The issue I take with this opinion as noted above, it selects for people who have available time. I am genuinely interested in programming, but I come home and spend time with my 4 month old son.
I think the "more than just a 9-5" idea is a toxic pattern which has been championed by the privileged. In short, by wanting something like this, you risk selecting for a fairly homogenous set of people.
I think you can write a good coding challenge which doesn't look like all the others (the socialite example in Takehome.io is particularly good because it scales with skill level – it's not a pass/fail, but a spectrum from just making it work, to showing you have thought about and dealt with an array of odd things that might crop up).
I don't understand why we're rebuilding Resqueue/Sidekiq in Elixir. This seems like a problem which is solved largely by OTP.
Yes there are issues with back-pressure and over-filling mailboxes, but I can't help but wonder why you'd want to bring Redis into the picture when asynchronous processing is built-in for you.
Similarly if you want more robust queueing semantics, isn't RabbitMQ there?
I started using Red Pen when I was working with Katie (who is a rocking designer) at one of my previous jobs. I've then taken Red Pen and used it at a bunch of other places now.
I've always ended up with bunches of printed mockups with annotations on them which are hard to version and end up piling up on my desk. Red Pen means that I can work with anyone to get a design just right.
The issue with round robin routing is that you can't do it in a distributed routing mesh. You need to share state between routers and that coordination overhead is non-trivial.
To me it seems that all this talk of "Google took away my data" is rather silly. From what I can tell, Google Analytics previously would get keyword data from referrer data, which is not passed on when using https. Thus the lack of keyword data is attributable to Google improving their search experience.
I have heard arguments suggesting that Google does indeed have the search referral data, but it is not as easily attributable as when you could rely on http referrers, since it requires matching clicks on a SERP (which powers the webmaster tools data which you get) with people landing on your site. Not impossible, but not trivial either.
It would be really nice to know which search terms people are converting on (for reasons othan SEO). Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury at the moment.
I'd wager that Azure is targeting a very different part of the market. There were some really handy things in Azure, and there's some really handy things about Digital Ocean. In the end, Azure is not chasing people who only want to pay $5/mo for a server.
I've had a few issues with Azure myself, but that never caused me to question the pricetag.
Will not treating DO as a serious threat come back to bite them? Quite possibly. Are they worried about it right now? Seems not.
I may be dense, but this does seem like a slow follower to Prismatic and co. It's interesting in a way: kind of pretty, but it doesn't seem like it's going to change my world.
Of course, I half expect to be proven wrong because I've now voiced my doubts.
I can see how that claim could sound pretty ludicrous. A startup coming from nothing isn't going to get $100 Million to spend on hardware.
We're backed by a publicly listed Australian company: Macquarie Telecom. We've built upon their investment in datacenters and fiber connections between them as well as racks, servers, switches, routers, power etc.
We thought it was important to call out that we're not a fly-by-night operation, hosted in an office cupboard. We (and our backers) have ploughed serious capital and we're serious about what we're doing. I understand that we may not have explained very well how that investment works.
All that said, we have the advantage that most platform providers don't: capital invested in hardware which means that we don't have to rely on another provider (such as AWS) for compute resources.
I was hired as a technical community manager/evangelist. I've chosen to take on neither of those titles in the few months that I've been in this position. I've been a dev since high school and still consider myself to be one (although sometimes it can be a while in between chances to write code).
I put "Vim Wielder / Cat Herder" on my business card. Turns out the cats I herd tend more often to be executives than developers. Developers are great: you show them a great product and help them to use it and they're on your side. Helping executives understand how tech community works can be difficult at times.
I can't comment on what particular brand of developer evangelist Adria Richards was, but there are many kinds. I'd hope that she was one who writes code and who contributes to thte community rather than just selling to it.
I think the "more than just a 9-5" idea is a toxic pattern which has been championed by the privileged. In short, by wanting something like this, you risk selecting for a fairly homogenous set of people.
I think you can write a good coding challenge which doesn't look like all the others (the socialite example in Takehome.io is particularly good because it scales with skill level – it's not a pass/fail, but a spectrum from just making it work, to showing you have thought about and dealt with an array of odd things that might crop up).