Most resonant quote from the article: "For more senior roles, look for dynamic range in their confidence levels." Great mental model of the types of senior people I've enjoyed working with.
I've found it's always more worthwhile to debate and work with people who have to consistently match their predictions against reality. In my life, that's been engineers that ship and money managers who tracked against a benchmark. Everyone else I'm happy to let them have the comforts of their opinions.
I seriously considered App Maker to build some internal code flows but could not develop the trust needed to deploy into production. With SaaS apps that require serious onboarding and deployment it's become almost impossible to trust Google in particular on this issue.
I'm hoping SMBs will start to seriously consider business continuity as a key feature of SaaS. If I wanted to differentiate as a SaaS product today, I'd consider offering putting at minimum source code into escrow upon sale/bankruptcy.
This has been so true for myself and many of our instructors at Fullstack Academy. There are so many cool ideas in programming that you can get by without - but once you start teaching it forces you to truly wrestle with those ideas. Definitely makes you a stronger programmer on the other side.
Excellent thought piece - wish HN was filled with more original analogies like this I one.
This reminds me a bit of domain driven contexts (something just added to Elixir/Phoenix 1.3) - reducing the surface area of sub nodes from each other by exposing that single point interface.
I’m the same way - I have lots of side project ideas I’d love to use Go for but get that early Rails like productivity. I maintain a few Rails apps and now view many of the things I’ve done as hacks to work around the lack of concurrency (though that was just Rails’ reality in late 2000s).
Elixir is close to my ideal though I like static types and a better community around libs would be nice.
Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.
This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.
Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.
This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.
It really depends on if I believed that my fifth day would be mine or would the demands of the work bleed into that day? Similar to 20% time at Google - it's easy for your "real" work to take over that time if you don't defend it actively and it's unlikely that you'll be vigilant the whole time.
I think in knowledge work - trading off time for salary is generally not a great move because we're almost always "on the clock."
I went pretty far down the path of trying to build applications with Google Spreadsheets and Apps Scripts (we still have some major business processes running on it). It's definitely made me feel the need for something between Spreadsheets and custom development or Salesforce - something like what I imagine MS Access solved in the earlier days.
Here's what it'd need:
- Spreadsheet like UI
- Validations and field data types (major liability of spreadsheets)
- Good forms integration
- Custom code like Apps Script capability
- Something around workflow and business logic
I think Airtable gets pretty close but I haven't been willing to switch cause of some limitations but I do like where they're going. I'm considering pulling the trigger for Salesforce but keep hearing that it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
One benefit often overlooked is that during high periods of churn in an industry (let's specify JavaScript fatigue as a symptom of rapid churn in Software Engineering for Web Applications). There are more opportunities to quickly speed up your career. Fresh problems call for new solutions and fresh eyes to work on those problems.
The opposite of JS Fatigue is climbing the J2EE certification ladder - if we were all still building Struts/JSP apps then there would be no room for new ideas to flourish. I felt very similarly about Ruby on Rails in 2004, there was 4-6 years where someone early in their software development career to learn a stack, find work doing that tech and manage a team (exactly what me and several of my good friends did).
Hey ChuckMcM - curious if you have any build reports of your 2D plotters. I've been very interested in them ever since seeing the Hektor and Victor project but haven't had the time/resources to build one myself (though I'd love to have one sitting at our office drawing out cool line drawings exactly as you described).
Congratulations on a great tenure at YC and best wishes for whatever's next! Your advice and friendship at YC are one of my fondest memories of our time there.
I've found it's always more worthwhile to debate and work with people who have to consistently match their predictions against reality. In my life, that's been engineers that ship and money managers who tracked against a benchmark. Everyone else I'm happy to let them have the comforts of their opinions.