I've been building software for 25 years, with experience scaling to several million users, running teams of 20+ people, bringing legacy software up to modern standards, building green field startup apps that successful sold. I've built AI (RAG) into a couple systems now. I am mission driven, with special place in my heart for civic software or software for the creative world, but am open to all sorts of configurations.
I'm looking for contract work, and can do anything from quickly iterating on getting a prototype built as a one person team, to fractional CTO work or anywhere in between.
In the US where I live, professional mold testing companies have big expensive machines which supposedly count spores in the air. The results always come back negative, unless the space is visibly super contaminated. This is because mold is usually in the walls and these services are called in after a water issues to absolve landlords of financial responsibility for the extensive work and expense it would take to actually solve mold problems. It’s a nasty business.
We had our place professionally tested, got negative results, then tore the place down to the studs anyway (eventually, after the Petri dish tests described above) and found all sorts of mold.
There is an easy and cheap test that is actually accurate. You place Petri dishes with a specific medium in them in the room, open, for an hour. Then you close them and put them in a dark spot for a week. When you next look at them, count the colonies that have formed. 3 or 4 or below is fine. 3 to 6 or 7 you need to wipe the walls with citrus oil cleaner or diluted bleach, deep clean carpets, remove old books and otherwise deep clean the space. More than that, you likely have mold issues in the walls or ceiling or floors. All mold issues come from water sources- small leaks in plumbing, old seals around the edges of bathtubs, ingress from clogged gutters backing up, etc. here’s where you can get the petri dishes- https://immunolytics.com/store/
Don’t bother with the kit or with paying them to interpret results, just count colonies like I outlined above.
We are going through this now. It’s no fun at all. We have the house ripped down to the studs. A couple times the plates saved us, showing there was more mold then we’d thought. We’d rip out some stuff we’d found, run the test, find too many colonies on the plate then dig some more only to find more issues. Finally, we are getting clear plates, and I feel much better.
If it does turn out to be mold and fatigue caused by the mold feel free to contact me as I have been through it and am now on the mend. It’s a long difficult process with only the vague signals you mentioned to guide you.
The idea isn’t to be more or less opinionated, its to learn to respect other people enough that you can manage communication and relationships with others who have different ideas. Unless you can make space for other people, you can’t reasonably expect them them to make space for you.
I'm down for any label that sticks on this concept. I would love for this idea to be part of the larger conversation around building software and communities on line. Thanks for the reply and article!
I think “organic” is prob the wrong word. It’s already a rather tortured word, even in just the farming world where it’s legislated. My brother, a small organic farmer with about 5 acres really groaned recently when telling me that hydroponic veggies can be labeled organic. And when I see it on non-far products (like salt, which is a real example that will make any nerd’s hair stand on end), it just feels like intentionally misleading marketing, not an honest description.
Anyway, I have a real soft spot for the sort of software the author talks about. I think of shops who build software like this as “design build”. Like in the construction world where design build means a small shop focused on overall quality and fit of the home to its owner, not scale or economy, etc. maybe that is a phrase that works?
I think this article might be something a litmus test for determining if you believe in such a thing as a functional software (not just engineering) _team_ or not.
I’ve been building software for 20 years, and in my experience good ideas come from anywhere, especially on a high functioning teams where everyone is bought in. Engineers in particular often come up with great leftfield solutions, as they know what’s going on behind the scenes and can find way to leverage that knowledge.
I came here to write this, and also to say that on a software team, for example, where the problem is complex, no one person may have a well rounded enough or deep enough grasp of the problem, goals, limitations, etc. to come up with an optimal solution on their own. This is why we have businesses in the first place, to organize teams in a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of way. A very basic example of this might be a UI designer coming up with a number of potential interface ideas for a particular problem users are experiencing, and an engineering choosing the design which will cost the least dev hours. Iterating on sketches of such potential solutions will almost certainly get to a better solution than the designer just making a choice their own favorite design and lobbing it over the wall to eng.
