andrew_wc_brown

AWS has over 175+ services and is continually improving. I would say more new services on launch don't live up to the promise but quarter after quarter you see dramatic improvement, some services it's year after year. What makes AWS so valuable is not individual services but the fact you can string them together which outweighs the feature set of a single service.

Github is amazing for developer happiness but CodeCommit is secure and seamlessly integrates with so many AWS Services I Can live without all the bells and whisltes of Github.

AWS Business Support is only $100 / USD per month where you can call in 24/7 and be connected with a Cloud Support Engineer within 5-15 mins. If you don't like the engineer, hang up call again and get someone different. That's incredibly in-expensive, saves me hours or hiring more devs.

You can get this Business Support for free a year if you join StartupSchool and get 3K USD credits with the business support.

If you can't afford it, maybe you are just hobbying around but AWS offers lots of ways to support you until you have a substainable revenue.

As a fellow content creator, I'd say your book appears to be lacking based on the outline.

I would agree the noise is high and the pairing is poor. I've done Startup School twice and will a third time with the same company.

The sticking keys on the new macbook pro is a serious problem. Always get Apple Care. I have had a problem with the last 3 mac purchases.

I've been using Rails since version 0.8.6 and have apps as old as 8 years I'm still maintaining. I've had teams as large as 20 on a single rails codebase.

You do not need anything other than the MVC pattern.

I would love to see the claimants of these needed abstractions post their code so I could refactor and show you how you're wrong.

If you make good use of your base controllers you can reduce controller code to next to nothing.

If you avoid Rails abstractions such as scopes use callbacks sparingly and focus on writing raw SQL instead of using Arel's query builder your models are easy to manage.

Yes! Space Repetition Learning is amazing.

For me its wasn't about becoming a 10X developer but proving that I was already 10X because I was facing a salary cap of 120K CAD where I saw friends working as long as me 180K+ CAD and some 250K+ CAD. The last job I attempted we had a 55 year old developer being paid the same as me doing the same rot work and I said thats not going to happen to me.

I've always been a person that gets things done but when you asked me how I did it I could never regurgitate the factoids.

Interviewers or other developers thought I was stupid/faking because their probing of my knowledge came down to superficial factoids and not evaluating the past work as a whole where I literally have 30+ projects. Hiring is broken and instead of getting upset about it you just have to meet the checklist.

I have Cracking the Coding Interview and I've been through that book 3x and I can not remember the contents of it because that book has been more more useful to me to prompt up my monitor than in my in the day to day work.

I feel when you're a developer 10 years in you'll be forgetting things as quick as you learn them but proving you have in-memory knowledge is super important.

I use Anki and Mnemosyne but found their UIs clunky and so I built my own Space Repetition Learning flash card system. I was studying for AWS Certifications and I wanted a way to tied practice exam questions I wrote to flashcards so when I got questions wrong it would reload my deck, and one I memorized all the factoids via space repetition learning I could go back and attempt a practice exam.

Now when people ask me whats the different between RAID 0 vs RAID 1 I know which is stripping or mirroring.

I got so carried away building my study system it because my own startup called ExamPro: https://exampro.co

Its really nice to have something you can build where you actually have domain knowledge and its the first time independently where I was successful building a startup that has generated revenue.

I could build anything but without domain knowledge I could never sell what I could build and now I can and its wonderful.

Space Repetition Learning changed my life. Who knew?

I do something similar with Rails and Postgres. I've never been good at publicizing tools I've built.

I think the biggest problem with Rails is Arel and by making it easier to write raw queries that serve json straight from the database you get great performance, composability and its still all really simple.

I don't need GraphQL because its so easy to write in one one endpoint everything I need to get back from my database and then write endpoints for all the smaller endpoints.

But yeah my project is basically handlebars meets SQL. I'm currently working on writing my own template language and hope to port it to other common languages.

https://github.com/monsterboxpro/monster-queries

I get really depressed working on projects with a million small endpoints or they take the other extreme of using GraphQL.

I'm quite tired of Full-stack development since things are taking 100x more effort and not because things are getting more complicated because they can't see the simpler solution.

I've built 40+ web-apps in the last decade through freelancing and then had my own web-firm with a team of 8 developers all remote. I got tired of building MVPs and so switched to AWS Training and Consultancy since my passion is with educational training.

What kills projects and drives up costs was:

Client doesn't have a clear vision of what will sell. This is evident since they have multiple business models or they keep changing features to tweak the business model. Have one business model and be confident that you won't change anything. If you have to change then you didn't do market validation and you are wasting money on development.

