Phillips126

In my opinion, no. If anything we likely only benefited the company. Our department has very low costs and those costs would have occurred whether we were on site or not. When we were remote we used the communication tools that were already provided to the entire company. What we didn't use (benefiting the company) was electricity, water, space to occupy, network bandwidth, etc.

The productivity increase of being remote resulted in apps/updates to occur much quicker. We were able to take advantage of many things we now had access to such as faster internet, IPv6, better network experiences (no more IP conflicts, blocked web sites/filtering, other IT nonsense), self managing our desktops, and so on.

This is absolutely true. I live in rural New York and weather here this time of year is awful. I've watched cars in front of me during my commute slide off into the ditch wondering if I was going to be next.

I am also a father of 3 so being remote gave me the ability to attend school activities, doctors appointments, and just being there for them more which I know means a lot to them - as it does to me. There is also the little things like a trip to the dentist which could take me ~30 minutes remote and I can do it on my lunch break. Now on-site I have the commute so I need to take a 1/2 day which in turn causes a loss of productivity for the company.

To be honest, no, it wasn't really made out to be a trial when this came to be.

As a growing company of around 400 employees, we were really short on space and software is one of those fields that do quite well remotely. We were asked if we were interested and we officially went remote a week later. Since then, a new building was built solving our space issue so I think that had a lot to do with our return. The communication "disconnect" I think was just a way for management to justify the reversal of the decision.

We used Pivotol Tracker[0] to track our performance so if anything we had proof of how well remote worked for us - but some people fail to see the positives of remote work even with the proof right in front of them.

[0] - https://www.pivotaltracker.com/

To answer your question honestly, it has been a long time. At this company I transitioned from a Graphic Designer to a Software Developer. After my first year I took the role of a Web Developer and ended up building a custom internal application for the Art Department which opened a lot of eyes at the possibilities of what a Software Department could provide.

I was employee #1 in this new role and have since made a lot of really awesome things such as a company directory (mobile app), dashboards for our fabrication department, license management software for our IT folks, visitor check-in/out kiosks, interactive surgical simulators for our R&D/Sales teams, to name a few.

I hold a BS degree in Art. While in college, I took some web development courses and that is when I first started noticing my interest in programming. Despite having ~10 years of programming experience (~4 being as a professional software dev) I am not the most confident developer and the horror of software dev interviews scares me. Maybe it is time to go for it - worst they can say is no, right?

Are you saying that on-site employees don't "scam" their employers? This is non-sense and is the exact reason why remote work is viewed so negatively. Remote workers (just like on-site) have goals and expectations. They are also likely on company chats, answering phone calls, video meetings, etc. If the expected quantity of work is not getting done, I think this is a problem with this employee and should be looked into. Don't cast a blanket statement over every remote working because this is not the norm.

I was part of a remote-work trial at my office (as a Software Developer). We were remote for about a year and honestly it was the best work experience I've ever had. I felt so productive working in an environment perfectly tailored to me (my own home).

It ultimately ended as several upper management thought we were too "disconnected" from the company although my e-mail was always open, phone forwarded to my cell and I was online in a company wide chat messenger during working hours. We even came on-site once a week for face-to-face meetings. But I guess some people picture remote workers negatively so we are now back on-site and all the things I took for granted during the trial year are making being on-site so much harder.

I commute an hour by car so I gave up a pay raise ~$6,000/yr. on gas alone. I haven't (and don't want to) calculate vehicle wear, snow tires, etc. I'm constantly interrupted by people throughout the day laughing at the nearby reception desk, asking me about lunch or just coming to talk because they are bored. Even right now I have someone using a leaf blower directly outside my window so I can't focus on code (why I am on HN right now). The office temperature is an uncomfortable 66F because the corner office gets so hot with the many windows it has and I am part of their HVAC line. I am using an underpowered laptop instead of my home desktop (32GB RAM, high end CPU, etc) and I require our IT Department to install all software for me because "company policy"... Needless to say my productivity has dropped.

Perhaps someday we'll be able to go remote again, or maybe it's just time to move on. I've been here now for more than 5 years and I enjoy the work I do and the people I work with but after having a taste of remote-work, it's hard going back.

It seems Google may be very interested in health data collected by Fitbit as other comments speculate. Fitbit has already done the data collection - now Google is buying it. For Google, this is definitely a "win" as I suspect they are mostly interested in this data and not as much in the hardware.

