect score. I'm sure the older heads have plenty of stories of coding by hand, but even by that time, circa 2005, such a thing seemed arcane, almost unheard of. I was duly impressed.
I occasionally wonder what happened to him - he was a smart guy and a good engineer, and I learned some important lessons from him. I hope he found his footing. And for the sake of his cubicle mates, maybe also kicked the cigarette habit.
GCP was not a strong competitor (in our eyes) when the on-prem decision was being made in the 2011-2013 timeframe, which was also before there was even an Autonomous program. The reason early infra was on-prem largely boiled down to a general distrust for the cloud from the Boss, who in my recollection had had some bad experiences with other portfolio companies suffering major downtime due to AWS outages.
Uber’s relationship with Google was great until that little legal matter. They were huge and very helpful investors in Uber.
But my earlier forays - writing macro bots on AOL and messing with the eggdrop source code on IRC - were just as meaningful; they hold the same place in my heart, even if they didn't have the same commercial success.
For me, my love of programming has never been about the value delivered. I've never really cared, in my heart, about how meaningful the product was (which is not to say I didn't make career decisions to optimize for that).
There are three things that have always driven me.
The first is an appreciation for the aesthetic elegance of a finely written program. A good source file is like a poem to me; even the paragraphing is part of the code, and I take great pride in crafting it. I never learned to draw or sculpt, but I poured a lot of what I think is a similar energy into my code.
The second is a sort of visceral awe for the speed with which a computer can do something, once I've given it sufficiently elegant instructions. I remember downloading the complete works of Shakespeare off Project Gutenberg in university, and feeding it into a word count program I had written for an intro programming class, and it spat out an answer in less than half a second. Every single word written by the greatest artist of the English language, boiled down to an integer in less than the time it takes a clock to tick. If I hadn't already been sold, that moment would've done it. What power!
And then lastly, I've always appreciated that outside of academia, programming is just a tool to accomplish some other task. I've worked in multiple industries that I wouldn't have known anything about otherwise, because I am skilled operator of a very versatile tool. I have my craft, and I get to apply to a myriad of problems, and that has helped me to build my "ocean" of knowledge an inch deep, which is a source of joy for me.
Nana's mission is to provide economic opportunities for people in the trades. We operate a managed marketplace in the appliance repair space, paired with a free-of-charge training program that helps to up-skill folks looking for greener pastures - which means we are building technology to help novices perform like experts.
JS/TS shop, in React Native, React and Node/Express. 10 engineers. We raised a $20M Series A last year, are live in cities in the 3 continental US timezones, and are currently facilitating on the order of 150+ jobs per day.
We offer competitive pay, 401k, covered medical, probably a few more things, and we have a lovely office in the Tribune Tower building in beautiful downtown Oakland.
You can reach me directly at bigo [at] nana [dot] io, or submit at https://nanahome.com/careers
that's what happens if you're lucky
I trust my heroes too, but like, that blog post doesn't really...say anything.
Go for it. As a former Yelp engineer, I can assure you that the answer would be negative (no correlation), but I invite you to give it a shot.
To your second question, the answer is "yes". A spam fighter simply cannot publicly release their spam detection algorithm - it would make the system too easy to bypass. SEO black hats have been trying for a decade to get around Google's sorting algorithms, and then they cry foul when Google changes things up. The message from Google all along has been: Stop trying to game our system, and instead focus on creating good websites. Yelp's situation is no different.
Yelp has tens of thousands of paying business customers, and yet with all the sensationalistic media play this type of story somehow continues to generate, no one has ever produced empirical evidence of a single documented case of pay-for-play. I'll also point out that there are at least three former Yelp engineers on this thread - some of whom didn't even like working at the company - who are steadfastly defending Yelp's business practices as legitimate and above-board.
By all means, record it if it happens. But don't hold your breath.