Client's don't understand the scope of what goes into a app and when you ask them to block out the pages they need come back with only 30% and then an estimate is made based on whats presented. They never think about the admin panel, the auxiliary pages, support pipeline, on-boarding flow. If you can find an "Interaction Designer" who can not only wireframe but design end to end flows this will migrate developer waste.

Bringing in a technical advisor, developer, designer mid project always inflates budget because they provide conflicting advice, try to over architect over process, or now we have two sources of truth, the advisor and the client. If you want to bring in more resources you need to understand you'll be expected to adjust the budget and pay more since you made more work for freelancer/firm than previous.

Flipping the coin I have been brought into projects as a technical advisor, and I have found developers totally lieing about their work by logging fake hours or outsourcing when they are not allowed to. I helped the client gain visibility by showing them how to read git commit history, what a sprint should look like. Re-estimate out tickets and gauge an alternative velocity to help the understand if the speed of the developer matches their cost. What a good/bad commit looks like. But I don't tell the developer what to do, create tasks or make in detail architectural decisions.

AWS, Rails and NodeJS are good as your primary stack since bootcamps churn juniors as low as 2.5K CAD on Rails and NodeJS. AWS is good since it gives you full visibility and helps you enforce good practices so you have less technical debt down the road.

I've hired developers out of bootcamps, hired them off of upwork, randomly cold-emailed developers I liked. I get them from everywhere. Its a 1:40 ratio to find a developer with good work ethic.

I care about work ethic and best practices/good habits first and developer experience second.

I would suggest getting lo-fi sketches of every possible page in desktop for your admin, marketing, support, onboard, auxiliary and core pages.

Then you get a developer to code them

Then after the functionality is in place you bring in a UX designer to polish the designs.

If you have the money I would get a Interaction Design on day 1.

Another Canadian in Toronto. Its not hard for US companies to work with remote Canadians but there is a perception that taxes, payroll, insurance is hard when its not. Its frustrating because the US dollar has more buying power so they can get higher quality developers at a lower rate.

I'm working on a Modded Minecraft series using AWS

If anyone has an interest in playing on my server ping me. We could use a few more players.

https://medium.com/@andrewbrown_78670/2018-modded-minecraft-...

I think anyone who signed up in time were put on the audit track if not accepted into the advisor track. I don't believe it has any community feedback which is what I really wanted. I spun up a facebook group for this reason.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/

It happened to everyone. You can still join this facebook group to get community feedback by others not not in the Advisor track https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/

I was a bit disappointed in not being accepted but figured could make a facebook group so we could get the benefit of community feedback. https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/

I didn't even know it was possible that you could end up on the audit track instead of advisory. Unless I am reading wrong if you are put on the audit track you can't even participate in the forums. I can understand limiting Advisors but why community forums where you can all share and discuss?

If you got put on the audit track, can we all join this group so we can leverage sharing with each other? https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/

Also it'd be cool to have a slack/discord.

I always ask people if they looked at website, my code or anything before hiring me and the overwhelming answer is no. I've always had to get things in front of people just get them to see the extent of work. People think you need a portfolio to get hired you don't. I've built over 30 web-apps in the last decade, and I've never bothered to screen cap them.

People only care what you can immediately do for them and if its not 1-to-1 with what they want they don't care.

Its sad but its true.

I haven't been working on my game since my newborn has been my priority but I have an open-source tetris-attack like game built in eletron, typescript and phaser.

Its deterministic, has multiplayer, and frame to frame recreation to the tetris-attack mechanics

https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop

Based on how verbose this article is I think maybe her original article was misunderstood because it was a chore to sort out the junk from the content just like this one.

Too much flourishing, poor pacing

My introduction to GaryVee was through Signal vs Noise in 2006. Beyond growing his parents wine company he's in the business of producing inspiration porn, like Malcom Gladwell or the 4 hour work week, its homeopathy for entrepreneurs.

My Sivers, I've been reading about you for years. I love your story about how you scaled CD Baby with People instead of Algorithms. I think its of greater advice now in a startup world where every thought of every startup is that everything has to operate with a robot brain.

I lost my value in most books in 2010, We have lots of reads in common 2010 and my feeling about books is that lots fall under motivational porn and they provide instant gratification then things you can apply.

Seeing your list now I want to read Arnold Schwarzenegger book Total Recall and tempted to read Zero to One.

I would love to aspire to your level of success you had with CD Baby.

get out of here spaces.

I had already opened up the Outline codebase but then stopped because The copyright is All Rights Reserved. Its not MIT.