I'm surprised you still seem to recommend AirBnb despite these experiences. As a family of 5 (3 kids) I know it can be frustrating and expensive to find hotel accommodations that work. But the strange (switcheroo, don't mention AirBnb to anyone!) to downright disturbing (cameras above the bed?!) experiences would never have me using AirBnb again. Maybe I just have issues trusting people... I'm sure there are great hosts but I don't like to gamble.

Curious were the cameras in the bedroom pointing at the bed and attempting to be concealed? Huge fear of mine having some psychopath watching videos of my wife and I getting (un)dressed or intimate.

I've never used AirBnb. However, when making online purchases (even for physical items) I don't have a lot of trust. Many systems (reviews, ratings, etc) are all too easily exploited. While the thought of staying at a stylish house is more appealing than a room at a hotel chain, I at least know what I am getting myself into. I've had my share of... not great rooms at hotels, but they typically make it right with a room switch or reimbursement. It doesn't sound like AirBnb is good at that.

I would highly recommend it. Setup is incredibly easy (VSCode has great plugins for it), the language is simple to read/write and compiled Nim is very fast with small binaries. I also really like nimfmt to keep my code tidy so I don't need to worry about it. Nim compiles VERY quickly and errors seem to be easy to comprehend. It's definitely one of my go-to languages for most of my projects.

Lol food simulators are next :). I've actually seen this one being played, very comical. The comedy (besides the obvious being bread trying to get to a toaster) is the incredibly difficult controls causing the player to panic and mash buttons sometimes saving themselves, other times flinging themselves into the air.

Interesting. Thanks for clearing that up. I used to be subscribed and did play a number of games but ended up cancelling my PS Now subscription. Now my Playstation is saying I need to fix the OS with a flash drive which I've been meaning to do but life is busy.

Playstation Vue was their TV service (not to be confused with Playstation Now - their game streaming service which is comparable to Xbox Game Pass).

Their TV service if I can recall started at $40/mo for their basic subscription. Their game streaming service was $20/mo but was dropped to $10/mo earlier this month. To compare Xbox Game Pass is currently $10/mo. The difference is (correct me if I'm wrong) PS Now _streamed_ the games whereas Xbox downloads them. PS Now seemed to focus more on older titles where Xbox Game Pass is heavily indie games with a few newer AAA releases mixed in.

Xbox certainly provides a lot of value for the $1.00 entry into the Game Pass with their current sale (provides games for both Xbox and PC).

I was at one point subscribed to Playstation Vue when I was determining what alternatives were viable after canceling my cable subscription. I remember it being a bit meh. The channels were decent but I was not a fan of the UI/UX. Also in the end $40/mo was quite steep for something we rarely used to begin with so we dropped it and continue to just use Netflix/Hulu for watching TV/Movies.

Ah that is a good comparison. I am very familiar with the Hitman series and this does seem to be very similar having a set of objectives and the player needs to put the pieces together.

I loved playing Harvest Moon as a kid, and more recently Starview Valley. Not sure the cat simulation appeals to me but to each their own!

Looking at the trailers and watching some clips, Goose game does seem to be a bit more interesting with the puzzles. Whereas Goat Simulator seems to be an interactive meme.

Looks like a whole new genre of games have recently been invented:

- Goat Simulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvWGLcdI8o8

- Untitled Goose Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LL2AtHo1gk

- Pigeon Simulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb30jQ_Bpmg

Very cool! Our tool only recognized A/AAAA, CNAME, and TEXT records (that's all we needed at the time). Your solution is much more complete and looks really good. Clever use of git! Your pricing is super affordable as well, nicely done.

"We're sorry your meal was not delivered. Seagulls have discovered our drones carry french fries and have been targeting our drones mid-air."

But in reality, is this the best tool for quick meal deliveries? Seems that weight will be an issue and I imagine obstacles will always been an issue (animals, powerlines, branches, malicious people wanting free food). I don't have a lot of faith in the drone-delivery game, at least for many years.

I typically do everything custom these days. In the past I would use Bootstrap, Semantic or one of the many other CSS frameworks but I found that I add a lot of size to my applications when I only used a few things from it. Most features (sidebars, grids, menus...) are simple enough to just implement on your own. I was a graphic designer that moved into development so I feel I have a pretty good sense of design and UX.

I do however use various charting libraries out there for ReactJS as they are typically quite well done and small in size. If I need something a little more custom I'll install D3 and build it out.

For backend I have used Node/Express quite a bit to serve API's and such. But as mentioned in my previous post lately I've been using system programming languages a lot more for building backend things mostly as a learning exercise and because I have the freedom to do that in my job.

Building out these tools and seeing them being used daily from nearly all employees in a ~400 person company is really rewarding. It really gives me a sense of appreciation for the work I do and I get a lot of good suggestions on how to improve the applications that in turn improve the work these employees do.

