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Pephers

82 karma · joined June 1, 2014

Founder of 51ˢᵗ, a digital agency in Denmark. See http://fiftyfir.st

I mainly do front-end development such as large client-side apps.

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Pephers··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2024)
SEEKING WORK | Remote/hybrid (Denmark)

Senior front-end developer available for hire!

I have 15 years of experience and I can help your team with: React, TypeScript, Playwright/Testing Library, improving developer experience (CI, build tooling), sparring with team members, and setting up your project for success. Past clients include major financial institutions, pharmaceutical startups, and SaaS businesses.

I'm situated in Odense, Denmark and I'm open for remote or hybrid contracts.

Email: cr@fiftyfir.st

CV/résumé available upon request.

Pephers··on Microsoft agrees to stop bundling Teams with Office
On a previous job we underwent a migration from Lynq/Skype for Business/email to Slack. It was driven by us employees and channels were very active and people engaged. We had dev teams in four different countries and I believe the communication on Slack was a key ingredient to our success.

Years later upper management must have noticed the Slack line item in the sheets and the company migrated to Teams which was of course included in the Office 365 plan. Public channels become almost silent in comparison and we reverted to DM'ing/emails.

Pephers··on Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?
Indeed. I was surprised when new Apple TV 4K remote was able to turn on/off my 2009 Panasonic plasma TV. And the Apple TV remote could be IR programmed to adjust the volume of my NAD amplifier, too.

This is perfect for me as I still find the picture quality of plasma sufficient and don’t want a “smart” TV.

Pephers··on List of rivers by discharge
Try to follow the Colorado River downstream of Lake Mead on Google Maps with satellite imagery turned on. It's quite interesting to see how much water is diverted away from it, primarily for irrigation.
Pephers··on Vikings went to Mediterranean for ‘summer jobs’ as mercenaries, left graffiti
Nothing to do outside of crop agriculture in Viking times gives time for:

- Building housing and barns

- Chopping firewood

- Shipbuilding

- Wood working

- Weaving fabric (linen) from the summer harvest

- Ropes

- Leatherworking

- Metalworking/blacksmithing

- Pottery

- Animal husbandry

- Hunting

- Fishing

... and probably lots of other things that were necessary during those times. Of course Viking raids are a different means of acquiring a lot of the above.

Pephers··on Merry Christmas, HN
I don’t believe a Christmas tree made from fossil fuels is more sustainable than my certified organic Christmas tree grown less than 5 km from my home.

That being said I know most trees are sprayed regularly, then wrapped in plastic netting and transported long distances to a Christmas market.

Pephers··on Apple Execs on iMessage for Android (2013)
Now that I think of it, I use Facebook Messenger quite a lot as well. In fact, probably more than iMessage/SMS so you're right.
Pephers··on Apple Execs on iMessage for Android (2013)
It's pretty much the same in Denmark. It's either a blue bubble or a green bubble. I'm pretty sure it's because of the heavy competition between mobile carriers in the 00's resulting in unlimited free SMS texts, thus having no incentive for using an alternative messaging platform. This meant that once iPhones became popular, every iPhone user's message automatically became an iMessage.

Practically no-one has WhatsApp here, but all my family in the Netherlands use WhatsApp almost exclusively. It's my impression that in the Nordic countries it's iMessage but the rest of Europe uses WhatsApp.

Pephers··on Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
Sadly, also in Denmark as the article mentions, I’ve only had to clean my windshield once this summer (by clean I mean scrubbing, I do use the windshield washer more often). 1995 Defender.

I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.

Pephers··on Top Tier Gasoline Worth the Extra Price, Study Shows
EGR systems are known to be a cause of deposits in the intake-side of an engine.
Pephers··on Projects for Old Versions of OS X
I’ve been using a Mac since Tiger. To me macOS Monterey has been the best version since Snow Leopard. It feels very stable and performant, much more so than Catalina and Big Sur.

I’ve dubbed it the “Snow Leopard” of modern macOS. IIRC it’s coincidentally the second release after a CPU architecture change, too.

Pephers··on How to design a house to last 1000 years
Slate roofs are a solid choice. Our 1875 house in Denmark still has the original roof with Port Madoc slates. It's in good condition, and the few slates that have broken can easily be replaced.

Slate has a higher upfront cost than other roofing materials, but it's a shame that so many houses are built with concrete roof tiles or fibercement roofing which only last 25-35 years before needing a complete replacement. In comparison, the typical life span for roofs with clay tiles are 75+ years and slate roofs 100+ years.

Pephers··on Denmark: We can slash CO2 by 70% in a decade and still have welfare
In other news: In 2021 the price of a Tesla Model 3 and other EV’s in that price range is estimated to increase by 15000 USD due to tax increases in Denmark.
Pephers··on Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study
I live in Denmark where about 60% of the land is used for agriculture. I’m also a fly fisherman and entomology is almost a natural side effect of this hobby. This summer I’ve seen the best mayfly and caddis hatches that I’ve seen in several years. This is totally anecdotal and there likely many other factors, but increased organic farming and possibly already the ban of neonics could be showing its effects.
Pephers··on A giant dam is part of a national scandal in Ecuador
The Chinese dam building around the world is a tragedy in my opinion (this isn't limited to just Chinese dams, though). Remote places in undeveloped or poorly developed parts of the world are utterly destroyed by these dams. Road building, deforestation, displacement of native species and native people.

I witnessed this first hand while hiking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal a few years back. A road is being built deep into the valley and not only is it disrupting the peacefulness and the attraction that is/was a hike through ancient cultures and landscapes with no roads, but it's also putting people out of business. Various tea houses (that provide accommodation and meals) lie now next to a dirt road where trucks race up and down instead of hikers. Many hikers now take a 4x4 up to high altitudes, skipping the lower parts.

