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JasonPunyonon We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

[status-no-repro] http://imgur.com/i9Ix4EN

JasonPunyonon We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

Not to whizz in anyone's cornflakes here, and we're happy the 37 signals guys have come around, but StackOverflow Careers has had remote specific job listings for a really long time. If you're interested we keep a decent number of them running pretty much all the time http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true

JasonPunyonon Stack Overflow is currently offline for maintenance

We failed over to our secondary load balancer and are investigating what went on. We've disabled realtime websockets for now.

JasonPunyonon IFit: "No applicants from Brazil, please."

We (SO Careers) are aware and are working on it.

JasonPunyonon Homegrown DevOps Tools at Stack Exchange

We have a forwards only migration runner that takes care of the deployment for us. We don't use many stored procedures, but they're taken care of the same way (in a migration). Our policy is that pushed code be backwards compatible by however many migrations are being deployed in a production build.

JasonPunyonon Language and social signaling

Yes a human language or grammar doesn't come into being the same way a programming language does, but the notion of correctness still exists and I'd probably define it as:

Correct === Tradition + Lots 'o' Time

And Matt wasn't arguing this, but I have to link to Eric Lippert whenever I can so:

The idea programming language isn't 'correct' is kinda wonky. As I learned from Eric Lippert's [Three umpires](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/09/three...):

  Three baseball umpires are having lunch together. 

  The first umpire says "Well, a lot of them are balls, and a lot of them are 
  strikes, but I always calls 'em as I sees 'em."
  
  The second umpire says "Hmph. I calls 'em as they are."
  
  The third umpire slowly looks at his two colleagues and declares "They ain't 
  nothin' until I calls 'em."

When a designed language is presented to you, you can't really argue about correctness, only suitability to a particular purpose or taste.

JasonPunyonon Not Constructive, a place for the discussions not allowed on Stack Overflow

This was the original ill-fated purpose of programmers. from a few years ago. It's changed since.

JasonPunyonon Rails 4 UUID primary keys with PostgreSQL

(Caveat: I know this about SQL server, not Postgres)

If you use random UUID's (as opposed to sequential UUID's) for your primary key your database will spend an extra hunk of time on reordering your PK index on disk on insert. This bit us at Stackoverflow. So remember: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

JasonPunyonon Stack Overflow was down

We're on it. We're having DNS problems.

JasonPunyonon A job at Joel's company doesn't pass the "Joel Test"

That middle part is where the tests run. On Careers for example we have a decent set of Selenium tests that run through the core functionality of the site on every dev build (Can I Login? Can I buy something? Can I post a job? If I have a profile and I go to the profile page is it there? type stuff).

JasonPunyonon Testing 3 million hyperlinks, lessons learned

Yeah, we did. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/132677/6212

JasonPunyonon On Counter Offers

Those company names are anonymized (except for my DBA and Stack Exchange). According to that CV I've worked at "A Management Consulting and Reinsurance Company", "Big Hedge Fund" and "Bigger Hedge Fund".

JasonPunyonon On Counter Offers

You could be reasonably confident, but you'd be absolutely wrong :) All names have been changed to protect the innocent. The company at which this happened does not appear on my LinkedIn profile.

JasonPunyonon Employee Referral Bonuses Are Pants on Head Stupid

I already save money on recruiters by not using them :)

JasonPunyonon How I got a job at Stack Overflow

Word. Jibby is awesome and I'm glad to have him on the team.

JasonPunyonon Stack Overflow running short on space

Our web tier has 10 servers that all run at 10-15% CPU. And we have two database servers: one for StackOverflow and one for everything else (SE Network, Careers and Area51)

JasonPunyonon Assault by GC

2 magic threshold numbers that could mean anything :)

JasonPunyonon Teal and Orange in Hollywood movies

The first time colors really stood out to me in a movie (and I noticed it while watching) was One Hour Photo. The range was so wide and the colors really added to the story telling. Later (I think on the DVD special features) someone broke it down into it's constituent parts and I really understood an example of how someone designs with color. Very illuminating.

JasonPunyonon Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?

Yeah, I had this exact feeling about finance and was lucky enough to be able to get out. Working for organizations that do little but spend ever-increasing amounts of resources so that computers can edge each other out by nanoseconds in the market to the continuing aggrandizement of the uber rich is about the most depressing thing I can think of now.

I'd like to think that working on Stack Overflow's Careers service will help keep at least a few people from taking finance jobs like I did by providing them an alternative to needing to throw their lot in with a technical recruiter in a big city. Due to the economics of recruiting, recruiters tend to work with big finance (big salaries mean big commissions) instead of companies that y'know, make things but have lower salaries. I'd like to think we provide a slightly more level playing field to regular jobs (because we don't get paid on commission, therefore won't send applicants towards a finance position before all others).

"You can't change the world, but you can make a dent" - Sheldon Mopes

JasonPunyonon Testing Benford's Law

Check out those post ids :)

JasonPunyonon Calacanis Combinator

Hey. That's me! (The one that isn't Joel)

JasonPunyonon When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

This is true and thanks for the feedback. Do you (or anyone else reading) have any ideas for things that all talented developers would want to list on their profiles that we don't have on Careers yet? Thanks again!

JasonPunyonon Lean vs VC: How We're Taking on StackOverflow Careers

I don't think SO Rep is really a good candidate for "the one number to rule them all" when it comes to hiring. As much as we'd like it if everyone used SO, they don't. A great majority of the users of SO never gain enough reputation to distinguish them from each other based solely on rep. You can look at the reputation distribution for SO at http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/week/stackoverflow in the sidebar under Total Reputation. Even if we say that having 200+ rep is the signal, that's only 41K people in the world.

So if someone decides on using SO Reputation alone to qualify candidates, they can't effectively solve the primary problem of sourcing those candidates.

JasonPunyonon Facebook Now Shares Phone Number & Address With Third-Party Apps

Just in case anyone else is wondering...

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-do-i-delete...

JasonPunyonon Google Engineer bails out student in jail

BONUS: These were children.

JasonPunyonon Ask HN: Fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

JasonPunyonon Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

How can you tell how many users there are?

JasonPunyonon Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

It will never equate to the number of user accounts because we don't require users to register. You can get in on all that hot Q&A goodness account free.