Roofstock Owner Services - Stessa | Oakland, Remote | Ruby, Rails, AWS, React Native | Full-time | Senior Software Engineer
Roofstock (https://www.roofstock.com/) Owner Services - Stessa (https://stessa.com) provides Real Estate Rental Property Owners (& Homeowners) a platform for keeping their financials and property related data in good order and all in one place. Sick of your bank not letting you search back through all your transactions ever since account opening? Dreading Tax Time? With Stessa, you never have to worry about losing track of any financial transaction or expense related to your real estate. A large portion of the population will own real estate or a portion of it at some point in their life, and anyone with any real estate tremendously benefits from our platform. Come build out an awesome product and be a user of what you'll build!
Roofstock (https://www.roofstock.com/) Owner Services - Stessa (https://stessa.com) provides Real Estate Rental Property Owners (& Homeowners) a platform for keeping their financials and property related data in good order and all in one place. Sick of your bank not letting you search back through all your transactions ever? Dreading Tax Time? With Stessa, you never have to worry about losing track of any financial transaction or expense related to your real estate.
A large portion of the population will own real estate or a portion of it at some point in their life, and anyone with any real estate tremendously benefits from our platform.
Come build out an awesome product and be a user of what you'll build!
Pivotal Tracker. I've found it to be a much more productive tool, and teams using it typically move alot faster and are far happier than those using Jira.
The tables / spreadsheet functionality can be super helpful when you just need to jot down thoughts which lead to comparisons which lead to calculations which lead to helping you decide which path you want to go down. It's really great to not have to leave the context of what I'm doing and just open up an org mode buffer and jot down my thoughts and then come out with an answer that is backed by calculations I'm confident in. Very handy 'back of the envelope' or 'napkin' alternative!
This is great. Nice work! I built something really similar about 3 years ago, a few months before my 4th child was born. Then I lost interest lol. Super barebones POC https://justwatchwith.me/ The idea was that you could stream videos directly from your machine and watch in sync with remote friends and family, controlling the playback with a pause button. I didn't maintain it for a while after I built the POC because not many of my friends / family were very interested at the time. If I only had more time to improve it..... they probably would've appreciated it more under current circumstances if I continued to work on it lol
I recently used it to find out how much a certain company owes me based on a monthly guarantee obligation they have continuously fallen short of . I've also used it to do comparisons and find out the maximum I can save on a refinance from different lenders etc, whether I should lease or purchase a car etc.. Very useful!
I have to disagree with you on almost all points. I lived in East Africa for 20 years, and my observation of the African people was that their intelligence was similar to what you'd find anywhere in silicon valley. The problems you mentioned with financial services was solved way back in 1999 and rivals any mobile / cashless system anywhere else in the world, and that was long before things like square came out in the US. Other issues you mentioned such as electricity and water are the reason why you will find some of the most innovative people out there. Rather than complain about their inconvenient lack of opportunities, they think outside the box to achieve whatever they want to achieve. When everything is handed to you on a silver platter, that is what causes lower IQs, and when you have less and are constrained, that is what causes you to innovate. It's amazing to see what some of the makers there make, even the children, when they have very little, or practically nothing sometimes.
> You have to work a late night the day before sprint release? You were in the room when the team agreed to the body of work that would be committed for delivery in this sprint.
This can get complicated depending on the team dynamics and upper management. Sometimes there are pressures that cause the team to overcommit (throw lower estimates, giving the illusion that things can be done within the 2 weeks).
Overall, I think it kind of depends on the product you're building. If it's some SaaS product in the modern world of CI/CD, it doesn't really make sense to hold everything up for 2 weeks and then release. If new things are being continuously deployed/delivered, then value is being delivered faster and the business is achieving goals faster, learning faster, getting returns faster, rather than having to wait 2 weeks at a time. This in turn makes your business more 'agile', and all the productivity boosts, developer empowerment and happiness are great side benefit of the iterative process.
> Rule 20: When somebody says Agile, push for Kanban, not Scrum... ...Scrum can easily mean that you’ll get pressured to work extra hours to complete something within that arbitary two-week horizon.
This is very true. I've worked for over 12 years in the bay area in different software engineering teams at startups and found that scrum just leads to burnout and developer unhappiness and encourages team members to just do the minimum 'slap it together till it works' solution without thinking long-term on codebase stability, architecture and maintainability. By far the best development process that leads to high developer happiness, engagement, productivity and empowers them to go the extra mile to go above and beyond, and produce work that acts as a force-multiplier across the team, is what the author describes here as 'Kanban', also known as eXtreme programming. Most people from Pivotal Labs or Carbon Five or from a startup that adopted their process would recognize what the author describes as 'Kanban'.
Emacs is very easy to learn. Just as you learn the key combinations for video games, learning key combinations for emacs is really easy. Here are some steps to help you:
1. Go through the Emacs Tutorial. Just start emacs, put the cursor on the text 'Emacs Tutorial' and hit enter. It will only take 30 mins max.
3. By now you are comfortable navigating around and editing text, opening files, running emacs commands with M-x etc... so you can now install packages for syntax highlighting for your language etc... via M-x package-install <enter> -> search for your language (usually LANGUAGE-mode), and install it.
4. Use emacs to edit all your files for at least 1 day.
5. Use emacs keybindings to navigate around in other apps if you're on Mac or Linux, those are standard keybindings that work everywhere in Terminal, bash, Textedit, Chrome, etc...
6. Learn how to use vim, download a vim cheatsheet and have it handy for reference, edit some files in vim (git commit messages will also do).
7. Install evil-mode and edit your .emacs.d/init.el file to bind a key to toggle evil-mode on/off
8. In maybe one day max, you're very comfortable in emacs now, and may be well on your way to writing your own extension functions. You're pretty much an emacs expert by now, in only 2 days max!
9. Try out different emacs configs. You can try mine out here: https://github.com/sufyanadam/.emacs.d it's setup for all major languages, Ruby, Python, React, JSX, etc... It also has some soundboard keys bound, try C-c-n-m when you want to greet someone new but don't want to be interrupted (you have to have mplayer installed on your system for it to work).
Developer experience in React is orders of magnitude better than in Vue. Also, the React community settles on great conventions and patterns to help you be really productive early on. This is great because you end up with projects that are a pleasure to code in and easy to maintain. Debugging experience is far superior in React, finding the root cause of an issue is much quicker than with vuejs. Working in a vuejs project, I continuously wish we could just abandon it and rewrite everything in React.
I use a collection of tools from this repo to automate mundane developer activities such as posting release notes slack messages containing linked pivotal or Jira story titles: https://github.com/sufyanadam/pivotoolz
There's a bunch of stuff in there that saves you seconds each time you have to work with a user story or cut a branch or merge etc... Saved me a bunch of time over the years!
Email me at sufyan.adam(at)roofstock(dot)com