Hacker News Reader

brettlangdonon Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

Wow, this is a really cool application. I needed to cut down a song this week and this is a very cool approach.

brettlangdonon Show HN: Gnomecast – A Linux Chromecast GUI with transcoding and subtitles

This is great!

I personally have been using https://getvideostream.com/ which I like, but awesome to see an open source alternative.

I used Mazda AIO Tweaks to get Android Auto support (along with other changes) in my 2017 Mazda 3. I am pretty sure they support older/other models as well. Very easy, took about 20 minutes from downloading to updating the car.

https://mazdatweaks.com/

brettlangdonon SVG2JSX – Convert SVG to Valid React SVG

The site would be much better if it loaded a sample SVG by default so I don't have to hunt down the source for an SVG that I have lying around (or on the internet).

brettlangdonon Ask HN: Mailing lists that HN readers ought to know about?

I rather like Porter.io which will provide you a digest of top HN posts, but if you login with your GitHub they will also include articles relating to repos you are following. Some days I get a digest of articles I have already seen, but most days I find an article or two I missed.

https://porter.io/

brettlangdonon Show HN: icanhazdadjoke – dad joke api with slack/alexa integrations

Hello,

I am the creator of https://icanhazdadjoke.com/. As the product is closing in on it's 1000th Slack installation, I figured it is about time I start to tell the world more about it.

This project was a silly weekend idea that I had that slowly has grown organically into over 900 Slack installs (with about 300-400 Slack interactions per day), and over 50 Alexa installations (with around 10 interactions per day) without any marketing.

For those interested, the tech stack is:

* Python/Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/)

* Flask-Ask (https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

* Elasticsearch (https://www.elastic.co/)

* AWS S3 (https://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

* Caddy web server (https://caddyserver.com/)

* Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/)

I am happy to answer any questions anyone might have about the product.

brettlangdonon Vendoring Python dependencies with pip

Author of the article here, happy to discuss any questions/comments/concerns :)

brettlangdonon Python moved to GitHub

I am always amazed at how hard it is to find something with GitHub's search, when `git grep` works so well.

brettlangdonon Show HN: HNStats – track stats for HN posts

Creator here. Porter.io used to have a service where you could track some basic metrics of Hacker News posts, but was either shut down or has not been working for while. So, I wanted to create a simple clone of the service.

HNStats stats for this post: https://hnstats.info/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541433

brettlangdonon Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

Not 100% what you are looking for, since you specify "installed in apps as a package", but we are using https://redash.io/ and love it. They are open source and very easy to run ad-hoc queries, save/schedule queries and alerts, and build dashboards.

brettlangdonon Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

https://icanhazdadjoke.com

Probably not the best example of a "tool", but it does have an API and a Slack integration. Probably one of the more favorite things I've published.

brettlangdonon Show HN: Writing my first interpreter in C for fun

Given how much of a novice I still am in the subject, might want to take my suggestions with a grain of salt compared to others.

I have always really enjoyed just reading the source code for programming languages. As I learn more and more, I seem to take away a bit more each time.

Personally I've enjoyed reading through the source code for Go, since it is hand written in Go. Being hand written, it can be a little repetition reading through it, but I find it to be pretty easier to read/understand.

https://github.com/golang/go/tree/release-branch.go1.6/src/g...

Also, I have read (at least parts of) the book, "Engineering a Compiler", which being a novice in the subject, some of it goes over my head, but I think it does a better job outlining the topic than any other books I have read.

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Compiler-Second-Keith-Coo...

Enjoy :)

brettlangdonon Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how do you find new jobs?

Yeah, sometimes products like these try not to market themselves as recruiters or agencies. When really they usually fill a similar role for companies, providing them with candidates for open positions. Some offer slightly different value than hiring an agency, but the role they play for a company is usually that of a recruiter/agency.

I think what is most important for candidates is that finding a new job is really hard and takes a lot of work, and utilizing as many options as you can to find the right job.

This also goes for companies as well, finding the right candidate for a job is hard and they should utilize as many options as possible.

brettlangdonon Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how do you find new jobs?

