Location: Remote/NYC
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: 20 years on: Java + SQL Slightly less on; AWS, and Docker
Résumé/CV: https://github.com/colangelo-david reach out for official CV
Email: [email protected]
Senior Engineer with 20 years of java experience across all major cloud providers. Lots of experience in the Banking/Credit Union and Payment space. Always looking for consulting and freelance work. Lets chat!
If you just want it for the HDMI input to use as an aux screen for what ever computer your running than anything with an HDMI input in the size range you want should work. I run all the TV's in my house like this; connected to mac mini's instead of futzing with the onboard software mostly because I despise typing one letter at a time with a tv remote.
Honestly all the onboard TV OS stuff I have interacted with in the last decade has been more or less terrible and I wouldn't even consider it when buying a TV especially one that is just going to be a screen. All of the recent installs Ive dealt with (family and friend support) has revealed a ton of pay-to-play features (Samsung frame tv's cough cough). I applaud you for wanting something neat but I cant say Ive come across anything Ive ever actually wanted to use beyond "select input -> HDMI1"...
Perhaps an overly simplistic view but heres my take on it:
"You get into STEM by studying, you get into art by doing"
Im a software engineer by trade, Ive also done a bit of hardware work at another time in my life. I consider my self an engineer both in what I enjoy and what I do professionally. However I also play a half a dozen instruments, shoot process and print wet film, enjoy analog audio recording process' and have done a lot of live sound work for theater productions over the years. I fancy my self a half decent carpenter and have built at least one boat that floats and is useable. People have described me as "artistic" but you will have to take their word for it.
Anyway... Some thoughts in no particular order:
- Art, FWIW is sometimes about being shameless to try and create something you like
- I photograph what I enjoy, some times other people like my photographs, sometimes they don't many hang in my residence, some hang in others if they have asked for prints over the years.
- You can create most art forms for cheap or free if you are careful
- Getting over the initial "frustration" hump can be the biggest hurdle, I still cant really play the banjo yet...
- Gravitate to something that seems interesting to you, just because your friend really likes watercolors does not mean that is the art form you must partake in.
- Use the resources at your disposal, in my experience most artists or really anyone passionate is more than willing to share their knowledge with you.
Practical advice on doing:
- In the modern world you can get cheap supplies to at least test the waters on anything
- If you have $100 you can probs do anything you want
- A half decent film camera and a few rolls of film with processing can easily be had for $100
- There are plenty of cheapo guitars that work perfectly and can be had for $100 buy used and your more than likely to snipe a sweet deal.
- You can get a basic paint set, brushes, and some canvas for <$100
- paper and pencil can be had for WAY less than $100 (yeah yeah I know theres fancy paper too)
- If you live in or near a city (or really anywhere) many art galleries are free to the public to walk around, some offer lectures with artists or other similar events that anyone can go to. Public libraries and museums often have similar things you can take advantage of for free or cheap and spend some time near or with some really famous individuals. Go to these things, if you don't like what you see, hang for a bit, learn, leave a better person, keep going until you find what you like
- Youtube, oh man the endless tutorials, free lessons, how-to's, helpful advice, creative work you can see for free. Youtube is your friend, youtube is one of the great art resources of the era.
Chances are the only thing at the moment keeping you from creating art is you.
How about some more turn-of-phrase-quotes:
"Engineering is about separating the signal from the noise, art is an outlet for the noise"
"If Your first 10,000 photos are your worst, send a crew of engineers to the Hubble to fix the mirror"
"Somewhere between art and engineering is a reasonable salary"
Sorry in advance if this post come across a bit harsh but I think there is a fair bit of misconception in your post.
First and foremost I think it's safe to say that things like TypeScript and JavaScript would not be possible without the lower level "system" languages. In all fairness they were there first, by a matter of decades in most cases. Ultimately the V8 engine, Node and other similar stuff is largely built with C++ and C anyway. Fundamentally what you are asking about CAN be done, there is a larger, fairly academic discussion of "should" it be done or "why hasn't" it been done.
"It's quite clear that TypeScript is going to be around forever" Really? Why? Type script is 9 years old, C is 50 this year. Sure C is still here but lots of things have come and gone in that time, small talk, lisp, fortran, cobal... (as long as you dont look TOO closely in some basement mainframes). Ive been at this for a while and the way I see it typescript is still in the late "fad" stage, it has yet to truly prove its staying power and there is nothing indicating with will "be around forever" just yet. Languages dont have real staying power until they last through the the subsequent fad, if people are still using it after the next cool thing comes out then its likely here to stay.
