Location: Michigan, United States
Remote: Yes, remote only.
Willing to relocate: No.
Technologies: PHP/Laravel, Python, JS, AWS, DevOps, Docker/k8s, Cross platform (mac/*nix/win)
Résumé/CV: https://ktross.com/resume/
Email: [email protected]
20+ years of experience. I'm a generalist who does a bit of everything which makes it difficult to decide what to list here. I love to work on things like developer experience (local dev environments, tools, CI/CD pipelines), upgrading/refactoring/rebuilding legacy applications, documentation, improving processes, and anything that lets me learn something new.
I'm mostly looking for side work, but may be open to full-time if it seems like an exceptional fit.
If there's anything your current team has been meaning to tackle, but hasn't had the time, feel free to reach out. I can work very autonomously with almost no onboarding.
You could sign up for fastmail and point your domains DNS records there. It's $5/mo and they make it easy to import your existing emails from gmail. I switched to them when Google stopped offering free workspace accounts. It's been great so far.
I use it frequently, and there has been a major bug since launch that seems present on multiple platforms (desktop, mobile, Android, Apple). Seemingly at random, though I have suspicions that it's related to ads, the currently playing podcast will skip to the next unplayed episode before the current one is finished. This happens anywhere from a few minutes in to a few hours in. I would never watch another podcast in the Spotify app if the podcast I want to watch was available elsewhere.
They launched a half-baked product that was missing some of the most basic features you could imagine. It has since improved to the point where it's almost usable, but it can't compete with anything else from a UX/quality perspective.
It's also missing the discussion/community aspect that you get with a platform like YouTube.
Another annoyance is that I've had a Premium family subscription for years, but I still get ads on podcasts.
The G Pro X Wireless felt awesome and first and seemed like a great headset, but my mind changed when I ran into issues and saw how many others had issues as well. If they made it a bit more durable I would say it would be almost perfect.
I had an SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless as well before the Logitech one, and I ran into the same issue! Huge disappointment after having loved the SteelSeries Siberia wired headset
I'm not 100% positive, but it seems to be. Blowing into the front of the mouse would fix it for a few minutes. I saw a bunch of threads about it the last time I looked into it.
If I recall correctly, there were firmware updates that claimed to fix the same or similar issues, but those had no effect for me.
They're mostly a computer peripheral company. They've always made a ton of products like keyboards, mice, webcams, speakers, headsets, microphones, game controllers, etc. I've only experienced issues with fragile plastic parts in sub $80 headsets. You definitely shouldn't be seeing such a critical design flaw on a $200 headset.
The quality of their products used to be pretty good, but it's becomming obvious that they're starting to cut too many corners to reduce costs. I have an old pair of logitech speakers that have lasted me well over 10 years.
The G Pro Wireless has some major issues as well. They build up static electricity during use and this causes a single click to register as multiple clicks, and causes a continuous click to stop registering when you're holding the button down. This is terrible for a gaming mouse. I switched to a Razer Viper Ultimate and haven't had any issues.
Logitech is no longer the great company it used to be, so I have decided to no longer purchase their products. I purchased a G Pro X Wireless Headset less than 2 years ago, and I'm already on my second warrranty replacement (3 total headsets.) Multiple parts on it seem designed to fail, and all of mine have failed in the same way. They use laughably small screws to connect the band to the arms that hold the earcups and they just snap after a few months. It's very sad to see so much e-waste created just to increase profits by a few cents per unit.
I've been using wired mechanical keyboards for about 15 years so I can't recommend a wireless model, but Ducky makes great, reliable, entry-level mechanical keyboards. I've mostly used Ducky and I've never had one of their keyboards fail in any way. Glorious also makes great keyboards, but based on my perception of the build quality, I have a feeling their cheaper keyboards might not last as long. I'm currently using a Glorious GMMK Pro and it feels very solid.
It doesn't surprise me. Spectrum is currently the only non-dsl provider in my area, so I'm basically forced to use their service since I moved here. The first time I paid with one of my cards, the bank flagged it as suspicious and denied the transaction. Spectrum then charged me a $25 fee and initially refused to refund it until I was very persistent and annoying.
