I'm a Tech Lead with a solid CV looking for a new gig. I'm finding it noticeably more difficult to get recruiter attention (let alone interviews) than I'd expected.
My gut feeling is that there are likely more candidates applying for any given job than there were late last year.
A lot of people here seem to take the "Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and therefore is worthless" line.
I don't hold any bitcoin and I don't feel strongly either way. But this piece by Lyn Alden provides some good insights into situations where Bitcoin might be valuable and why it may well have a strong future. Particularly compared to other, less widely-held cryptocurrencies:
I often find myself in similar situations as OP's, working with a client to understand a complex or ill-defined problem space and developing solutions in an agile way.
Neither you nor the client has a (functioning) crystal ball and so all that you can do is make the best decisions that you can with the information available at the time.
I've found that documenting Architectural Decisions as Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) helps build a shared understanding and ownership of these decisions amongst all concerned. They also prevent me from becoming bogged down and second-guessing myself: Here are the available options, here's what we decided and here's why.
No need to make ADRs overly long or complex. I use this "Lightweight" template:
The availability of equipment and expertise at a makerspace allow you to accelerate your learning, enhance your skillset and create things better and more quickly than using just your own gear and learning from YouTube.
Perhaps more importantly, a Makerspace turns making into a social pursuit. You'll meet new people with a genuine interest in your projects. You may even be able to help others learn things that you're already good at!
In an ABC (Australia) news story this week a journalist who was involved back in 1989 recounted that families were only allowed to collect the bodies of victims from hospitals and morgues if they agreed to sign a document confirming that the victim had died under "accidental circumstances".
This was one means by which the official bodycount was understated.
A lot of comments here bemoan "Full Stack Engineers" as being Jacks of All Trades but Masters of None. But that misses the point. Don't forget that the full quote is:
“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
In a startup or smaller organisation an Engineer with a deep understanding of a single area (frontend, backend, devops etc) is far less valuable to the business than an Engineer with "T-shaped" skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), a solid understanding of fundamental best practices and the ability to quickly understand new things as required.
Apparently because their special phones have "new, long-range radio hardware" that makes this all possible.
But radio technologies are pretty widely understood and while I'm no expert I've not heard of anything that could achieve what they're suggesting. So I'll remain skeptical until I understand better what that "long-range radio hardware" is and how it makes such a mesh network feasible.
"If the industry and government would reach a solution that would enable access that doesn't go to removing electronic protection, and doesn't attract that prohibition against systemic weaknesses and vulnerabilities, if the industry player was mindful to challenge that, there's a very robust judicial review process in Australia," Ingle said.
"They can very well go to the courts and determine that arguably this notice is not reasonable, proportionate, technically feasible, [or] practical, or say that it will introduce a systemic vulnerability, and is therefore unlawful."
That's fine for Google and Apple. Where is a bootstraped or VC-funded communications startup supposed to find the money for that particular legal battle?
The answer is that they avoid the whole scenario by not starting said startup in Australia or hiring any Australian employees.
Frame situations in such a way that you're happy with whichever outcome eventuates.
Simple example: Tomorrow's Saturday. If it's Sunny we can go on that family picnic we were talking about. If it's Rainy we can stay inside and watch that movie we've been wanting to watch. Positive outcome either way.
More Complex example: Tomorrow I have an interview for a job that sounds great. If it goes well then I get the job. If it doesn't go so well it'll be great experience for the next interview. Positive outcome either way.
Sometimes it can be a stretch to find the "silver lining" in a given situation but there's usually one there even if you can't see it at first. See also "Good, Bad, Who's to Say?":
Highly recommend joining a makerspace. Our makerspace (sparkcc.org) is quite tech-focussed and attracts a lot of people with a professional or hobbyist interest in tech. I've been working remotely for > 3 years now and always enjoy going along on Tuesday night to talk with my fellow makers about projects I've been working on and technology I've been working with.
+1 I used Tornado in the past because it had an async event loop before it was native to Python. So much simpler than having to set up wsgi servers etc with the added benefit of easily-configured background tasks (like having cron jobs built in to your application). This is really good when you're building an application that you want other people to be able to install and run easily.
It seems that Tornado is now offering the choice of its own event loop or the asyncio event loop. I built something recently in aiohttp because it felt like it had been built on asyncio from the ground up but will explore Tornado again.
I used aiohttp for a small project recently and found that it to be very good.
Combined with aiohttp-json-rpc I had a very effective websocket-based JSON RPC backend service up and running in a very short time and with very little boilerplate. I'll be using this pattern again for sure.
What would have been the advantage of me using Sanic instead (I haven't RTFM for sanic yet but I'm about to...)?
Circa-2000 I was in my final year of university and working as a Windows service desk monkey in the SysAdmin team of a Sydney-based company that developed a platform for hosting (legitimate, regulated) gambling websites.
Sun Microsystems happened to be across the road from us. My mind was blown the first time I saw the value of the invoices for servers and Solaris licenses that we bought both for ourselves and on behalf of our customers. That's where a lot of those dotcom-era "investment" dollars ended up - at Sun.
One day we needed a router + firewall for some internal service. One of the Unix sysadmins in the team grabbed a spare i386 desktop PC, stuck a 2nd NIC in it, installed Slackware Linux and configured ipchains. Job done: no budget, no managerial approval, no licenses, nothing. I couldn't believe it.
I asked him about Linux and after learning more came to the conclusion that it could basically do most things that Solaris could do but was 1) free and 2) ran on cheap, commodity hardware.
That was the writing on the wall for me. I taught myself Linux and pretty soon had my first bona-fide Linux Sysadmin job. Linux went on to become the OS that runs the world and I've never struggled to find relatively interesting, well-paid work since then.
Living in a share house in London (I'm Australian) with my fiance while earning decent money working for a tech company and taking every opportunity I had to go to gigs, travel Europe and attend music festivals.
I'm not sure if Dave's been active recently but he's best known for the use of his paintings as album covers for seminal UK doom metal band Cathedral.
I was fortunate enough to meet Dave in 2005 and purchase one his paintings. Chatting with him he confirmed my suspicion that he was heavily influenced by Bosch.
There is now potential for side-projects involving small-scale manufacturing thanks to recent advances in 3D printing.
A friend and I created Enstaved [1] ("Customized Staves and Accessories") after a prop that we designed and 3D printed for a talk I gave at PyCon AU proved really popular.
We did put in quite a bit of up-front work designing a product line and a website. Now most of our job is promotion and manufacturing the staves people order. Frankly that doesn't feel like "work" at all...:)
Several people have mentioned Flask. Eve is a well-written and actively-developed Flask framework for building RESTful API services: http://python-eve.org. It's most at home with a MongoDB backend but can also use SQL RDBMS, ElasticSearch and Neo4J.
I'm a Tech Lead with a solid CV looking for a new gig. I'm finding it noticeably more difficult to get recruiter attention (let alone interviews) than I'd expected.
My gut feeling is that there are likely more candidates applying for any given job than there were late last year.