Cymen

Is contracting on your resume really so bad? I recently made the jump from FTE to contracting because I've always wanted to and it's great. The compensation is higher and I can work the way I want to (put in a ton of effort to get something done, get paid for actual time put in and then move on to the next thing or take a break for a while to play with my two young kids).

I have on all my personal projects but I wouldn't bother with an existing project unless I had a specific need that PostgreSQL met (and MySQL did not).

I'm actually all in on PostgreSQL at this point -- I'm not bothering with trying to use vanilla SQL and worrying about switching databases but I have that luxury on my side projects. PostgreSQL has a lot of interesting features that I am happy to use and I frankly never really relied on using vanilla SQL in order to be database server agnostic anyway (not saying that doesn't have a place and maybe someone will reply with how it was absolutely essential for their X but...).

To be clear, I still am all for portable SQL queries but I no longer worry about relying on a feature only PostgreSQL offers and/or taking advantage of things it offers that are not part of the standard.

I agree with this now. I just went through some interviews and I should have practiced more leetcode, should have practiced whiteboard pseudo code and should have reviewed my big-o. With 10 years in, the skills needed to demonstrate knowledge in an interview are stale because things like big-o are internalized/intuitive and don't often come up in actual work (as something that gets discussed much as it might in an interview, YMMV).

I really resisted buffing up in my interview skills because it seems silly but I realized after the last couple that it clearly impacts the perception of those interviewing you (should have been obvious as I'm interviewing others but not all places interview the same -- we don't ask much about CS fundamentals). And that perception likely has a big impact on your compensation negotiating because you're going to get pegged lower than your ability and be less desired unless you can clearly demonstrate your knowledge.

Working remote nearly 100% of the time.

What does remote mean to you? Bit confusing to have remote and then list specific cities? Are you expecting people to live in those cities while being remote? If so, why?

That sounds more like the car insurance schemes to give a discount by sharing your data. Are you sure she didn't opt into that? Just curious as first I've heard of such a thing outside of auto insurance.

I just ran into this with a seldom used MacBook Pro 2016/2017. I couldn't reset the password via iCloud and eventually I realized the system clock was wrong (on the order of years). I had to boot into the OS X recovery mode and start a terminal and set the date and time by the command line. Of course, none of the login screens have a time/date setting widget let alone show the system time and date so it took a bit of guessing.

Once the system time and date was correct, the iCloud password reset feature worked without issue.

Location: Michigan, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React.js, Redux, Node.js, Koa, Redis, PostgreSQL, React Native, React Native Web, Linux, NGNIX, JavaScript, ES6, GraphQL (WIP)

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cymen/

Email: cymenvig@gmail.com

Interested in regular employment and contract opportunities. I enjoy getting early stage projects from nothing to shipping or helping existing ones. I have been working remote for the past two years and would like to continue to do so.

I've found tech meetups scratch that itch a little bit but I'm 2 years into remote (with a wife and 2 kids) so maybe more is coming... Just curious if you tried that and if it worked or not for you?

Did you try Postico? I think it has a free / demo option. I bought a license a while ago. I like it -- curious if SQL Pro offers something it doesn't but I'm generally happy with it. There is also a github repo with feature requests as issues. I'd lover for Postico to show JSONB fields more nicely but not really a huge issue.

You might look closer at react-native-web. It's early days and React Native can be painful at times however it does offer the idea of using one codebase for both mobile and web. It does require some care, flexibility and thought in design and development.

For the API, look to PostGraphile for GraphQL on top of Postgres (and of course, if multi tenant, there is row level security which is the direction I'd go today).

There have been at least a couple of posts here that had thread discussion about this approach at Apple leading the focus to be on features over bugs. That things don't get fixed. Before holding Apple up as an example of good, best to look into those as those complaints/comments here mirror things I've seen on other venues in terms of features versus working software being shipped by Apple.

Are you intentionally picking dividend-focused stocks though? That is a key aspect of it if you want dividends. Most stocks are not focused as much on dividends (presumably, people buy them for the potential increased value of the stock over time instead of potential dividend payments).

Just in case you missed it, you can clone the git repo for this project and use it inside your network. I'm playing with it now that way.

Right now, I'm using wkhtmltopdf which supports custom headers and footers and I'm mulling over how to do the same with this solution.

Consider reading "Early Retirement Extreme" but s/Retirement/Financial Independence/g. Working towards financial independence can bring a wealth of benefits even before you reach it. There is also an active forum for the book.

It's not the same -- Relay Modern and Apollo Data are both a bit half-baked still in terms of client-side state caching. GraphQL mutations are painful to code right now. I say all this as a long programmer on my side SaaS -- with a team, things aren't quite so bleak. I really want to go GraphQL but it's just too complex still. Redux is much simpler to reason about. It is a simple state store. The client side state caches are just not there yet from what I can tell. There is too much magic and not enough time on the market to trust my business with them.