Disclaimer: I am a software engineer at Underdog.io.

There are a lot of platforms nowadays that help to remove the "middleman" of external recruiters. Underdog.io, Hired, Vettery, InterviewJet, and others. These platforms typically are working to connect companies and candidates together directly by removing the "find and apply to each company individually" type approach. Instead they accept candidate applications, put them through their own internal approval process, and then, if selected, present them to companies to then make the decision if they want to talk to the candidates directly. In my opinion is approach is a much nicer and less stressful process for candidates.

brettlangdonon Embedding Lua in the Web

I have always wanted this!

Every now and then I get the thought that maybe I'll try to hack Lua into a browser just for fun, then I start trying to read the source and it is just 0_o to me.

brettlangdonon JSX is no longer my friend

If anyone was curious about other alternatives, we use r-dom at work. I am personally happy with it as an alternative to JSX.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-dom

brettlangdonon [dead]

Hey,

I am Brett, Senior Software Engineer at Underdog.io. Happy to answer any questions anyone might have about this open position.

- Brett

brettlangdonon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)

I am Brett a Senior Software Engineer at Underdog.io. More than happy to answer any questions anyone might have about our current stack, technical challenges, or anything else anyone might be curious about.

GitHub: https://github.com/brettlangdon

Website: https://brett.is

brettlangdonon Show HN: Git-vendor, manage dependencies with git-subtree

For anyone interested, here is a great article on git-subtree and where I learned about it from:

https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/05/the-power-of-gi...

brettlangdonon Show HN: Git-vendor, manage dependencies with git-subtree

Most of it is a personal preference. I'd rather pull the full repo of my dependencies in rather than "deal" with submodules. Submodules add some extra necessary workflow steps that others contributing to your repo might not be expecting. Subtree simplifies a lot of that.

As well, I think it helps to solidify the "reproducible build" concept by taking submodules 1 step further.

brettlangdonon Postico – A Modern PostgreSQL Client for OS X

Previous discussion from about 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838040

It has reached version 1.0 since the last discussion.

brettlangdonon Jsonstream – cli tool to transform streams of JSON

It doesn't appear that App::RecordStream knows how to deal with a stream of JSON objects. You can split on a delimiter (newline), but you'll have to either write some regular expression or some perl code in order to transform each line of JSON into something else.

brettlangdonon Jsonstream – cli tool to transform streams of JSON

Yeah, very limited in what it can do. There are a bunch of tools similar to it which have a lot more features built in, but what I really wanted was something I could use easily with traditional UNIX tools like sed/awk/sort/uniq/etc which tend to be difficult to use with JSON (in my case JSON log lines).

brettlangdonon 80x40 Animated

80x40 is a project by https://github.com/mattbierner to have a collaborative ASCII art canvas board in git, where all pull requests are auto-merged.

I decided to write a script to generate a gif from the git history.

https://github.com/art-dot-git/80x40

https://github.com/art-dot-git/80x40/blob/master/about.md

brettlangdonon 80x40

https://gist.github.com/brettlangdon/4e9f58dabfbfcb263dc2

brettlangdonon Encouraging an I don't know culture

I rather like the one quote that is used for this post:

> If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past. If you lie, it becomes a part of your future.

Cultivating an "I don't know" environment is really just helping to encourage honesty and mentorship.

brettlangdonon Why It Took Us Two Months to Rebrand ChallengePost to Devpost

This is a great article. You don't usually think about all the engineering tasks behind a company rebranding.

brettlangdonon Before You Learn to Code, Ask Yourself Why

I threw this document together quick trying to break down the "unit" (per week) price of each coding school mentioned in the article.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wKfEzO860nn_2AuKx5fD...

The main issue I found is that some schools include other services in the tuition, like career services, housing, etc. Where others are simply just the course.

brettlangdonon SCRUM is not our saviour

Yeah, I agree. As developers most of us want to develop the best that we can all the time, either new features or cleaning up technical debt, but the pressure from the business to always push to get things done as quickly as possible is very stressful to deal with.