"It's nice and simple." as others have noted, it's nice and "familiar" there are plenty of us out there who love C/C++ syntax and coding styles. I consider C to be one of the simplest languages out there.
"A systems language essentially just adds access to pointers." Sure, but it also does LOTS of other things. If you want to make a vague comparison systems languages are closer to running "on the metal" than interpreted languages and for some use cases this this is critical. If your flying a jet at 35,000 feet you don't want your altitude tape to all of a sudden read NaN... In many cases, especially mission critical systems, programing close to the metal is the only way to achieve the sort of optimization you really need to run a system, abstraction is NOT always a good thing
"Imagine the same syntax/tooling for embedded, kernel, system (browsers, interpreters), backend, and frontend." -> You could define a systems language that had similar syntax to JS but the main point of JS is the broad abstraction of some things that you very much want access to when you working on a system closer to the metal. Sure its nice when all numbers are of type "Number" but there are lots of cases where you need far stricter control over that. Another piece of historical context here is that the web era brought around the notion of a "full stack" developer, someone who could work on "front end" and "back end" code. In my experience the best dev's are good at one of the two and have a cursory understanding of the one they are not good at for the sake of knowing whats going on most of the time. Realistically these people are not tinkering with the "low level" aspects of the system since its all provided by other things.
"I just don't know why there is not more interest in this." Perhaps because there is no real reason to sink the engineering effort into adding a new syntax to something that works and there are plenty of competent, educated engineers out there working on the stack already. There is lots of historical context here as well, JavaScript more or less became popular in the web era to manipulate front ends, Node made a viable server side platform so it was "one language up and down the stack" which made engineers easier to train (supposedly, I have yet to see this in practice). This was all great but thats a web centered view of the whole situation. In reality there are computers in EVERYTHING these days and many of those computers/microcontrollers/microprocessors simply can't run javascript (for what ever reason) and systems languages are quite relevant.
To sum it all up I think your largely ignoring:
1) The huge historical contexts to why some languages are the way they are
2) Why some syntax/language designs lend to certain use cases
3) Why the "web" era made JS popular for better or worse
4) Why OOP is not a silver bullet for all computing use cases
It took me the better part of the first decade of my career to understand that the purest developers/comp sci's fundamentally know that the language does not matter but instead understanding WHY a language/framework/library/system is good for the use case. Roller Coaster Tycoon was mostly written in assembly anyway...
As other have noted, pick up a copy of this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language it was written by the two guys that created C (and also contributed quite a bit to UNIX). Its perhaps one of the truly "original" programing textbooks (and it does not have some wacky animal on the front). The creator of C++ also has written many books on the topic https://www.stroustrup.com/books.html all that are pretty decent.
If you want to lean by doing my advice is to get an arduino and try and build stuff. The arduino has a C like language (and will also accept C code) which is a great way to learn the language with fun projects. More importantly it will force you to learn C in a very restricted environment where you actually have to think about clock speed, memory management and code efficiency due to the micro controllers limited resources.
I don't own a plane or fly in 135 charters, I'm a member of a flight club that owns a few planes. As a member I effectively rent the planes from the club at a very reasonable rate with a small fixed monthly cost for things like storage etc. The planes are not used for primary training and are only available to club members. They are very well equipped IFR capable aircraft that are very well maintained. The club is small enough that its pretty easy to get a plane when you want/need one. With that in mind here are some cool things the club has aloud me to do.
1) I have moved a few times since I got my PPL and some of my friends have as well. At this point I have fairly close friends all up and down the eastern seaboard. The plane has aloud me to see them regularly without very much complex planning and often for lunch or breakfast when it would otherwise need to be for the whole weekend. Just yesterday I flew down south a bit to meet a buddy for breakfast that I otherwise would not have been able to drive to do do such a thing. This has been a really nice aspect of flying.
2) We have some family that lives close but not super close (7ish hour drive). The plane has aloud us to be part of their new borns life in a tangible way. Similar to seeing friends that I otherwise couldn't
3) The plane has expanded my weekend trip options. We have explored islands, gone to further cities and seem more than we would in a car. There are just north of 16,000 airfields in the US and only a small chunk of them service commercial traffic. I can get my little plane into pretty much all of them and land super close to lots of interesting places.
4) Ive been able to leverage interesting one day opportunities: Is there a once in a decade eclipse coming, best viewing spot is 600 miles, lets take the plane for the day. Is there an airshow somewhere lets fly in and check it out. Ferries booked to Nantucket for the weekend, take the plane. Want to get some chowder the vineyard for lunch, take the plane. Wedding in the Hamptons, traffic looking like its gonna be 6 hours to get there, take the plane. Buddies bachelor part is far and you need to get there friday potentially stuck in hours of beach traffic, take the plane (and pick up some friends along the way!)<- all things Ive done.