They also constantly send me spam regarding Spectrum mobile with subjects like "Your response is required". I even used their cost estimator to compare it to my current provider, Mint Mobile. When I entered my current plan into their calculator, it told me that I made a mistake (because it was so much cheaper.)
> Squash/rebase also plays horrendously with my local branches.
This is a very good point, and it has been slightly annoying at times with this approach. It hasn't been a major pain point for me, so I've just dealt with it. I've seen some scripts/aliases that claim to solve this, but I haven't spent much time looking into it.
GitHub actually keeps these in the pull request indefinitely if you delete the branch. You can also restore the branch at any time if needed. We have the branches set to automatically delete when a PR is merged.
I agree with the idea, but disagree with the approach. This seems like a lot of extra work for not much, or maybe even less, benefit.
The process I've set up for my team allows us to get the best of both worlds, in my opinion, with almost no extra effort:
1. Create a branch and open a pull request. Nothing gets pushed directly to master.
2. After the pull request has been tested and reviewed, we Squash and Merge into master on GitHub with a single button click.
This way we end up with a single commit in master for each feature, bugfix, etc. There's also a link to the PR in the commit message where you can view the individual commits that were squashed as well as links to any related Jira issues.
I lost my fiancée to cancer a few years ago, and this just reminded me that I suggested she create a GitHub account years ago. I didn't know she had used it, but this post prompted me to check, and it turns out she created some (good) issues on a few Minecraft/CraftBukkit projects.
It's great to see companies dedicating resources to putting these policies in place. It can make a huge difference while someone is going through the most difficult time in their life.
I had no idea he wrote that, very interesting! I need to look into other film scores he's written.
My first introduction to Philip Glass was his Book of Longing collaboration with Leonard Cohen. If anyone hasn't heard this, I'd recommend you check it out on Spotify.
> Don’t be that person. It might not be about you but it is everyone’s problem. Don’t be careless in the hopes you get sick when you can “avoid the rush.” There is zero benefit to individuals or the population to getting sick early in the pandemic. You would be putting the lives of others at risk. It is not just that people are dying, but how they are dying. To say nothing of the physical trauma, emotionally speaking this is the opposite of a “good death”. People are dying alone, quarantined from those they love.
> Early reports are that people who recover develop antibodies that provide immunity if they are infected with the same strain again. However, this is great news for vaccine development, so flatten the curve and wait it out.
> This can get very serious; one person described the pain as feeling like her lungs were being put through a pasta maker. 10% of cases require ICU care and mechanical ventilation. Even if autopsy reports from China have been misrepresented or overstated, there is a possibility of long term or permanent lung damage if you do get sick and recover. There are lot of gaps in the information about lung damage, mostly because everyone qualified to let the public know exactly what is going on is already very busy saving lives and putting their own at risk.
This drives me crazy, especially on Spotify. I've been uploading some of my collection to Google Play Music to get around this, but I'm probably switching to Plex in the near future.
For an extreme example of this, check out Blind Guardian on Spotify and compare some of the songs to the versions on YouTube. Some of them don't even sound like the same song.
Personally I use Firefox on my MacBook for slightly better battery life and the tools are good enough for the most part. AFAIK in terms of batter life it goes Safari > Firefox > Chrome.
I feel like all of this and more should have been mentioned in the article. It's surprising that Safari wasn't even mentioned when it has clear benefits in some cases (coming from someone who hates Safari).
I love Sublime Text, and purchased a license years ago. I'd love to be able to use it on JS projects. Do you have any suggestions for me to have a better experience with it?
That's just one example of broken syntax highlighting, and it's about the simplest a .vue file can be. It becomes more apparent/annoying in larger projects when you see perfectly valid chunks of code underlined in red or all the same color.
20+ years of experience. I'm a generalist who does a bit of everything which makes it difficult to decide what to list here. I love to work on things like developer experience (local dev environments, tools, CI/CD pipelines), upgrading/refactoring/rebuilding legacy applications, documentation, improving processes, and anything that lets me learn something new.
I'm mostly looking for side work, but may be open to full-time if it seems like an exceptional fit.
If there's anything your current team has been meaning to tackle, but hasn't had the time, feel free to reach out. I can work very autonomously with almost no onboarding.
https://ktross.com