The issue with All Rights Reserved means lets say I were to put a ton of work into Outline and I want to monetize the work I put in to provide easy hosted solutions. I can't. I'm not saying I want to monetize but I don't know how much effort I will put in and then may regret giving you so much free code.

A Knowledge/Note based system is very useful for teams.

On my own personal project where I have a team of 8 I tried Gitbook but when I lost a bunch of stuff do with git pull that override my local changes I really disliked Gitbook.

I convinced my work to get on Confluence so we at least have a knowledge base. I find Confluence like all Atlassian products clunky, slow and cumbersome to navigate.

I really liked Backpack, however its dated and structuralized for an older workflow.

I look at Slite and think, does it handle code blocks well? Is it navigation easy and feels fast? How clunky is the rich text editor?

I personally don't like the look, the open source outline looks more professional. I would have borrow design elements from Discord than Slack.

To me this is a gimmick of piggybacking on the familiarity of slack channels to take something that has already existed (collaborative note and note-like apps). An old tool for a new generation.

Since I've built my open-source HTML5 game in Electron I feel I could whip up my own note-taking app because my feeling is I'm not going to be sold on either Outline or Slite.

I went to connect with my Google Account As soon as Slite asked to view my Contacts, I stopped. Its like asking to see someone's facebook on a first date. No Thank you.

So I go and check Outline, since its open-source but you have to have a slack account and create a Slack App, No Thank you.

I guess I should build my own.

I am unproductive if I am given a task where I can't switch to something else. If I have to work on a task for longer than 2 hours then I become unproductive. This is why I am always jumping on helping other people with their tasks and get pushed into leadership roles when its just really me coping with ADD.

I live in Canada and its quite upsetting to see salaries just a skip over the border that are 120K USD for remote positions but they won't even entertain hiring a Canadian, meaning in Canada the remoting range is 55-70 CAD USD. Going above 70K is possible but in my experience those jobs can only be acquired through personal networking in the GTA which is self-defeating because it keeps you tethered to the GTA.

Imagine if I could live somewhere like Thunder Bay and make a 120K remote. The only possibility has been freelancing and I was successful for a while remoting though running your own company came with downsides which led to my eventual decision to work back full time for a company.

My open source game is Electron+PhaserCE+Typescript+Webpack.

I tried to avoid webpack since I knew compile time would be an issue for my other team members and it turned it out it was. As a web-dev I'm use to its workflow but onboarding game devs hate it. I have to hear everyday lets move to Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine because waiting 4 seconds for compiling is a headache.

Switching to Typescript is great for larger teams because it makes properties explicit. I personally like coffee-script and find it more productive if I'm the only dev but I swallowed the medicine on this one and it was worth it.

VSScode is powerful with Typescript but its not as productive as VIM. I think of code completion and seeing errors right away as crutches that atrophies a developers own skills to find code and errors but they can make it much easier for juniors and lower the bar, pair this with wallabyjs and you have a controlled environment that catches everything for you.

I found no resources on testing Phaser but figured out my own way of mocking Phaser objects, and came up with my own way to write acceptance-like tests for my game without electron.

I really wanted to contribute to Phaser3 and had put great effort to join but Richard was useless in responding. He said he was porting their tickets from Trello to Github and then I could contribute which never happened, I asked month over month. I really wanted to use Phaser 3 to future proof my game and I would have contributed significantly. I could have forked PhaserCE but its a mess which makes sense for the rewrite but working blindly on Phaser 3 would be futile. I am quite bitter about bitter about this because I 20 hours a week for 6 months I could have contribute and now I don't

I think I will likely just write my own lightweight game framework to map only what I need and gut Phaser. Even looking at Phaser 3 codebase with their big rewrite from scratch its still clunky and I think this is because they don't build games at a large scale with a team to have a good feeling to fine tune an engine.

https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop

Navicat has a high price tag but its still a better tool and I wish everyday if I had to use a GUI it could be Navicat over TablePlus.

TablePlus looks good but its design is confusing and downright stupid.

I'm for the Northwestern Ontario, or as we think of it as the "truth north"

up and down are directions. Also we say pack sack instead of back pack.

I have been trying to spin up projects for years since my early teens and the best project I've have had traction on so far is my open source Tetris Attack-like clone.

I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low.

I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting.

The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage.

Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't.

https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop

Here in Toronto I always ask, have you looked at the source code I shared? And the answer is no.

I have lots of source code open to private to share, and its just because I'm a workaholic, though I find having source code doesn't matter, at least not here since they don't put much value in it.