Not to dismiss the psychological safety point the article makes, which i believe is very valid.
Yes, and emotions help you choose good “anything”s. There’s always an emotional superstructure- yours, or somebody else can choose for you, based on their own motivations.
In a post scarcity world, framing everything as a problem puts you in a needless optimization loop. Emotions tell you why, logic can only answer how, which won’t get you out of the loop.
I’m not making a point for or against employing emotions in problem solving, I’m advocating for an awareness that all “logical” thought fits into a larger emotional context- just the opposite of op who structures their process as a pure logical process. Ironically, I’d call the notion of a purely logical process devoid of emotions a fantasy.
How much satisfaction do you really get from checking something off the list? There was some motivation that put the item on the list in the first place, and 9 time out of 10, that motivation goes back to an emotional drive of some sort. Ignoring that motivation during the process of satisfying it is fundamentally missing the point.
Any choice we make that is grounded in subjective decision making suffers from this reframing. And, i'd posit that the vast majority of choices are fundamentally subjective. Just take a moment when engaged in "problem solving" and ask yourself "why?", then question that answer again. You get to motivation, identity , "needs" (and not just the basic food and shelter needs) or some other emotion very quickly this way.
Is choosing a life partner a "problem"? What about something as simple as choosing what to wear in the morning or what beer you want from the bar? Even within traditional engineering problems so much of our decision making process can only be evaluated subjectively. Some examples are: naming variables (your compiler doesn't care what you name them), making choices around encapsulation (there are very often many possible ways to do this. we frequently chose the "simplest"- a subjective assessment), choosing a framework or language (a decision which is one part right tool for the job one part joining a likeminded community), etc.
At the root of it, we're emotional beings, not logical ones. Outsource the logical problems to computers, machines, institutions and focus on what makes you human. Otherwise somebody else will make the important choices for you in ways you certainly wouldn't chose for yourself.
If you view life as a series of problems to be solved, then life will become a bleak series of problems needing to be solved. The approach outlined in the parent comment here would fail to solve any essential human needs beyond a few of the most basic ones. Finding purpose, not burning out, nurturing family, communicating with others- even in professional settings- and so many other parts of being human require us to engage emotionally.
I have- just put the slowcooker on low and started putting my scraps in there. It was a total disaster after i added some Parmesan Everybody in the house was completely unable to handle the smell. I still think it has potential as an idea, but like all cooking, the details really matter, which is sort of exactly opposite to the appeal of the idea of a perpetual stew. Anyway, i'd try it again, but will wait until the of the house is going to be empty for a while.
Daily Kos | Oakland, CA or REMOTE | full time Senior Rails dev
Daily Kos is a progressive journalism and activism site with 11.5M uniques a month- more than the Wall Street Journal. We have a strong and devoted community of activists and readers, many of whom write for the site as well as staff writers and activist who do things like help lead the fight for net neutrality. We've been around several times longer than most other outfits posting here- 14 years- and have learned the value of high quality engineering.
I graduated in 2000, when microsoft was still king. There was no CS department then, though there was a CS major that you could get through the math department. Certainly there were no ties from campus to the startup world then. I loved the major- the intro book was the amazing Wizard book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and classes forced students to spend a lot of time in functional languages when most schools were pushing Java. This was prescient, and has very much worked out in my favor as a web dev working in ruby and coffeescript, functional style js, etc.
- Remote: yes, preferred
- Willing to relocate: probably not
- Technologies: Javascript and Typescript front and back end, NextJs, React, Ruby on Rails, RAG AI
- Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-libsch/
- Email: [email protected]
I've been building software for 25 years, with experience scaling to several million users, running teams of 20+ people, bringing legacy software up to modern standards, building green field startup apps that successful sold. I've built AI (RAG) into a couple systems now. I am mission driven, with special place in my heart for civic software or software for the creative world, but am open to all sorts of configurations.
I'm looking for contract work, and can do anything from quickly iterating on getting a prototype built as a one person team, to fractional CTO work or anywhere in between.