I'd love to hear contrary experience.

I use db-migrate but I have corresponding ...-{up,down}.sql files for each migration and write the migrations in SQL.

I really love the Wemos D1 mini. It fits in a standard breadboard with space for a row of pins on each side. It's only $4 plus shipping from Wemos:

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/D1-mini-Mini-NodeMc...

For anyone thinking about trying ESP8266 programming, it's a great way to start. For my one-of projects, I just put a whole D1 mini in and don't worry about trying to optimize it to less components (why bother at $4/board?). Just order at least a handful as shipping is slow.

I'm using redux both at my day job and on my side startup. For the day job, right now, it's simple enough we don't really need redux. But it was already in play when I joined and it's not really a bad thing in terms of team communication in code so... On my side startup, I definitely need redux. I have a lot of related data that is rendered in multiple ways and soon I'll be hooking up websockets and emitting changes from server-side that will flow into the client UI via redux to keep some things in sync.

Redux does add complication. But it also cleanly solves a big problem. I've heard good things about mobx instead of redux in terms of reducing boilerplate/total lines of code. So that might be one thing to try if starting a new project today or refactoring.

The purposed solution in the blog is pretty bad. It only works if you have a few things being updated. It might work fine for the author's use case but it's a bad idea to assume it will work well for all use cases. If you want to go this route, please try Backbone.js and come back when you get sick of ghost event listeners (event listeners that didn't get unbound). Obviously, there are ways to work around those issues but it requires understanding them (both by you and any other devs who join the project -- some with less experience might have no idea about these gotchas).

Some people start a family and working from home dramatically lowers the hassle, they still get things done yet get to see their kids.

It just depends on the situation and the person. For some people it's great, for some okay, for some horrible. Luckily, there are a wide range of employment options so you can chose employment that fits your needs/desires.

While at Mattermark, I made their Google Chrome extension in a two day Hackathon. That code was shipped and is right now their current chrome extension (it looks like there were minor changes since then). In all fairness, the designer had already done mockups so there wasn't a lot of back and forth on how it should work.

You can see an animated image of it here:

https://mattermark.com/browser/

I was a bit disappointed we shipped Hackathon code instead of doing it as part of normal product development. There were issues in the product development cycle and in reality, the end result was good so such is life.

API also used by Teespring.

There is a whole movement around this called Software Craftsmanship. There are a lot of companies involved and typically they are using the apprenticeship model to bring on new employees and grow the company. The one I'm most familiar with is 8th Light which started in Chicago but is now in Los Angeles, London, and New York City too.

Their approach is more spend 5-9 months having the apprentice do mostly directed self-study, then a kind of final project and other work and, if they pass, an offer of employment. It's a really interesting model that seems to have worked well for them -- they attract developers from both traditional backgrounds and non-traditional.

They have a page that goes into what apprenticeship means to them here: https://8thlight.com/apprenticeship/

Do you mind sharing where the company you work for advertises open positions? You could just share 5+ such sites to avoid revealing anything if you are concerned. I'm at the tail end of interviewing and have some great options however finding open remote positions at remote-friendly companies can be difficult.

I've been looking at sites like weworkremotely.com and remoteok.io.

It's in the US too however it's in lower cost areas. For example, a small rural town in Wisconsin has a bargain store that often gets these kinds of items from Costco and major markets like NYC and Chicago (it's obvious by the ethnic grocery items). Obviously, one small store isn't enough to sell it all so there must be quite a few of these spread out over the country in lower cost of living areas where rent is cheap for low margin small retail.

I've seen slower scrolling done to improve the "mouth feel" of the website. It's usually a designer wanting to do it without considering the full ramifications of their whimsy.

If you're interested in component composition, react-bootstrap is a good one to look at for ideas:

https://github.com/react-bootstrap/react-bootstrap

They are also accepting of new contributors.

I would build a 9.9-10.5 meter sailing catamaran using a design from Richard Woods and then take off sailing with my family for a decade or so.

Is the car new? Why isn't the dealer offering to loan a car during the repair time? Or is that not something that is done there? It is what I would expect in the USA.

A lot of projects do a rewrite from PHP to Ruby on Rails or some equivalent migration. What the project really needs is a rewrite/refactor/cleanup however it's much easier to frame that in the context of going to a "better" choice than it is explaining it just needs a rewrite with better practices/engineers (ie maybe more and easier tests or using the prior prior/current architectural lessons to create a better architecture). The reality is one could just rewrite it in the original language/stack but that is apparently harder to sell even though it's less risky.

So if the first language/stack is less respected, it makes it easier to sell that rewrite to non-technical/management. Thus PHP is a great choice for the first stack.

The one huge trap here is if the second team isn't experienced enough in the holy grail (next) stack. I've seen that and been relieved to walk away from those projects/companies.