Completely different experience though, since RAAM is a supported race, a very different kind of suffering. The Trans Am is a more comparable one (though still a race): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Am_Bike_Race
I often do ultra races, always trying to be at the pointy end. I have all the training, and all the fancy equipment you could possibly imagine. Doing something of the magnitude of this article though still scares the hell out of me. Every year I watch the Transcontinental Race, and every year I say "yeah, would love to do it, but next time". I still haven't signed up.
The gear, the legs, they help with going faster. Whether or not you can finish (barring catastrophical mechanical or injury) is all in your head!
I'm going through the same path right now, building my own product, and while I do indeed feel like it taught me tons, I don't want lessons, I want to get a business off the ground!
Fun fact: a previous company I worked for denied my request for a 4-day workweek precisely because they were scared I'd work another job. I honestly just wanted more time to ride my bike.
> I now understand that a rewrite carries with it a huge amount of various risks and that people are biased to overestimate the costs of the ugly stuff they see in the old application and underestimate the risks of things they are not aware of when deciding to do the rewrite.
I see this a lot with large scale refactorings, where people usually start with the easiest case and work their way up in the complexity ladder, and by the time they reach the hairy stuff it's basically time for another refactor to account for what's been missed. I started to look at any proof of concept or refactoring proposal that doesn't take into account the complicated bits, the corner cases, with a lot of suspicion.
I worked on some of these systems as well. Credit card details haven't been sent by emails for many many years, and I believe the last fax Booking ever sent was somewhere in 2018 or 2019, the whole fax system was decommissioned. By the time I left I believe they were still showing CC details to hotels via the extranet or an app though. A virtual CC thingy exists, but like someone said upthread, hotels are very set in their ways and often behind the times.
Very long, relatively easy rides, for the most part. In summer that's 6 hour rides or longer at a conversational pace, in winter it's 3 or 4 hours on Zwift. Sometimes I do threshold work (because it's more fun than Zone 2 all the time), rarely HIIT anymore (these races don't have a habit of having a sprint finish).
I've been competing in ultra-distance bike races since 2020. In April this year, I decided to take a break from work and see how well I could do if I dedicated one year to training. I chose the Race around the Netherlands in 2024, the race that started it all for me, as my goal race. Training takes up to 30 hours a week, so at time it's like a full time job, but I haven't felt so fulfilled in a long, long time. I definitely recommend it to anybody that has the opportunity.
As a matter of fact, at a previous job we used traces as a data source for event sourcing. One use case: we tracked usage of certain features in API calls in traces, and some batch job ran at whatever frequency aggregated which users were using which features. While it was far from real time because of the sheer amount of data, it was so simple to implement that we had dozens of use cases implemented like that.
I left B.com in early 2020, and they had been using Kubernetes for newer services (I actually worked on the deploy tooling), but until I left nothing of consequence had been moved to containers yet. The overwhelming majority of their workloads still ran on bare metal indeed, and to be really honest I still kinda miss it sometimes.
Not all sites that offer feeds actually put the appropriate link tag (things that come to mind: youtube channels, reddit, a lot of wordpress blogs, ...), which is extra annoying. It actually takes a lot of heuristics to be able to say with some sort of certainty whether a site offers a feed or not.
Software engineer with over 10 years of experience building web products, from content management systems to complex and highly reliable transactional APIs for integration with hundreds of third-party software vendors and handling billions of operations a day. Proficient in both starting up greenfield development and revitalizing legacy systems. I'm slowly finding my way lower in the stack, and nowadays you can also find me writing Kubernetes controllers.
Spent the last few years working mostly on the backend side on long running projects, so I'm pretty comfortable around huge and legacy code bases. Looking forward to get back on doing full stack dev and actually shape a product, because I don't appreciate being just a code monkey. Think of me as a one-man startup. I've been working remotely since 2009, so I'm really effective working on my own. If you have an interesting project, let's talk.
Spent the last few years working mostly on the backend side on long running projects, so I'm pretty comfortable around huge and legacy code bases. Looking forward to get back on doing full stack dev and actually shape a product, because I don't appreciate being just a code monkey. Think of me as a one-man startup. I've been working remotely since 2009, so I'm really effective working on my own. If you have an interesting project, let's talk.
Spent the last few years working mostly on the backend side on long running projects, looking forward to get back on doing full stack dev, I miss working with startups. I'm mostly interested in developing products from the ground up, so I'd be a great fit for a tech co-founder, but I have no problem dealing with existing codebases. Feel free to approach me if you have an idea that generates actual value.
22 yo here, recently dropped out of college. I cannot tell you what to do, but I can tell what difference dropping out made to me.
To give some context: I lived in a small city in Southern Brazil, and I've been programming professionally since I was 16. Of course the money and the recognition were close to zero, because who trusts a kid anyway. Self-taught from the beginning, so by the time I got to university at 18 I was always the best programmer in the class, which made almost every class extremely boring. More or less 2 years later I started getting offers from big companies in Brazilian tech hubs like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Moving to another university meant losing almost 1 year worth of studies, so I decided to stay. But at this point I was convinced that I was worth something, and started working remotely for a company in Rio. I was in charge of a whole product, and the pay was ok for Brazilian standards. Since I lived in a small town, I was getting paid more than all my friends, even those that already graduated. I thought that I was on to something.
Last year I started working for an American company, and started getting paid a lot more. During the interview process, I wasn't even asked about my education, they just asked me to demonstrate what I knew (I understand that this is not universal to every company). This, combined with the fact that I finished all the college subjects that interested me, made me take the decision to drop out and move out of the country. Remote work is fun and all, but I missed the social contact with other people. Berlin was my first choice, and I started applying. I made it clear in every application that I was dropping out, and it didn't seem to make any difference, because I was getting interviews and ended up getting hired. So professionally dropping out did not hurt me at all, because I had the skills.
But not having a degree did make me life difficult. It was absurdly hard to get a work permit. Not impossible, but it required HR to get creative. So you have to be prepared to hit roadblocks every once in a while. I thought of giving up and going back home a few times, because it's really frustrating. In the end, everything worked and I'm more than one year ahead career-wise than if I had stayed and finished my degree.
So, should you drop out? Maybe, but be prepared for a slightly harder life overall. If you do decide to drop out, please do it as soon as possible, and don't wait a few years like I did. I feel I could be even better today if I had dropped out a year earlier. But YMMV.
This has been requested a thousand of times already, and we're listening. It's on the top of our list. We're dealing with some problems about feed data right now, but as soon as they're fixed we'll start working on it.