Other things I've used in the past for various projects include Ionic Framework & PhoneGap (mobile app), Zephyr RTOS (BLE Mesh Programming), React Native, Angular, Electron (Visitor Check In/Out Kiosks), and lots of CSS frameworks (too many to name).

I enjoy learning new languages. In my day job I spend most of my time writing JS (ReactJS specifically) building dashboards and other internal business tools. Sometimes I need to build API's or perform tasks that just cannot be done in the browser and I take the opportunity to experiment with other languages.

A few examples:

- We purchased a cheap USB duplicator (10 slots) to copy the contents from a master USB to the clones. It worked, but wasn't a great solution. It was slow, error prone and when it failed you never really knew what USB was having the issues (or what went wrong). Using a Golang backend and ReactJS frontend I created an alternative which had a nice GUI showing what files were copying, the percentages complete, error messages, etc. It was a far better solution and using Goroutines it was fun. We ended up scaling the system to 100 USB's at a time and that was fun to watch (lots of blinky lights :D). The solution didn't take much time to write (Golang was quick to learn) and we finished the duplication WAY sooner than the due date.

- We needed to automate a bunch of DNS stuff with CloudFlare. I ended up creating a parser for a custom config we wrote, hooked it up to CF's API and we ran it as a service. The language I used for this project was Nim[0]. I liked the syntax and the final binaries were TINY and FAST.

- More recently I was approached by an IT guy at the company that manages all of our software licenses. He showed me this command line tool he uses to query all licenses and goes through the cryptic output trying to figure out what licenses were being used, by whom, etc. I ended up using Go to parse the command and serve a ReactJS application with all sorts of bells and whistles (reports, history, alerts, etc). Since the application is browser-based he can even use it mobile which he loves.

- I've been working on some prototype BLE Mesh stuff in C, but that is a ways out and not yet worth mentioning much more.

Rust has held my interest for a while as well, just waiting for the right project to come along.

[0]https://nim-lang.org/

You are not kidding, opening up the network tab in Chrome reveals they are loading nearly 300 images named: 0000.jpg -> 0289.jpg and stitching them together in canvas elements as scroll-able videos (Each image being ~50kb).

I was graphic designer (now developer) so I tend to give websites a lot of "artistic freedom" as long as it doesn't interfere a great deal with user-friendliness. Your comment was completely justified in this regard. This particular page when not viewed on a mobile device is painful and should be mentioned.

Normally I roll my eyes at these types of comments but you are totally justified. I'm in front of a desktop using a mouse and am getting scroll fatigue just trying to get to about the 1/2 way point of the web page. Literally scrolling through individual video frames is moronic.

Edit - Just noticed that the animated scroll-breaking stuff seemed to stop when using a mobile view (noticed using Chrome Dev tools) which makes it a better read.

Docs are always something I evaluate before moving forward with a specific tool or language for a project. I have not done much work in the Apple ecosystem but it surprises me that a company of this size would have lackluster docs. It makes me wonder how many non-Apple developers give up on their idea for an app due to frustration and how that translates to lost profit for Apple given their 30% cut.

I am not a huge Golang fan but recently I found myself using Go quite a bit and I really appreciate their docs which include a description of each function and an example. The example code is even editable with a "Run" button so you could test and understand the function much better before moving it to your own code. Here's an example if you are unfamiliar with Golang docs (click the "example" link for the editable code): https://golang.org/pkg/strings/#Compare

Genuinely curious how websites built in this fashion will adhere to accessibility guidelines, especially with companies (like Target[0]) getting sued recently.

Additionally, can these sites be responsive such that the content will look good on desktop and mobile?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/08/target-to-pay-...

That is interesting. I know Vue 2 had a huge community of very pleased users but I have not been following the developments of Vue 3. This is basically the general fear I have with React. While there really hasn't been any conversations that I am aware of talking about going beyond the view-layer, I don't want it to be the next Angular 1 which made me want to pull my hair out constantly.

That is true, the applications I build are typically internal business use only and have relatively low number of concurrent users. I just don't want React to suffer from any scope-creep and become the next "do everything" Angular 1 was - which was a nightmare I had to suffer through for a while. While this likely wont ever happen, it's always something I worry about. When you love something you use daily, change is hard (but improvements are always welcome - which this feature could be).

In this situation yes, the concurrent mode does feel like a view-layer thing. I just don't want the future of ReactJS to look something like Angular 1 - which may never happen. I just worry that someday the team may decide maybe they should start moving in that direction.