In comparison, a power plant can be controlled with very little staff once the building is complete.

See also https://www.balkanrivers.net for a not-so-remote proposed dams.

Pephers··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
Thanks, I appreciate it!

I must admit that marketing is my absolute weak side, but I've had the most success using organic SEO backed by some SEM campaigns. Since my product requires customers to have a website, I've created landing pages targeted at major WYSIWYG/DIY website builders. If they search for e.g. "booking system for <platform>" they'll have a chance to find a Zapla landing page for that platform :)

Pephers··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
I too was very inspired by the Pinboard numbers, and this story and others have inspired me to start my own business.

I'm running a booking system SaaS (https://zapla.co) which basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.

Pephers··on Deploying a Django App with No Downtime
For gunicorn running Flask I use something along the lines of for zero-downtime deploy which really works well as long as your app runs on a single server:

    rsync -avz ./ user@remote:/home/user/web-app
    ssh user@remote 'cd /home/user/web-app; \
    venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt; \
    venv/bin/alembic upgrade head; \
    supervisorctl pid web-app | xargs kill -HUP'
The full deployment script has a few extra options which I've omitted for clarity, but this is basically it.
Pephers··on BMW’s sector-defining 3 Series has turned 40
I agree, especially E9x just doesn't seem right to me. The F3x is getting closer, though.
Pephers··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2015)
SEEKING WORK - Copenhagen, Denmark - Remote or onsite

Hello,

I'm an experienced front-end developer with 6+ years of experience available for immediate hire for new and ongoing projects. I mostly work for startups and agencies, and my speciality is developing and architecting large client-side applications. In the past, I've worked on projects with over 10,000 active users.

I also do quite some back-end development primarily in Python.

Technologies I work with:

- JavaScript in ES2015/2016 using webpack + Babel

- React with Flux/Redux

- Universal/isomorphic web apps

- Backbone

- REST API development

- Python (Flask)

- PHP

- MySQL

GitHub profile: https://github.com/Pephers

Website: http://fiftyfir.st

My solo-startup website: https://zapla.co

Contact: cr@fiftyfir.st

Feel free to get in touch with me. Thanks!

Chiel Robben

Pephers··on Ants are as Effective as Pesticides
Yes, please! What really concerns me the most about conventional farming is the tendency to control, tame, and in result fight nature (with chemicals), rather than cooperate. This is of course a consequence of large monotonous fields with a single crop, which provides habitat for diseases and pests in very specific niches but leaves out the natural predators (such as ants in this example).
Pephers··on ES6: The features I'm most excited about
I too was reluctant of using many of the new ES6 features, but as I've begun to adapt them I've come to appreciate them a lot! In fact, when using Babel to compile ES2015/2016 you can in many cases rid yourself of things like Underscore/lodash[1], Promise libraries, etc.

I've recently started a new project in React/Flux, and I've cut away 3 or 4 dependencies compared to previous projects by fully embracing ES2015/2016, as Babel automatically provides the necessary polyfills and compilation.

As for template strings, I think they make sense. Most programming languages have them in someway or another, like Ruby "hello #{world}" or Python 'Hello {world}'.format(world='World').

[1] https://www.reindex.io/blog/you-might-not-need-underscore/

Pephers··on How Icelandic Yogurt Invaded America
Skyr is everywhere in Denmark now. Every supermarket is selling skyr, and you can even buy it in 7 Eleven. It's quite remarkable how fast this product has established itself.
Pephers··on Tarsnap GUI for the desktop
Thanks for the link. My guess is that this is what most people are after :)
Pephers··on Purple – Heroku UI Kit
Even though it's not open source, it's still great for inspiration.
Pephers··on Curl, 17 years old today
curl is just awesome, thanks so much to the author and all maintainers over the years! It's still my go to application for testing and debugging HTTP requests.
Pephers··on My first experience at working from home
I've also been working from home for the last 10 months, and while I love the freedom, I do also miss the times when you can cheer with your co-workers over an accomplishment and the general chit-chat over small breaks and lunch break.

I also agree with the author that a bad day working from home is worse than at a job. Since I'm a solo-founder it means I'll not get paid on a bad day, but at a job you typically get at least something done – and get paid.

Pephers··on High quality GIF with FFmpeg
This is pretty cool. I use GIFs for marketing for my SaaS startup[1] because it has the best support for autoplaying across devices, but the file sizes are a bit high (690 KB and 270KB for screencasts of a few minutes each). I use licecap[2] for recording and Gifsicle for optimizing, but perhaps I should give ffmpeg a go and compare the results.

[1] https://zapla.co

[2] http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Pephers··on CSS Sans – A pure CSS font
I wouldn't call that a pure CSS font, as it's just a Base64 encoded WOFF font embedded in CSS as a data URI. It can save you for that extra HTTP request, though, if you only need to support modern browsers which support WOFF fonts.
Pephers··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2015)
SEEKING WORK - Copenhagen, Denmark - Remote or local

I'm a front-end developer with large experience in building advanced web applications and complex UI. I've specialized in React and have a deep understanding of application architecture and JavaScript in general.

I do both development and consultancy and I'll be able to help you team make the right decisions early on or apply new technology (such as using React in an existing app) to existing projects.

I also do some back-end development in both Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy, Celery) and PHP, for example to build an API to support a web application.

You can get in touch with me on cr@fiftyfir.st. Also feel free to check out my website at http://fiftyfir.st or my booking SaaS at https://zapla.co.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pephers

GitHub: https://github.com/Pephers

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chielrobben

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