Before anyone jumps to "its super expensive to do those things" the fact is, in a reasonable GA plane its about the same cost as driving +fees for dealing with cars these days. My plane gets the gas milage of an SUV and most airports charge less than $20 a day for ramp parking, free if you buy some fuel typically. Some cities have silly $2 mandatory parking fees or what ever but if your careful about picking which small airport you go to in a city you can usually fly in for VERY cheap or free if you buy gas and you generally need to buy gas anyway... With tolls and gas prices the way they are its usually not much of a price difference to take the plane even after rental costs are figured in.
I'm, going to echo a bit of whats in the comments to robcohen's post but the single most productive cert I hold is my pilots license. I do not fly for a living, Im a software engineer (mostly). I hold other certs, some technical, others non technical both work related and non work related by a sizable margin my PPL is the the most productive:
Back story: when I started working for my self my first client was a pilot, he encouraged me to get my PPL or at least do a demo flight. I did an intro flight and was instantly hooked. 3 years later I had a PPL, Instrument Rating, High Performance and Complex checkouts. One of the best experiences I have ever had, I was fresh out of college, had a few bucks in my pocket and not many obligations. Anyway heres why its been great:
- I have found there are basically three types of people that bum around private airports where general aviation ops occur. 1) people successful enough to afford to fly private jets or charters when they need 2) people successful enough to OWN their own plane. 3) People who are liable to become types 1 and 2. In general pilots are a nice bunch and a talkative bunch. Ive met some really great people (read business connections) just by lurking around the airport. That first client I had, had lots of similar buddies who were pilots that I got to meet etc. etc. By far the most productive business networking I have EVER done occurred near an aircraft.
- Flying keeps you sharp in all aspects and it WILL change the way you look at things. It keeps you sharp on doing paperwork, sharp on staying current on a topic, sharp on thinking ahead of things, sharp on staying in at least some sort of decent physical shape. I have built a lot of productive habits in my life to ensure I can fly.
- It hones your decision making skills, a lot....
- It re-shapes how you view getting around and enabling your business/work. Both pre and post pandemic life. Meeting with client within 500 miles, Im not dealing with trains or regional jets, im coming and going as I need. This has enabled same day travel, taking meetings i normally wouldn't have and being able to generally buy time back.
- Putting my PPL on my resume has been the best talking point, stand out item, liner note I have ever had.
A junior engineer with some (but not too much) experience. Im not sure what exactly has been causing this lately but we have had serious issues at my current org as well as others that I help, finding junior engineers with 2-4 years of relevant experience. We run a fairly straight forward stack (postgres, python/node depending on the service, react front end), our packages are pretty competitive and we have not had a lot of (read basically none) good stuff come across the wire. Recently we have been inundated with resumes from boot camps, college kids, "self taught" people, and just people looking to change careers and expecting us to foot the bill to train them, none of them can hack it on even simple coding challenges or basic architecture questions. At this point ill take someone who can look at a common stack dump and have a fair idea of whats going wrong...
The best analogy I can think of is that we dont need Frank Gehry, but we need someone know knows the studs should be 16 inches apart, and all we are getting is people who know that 3 inch screws might be involved in the job but that is the only screw they have ever seen and the only screw they are comfortable using.
As others have noted I agree that building something (even not software related) helps get me out of these kinds of funks. The reality of your position is that you likely are at a point where you have hired people to make the important technical decisions in terms or architecture, design, and "engineering" and you hired them because they are specialists at that. In todays dev world there is too much to know about to many things to keep full grasp on it all. Your job as a technical leader is to drive the trajectory of the project in the right direction and that often means trusting the leaders of various teams to make decisions about individual technical topics so long as it meets your higher level goals as an organization. Remember Wernher von Braun was not designing every piece of the Saturn V he was driving the project to success.
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Drop a comment here for more info or apply directly to one of our positions!
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The Victorian Internet By Tom Standage, solid read on the history and progression of communication tech up through the dropping of the transatlantic cable. To the point with lots of history I did not know before reading it.
Forever Young by John W. Young; haven't quite finished it yet but its great so far. He is perhaps one of the most prolific astronauts to have served at NASA and has lots of great stories.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions By Edwin A. Abbott; Its short but its a solid read (especially considering its age) great thought piece on multidimensional space.
Senior Engineer with 20 years of java experience across all major cloud providers. Lots of experience in the Banking/Credit Union and Payment space. Always looking for consulting and freelance work. Lets chat!