fredwu

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, React, JavaScript/TypeScript, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/

Email: ifredwu at gmail dot com

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My name’s Fred Wu, I’m an experienced Elixir and Ruby developer who has worked on multiple commercial projects as well as released multiple Hex packages.

I work at a fintech startup in Australia as CTO, leading a small team. In the past few days I’ve decided to start moonlighting again, especially now that I’ve been working from home since Covid and has more time and flexibility. I can commit about 20-30 hours a week.

I’d been using Elixir professionally for a few years, ruby for over half a decade, lead and built multiple commercial B2B & B2C SaaS projects. Until recently I’ve always been very hands on, and have worked with multiple tech stacks in the past, including JS, React and PHP, and most recently Clojure at the startup I’m currently working at.

  - My blog and talks: https://fredwu.me/
  - My Github profile: https://github.com/fredwu

  - Crawler, a high performance web crawler built in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/crawler
  - Simple Bayes, a naive bayes machine learning implementation in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/simple_bayes
  - And a few years ago when I was heavily involved in the ruby/rails community, I had done an experimental project building a "layer 0" ORM on top of ActiveRecord and Sequel: https://github.com/fredwu/datamappify

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, React, JavaScript/TypeScript, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/

Email: ifredwu at gmail dot com

---

My name’s Fred Wu, I’m an experienced Elixir and Ruby developer who has worked on multiple commercial projects as well as released multiple Hex packages.

I work at a fintech startup in Australia as CTO, leading a small team. In the past few days I’ve decided to start moonlighting again, especially now that I’ve been working from home since Covid and has more time and flexibility. I can commit about 20-30 hours a week.

I’d been using Elixir professionally for a few years, ruby for over half a decade, lead and built multiple commercial B2B & B2C SaaS projects. Until recently I’ve always been very hands on, and have worked with multiple tech stacks in the past, including JS, React and PHP, and most recently Clojure at the startup I’m currently working at.

  - My blog and talks: https://fredwu.me/
  - My Github profile: https://github.com/fredwu
  - My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/

  - Crawler, a high performance web crawler built in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/crawler
  - Simple Bayes, a naive bayes machine learning implementation in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/simple_bayes
  - OPQ, a simple in-memory queue with worker pooling and rate limiting in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/opq
  - And a few years ago when I was heavily involved in the ruby/rails community, I had done an experimental project building a "layer 0" ORM on top of ActiveRecord and Sequel: https://github.com/fredwu/datamappify

The first piece is longer, on my journey learning Elixir and building machine learning libraries.

https://fredwu.me/blog/2016-07-24-i-accidentally-some-machin...

The second piece is shorter, on Elixir’s functional aspect and how doctest changes the way I code.

https://fredwu.me/blog/2017-08-07-elixir-and-doctest-help-wr...

Over the past few years I've mostly been working in leadership (but still with a bit of hands-on), so I mostly work on things that interest me. For example, for a while I was obsessed with building a web scraper, and some machine learning stuff, so I built:

https://github.com/fredwu/crawler and https://github.com/fredwu/simple_bayes

Working in bursts works well for me, as I can dial the effort up and down depending on my availability and mental space.

The quarantine forces me to think about it even more, and I think I've found the why, and how.

So I'm now building it: https://focussist.com/

No particular reason, but I started building websites in the late 90s and am now heading up the engineering department in our scale-up (60+ people w/ 25+ engineers).

In this Leadership Master Class session, I'll be talking about the adaptability of an organisation and an individual, and how things could affect an organisation as well as one's career.

I'll cover concepts that are fundamental but easy to overlook, as well as interesting concepts that I personally observed/invented over my decade-long career.

- Switching from =~ to Regex.match? did not yield significant speed improvement

- Without any changes though, 2.4.0-preview1 ran the stemming in 19s, compared to the 25s on 2.3.1.

The ruby stemmer I used is this one: https://github.com/NeilNjae/porter2stemmer

A small feedback: I just generated a React-based stack with a few Auth options - Email, Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The resulting `user.js` controller is 550 LoC.

It would be great if by default some of these logic are encapsulated in a service layer rather than littered in the controller itself. :)

Author here. This is going to attract a few more downvotes for me, but I have to respectfully disagree. Partially because the scenario wasn't quite what had happened, but more importantly, even in situation exactly like what you have just described, I would not have just lashed out on my junior colleague - to me no matter how junior they are, they are still my colleagues and they still add value. There is no reason why I need to be aggressive to them when they made mistakes.

Yep I can see why the negative tone is very off-putting to many people. Had I have a chance to do over I'd definitely do what you've suggested here and tackle it from the positive / lessons-learnt point of view. :)

Many thanks! :)

Author here. I'm glad there are people like you who share the same view. :)

I do admit that I haven't explained things well in my blog post, but some comments here that suggest being aggressive/rude is okay and/or justifiable as long as there's another side of the story is really an eye opener for me and I'm somewhat shocked... Is being kind and decent to another fellow coworker (and a human being for that matter) too much to ask? :\

Author here. Indeed I was the junior dev at the time.

I now regret not making a lot of the points clearer. In this case, I know I would definitely NOT treat my junior devs this way. In my view, using either aggressive tones, or public shaming, is not the right way to resolve things. I wish that senior dev at the time would've talked to me in a way that did not make me feel like I was worthless and intentionally fuck things up - at the end of day, most people try to do good things for their organisation, right? :)

Author here. Unfortunately that one was from a small startup where I was responsible for evaluating my team members' performance and salary.

In recent years I have started gathering feedback for myself from my peers, direct reports and managers. The issue I find is that only certain type of people are willing to be completely honest, for the rest it really depends on how much rapport you were able to build with them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I try, but it's hard. :P

For most of these moments, it was more a reflection of my personality if anything - under the same circumstances, I know I _wouldn't_ treat others the same way I was treated back then. I much prefer to use softer tones and more positive ways to start those conversations.

Author here. Sorry you (and many others) felt that way... I was trying to put together these moments without rambling on too much.

To offer my perspective on the things you mentioned:

a) I absolutely agree, there's always two sides of a coin. I can only describe how I felt at the time. b) Again, I agree, and communication is a two way art. Having said that, some of those moments I feel there were very little I could do in my end to turn them around. c) I did not claim those to be stories either, my intention was to share these things that have happened to me in the past and made me felt uneasy at the time, and perhaps make more people (including myself) to be more aware of their surroundings...

Author here, I can see why you have these questions. I tried to keep the moments short so left out some details.

For the first one, it was the passive aggressive tone and the fact that it was posted in a public channel. This person in one other occasion, stormed out of a meeting room whilst another colleague was trying to explain something.

For the second one, later on through mutual colleagues I realised that he essentially thought very little of me because at the time I was a junior developer so I made lots of mistakes in my code base. In my defence though, I was on my own and I had to learn Rails myself.

For the third one, I put the "non-technical" part in to indicate that my manager does not have the technical capability to determine whether my findings were biased. It was more so that he had his agenda and just wanted me to confirm his approach from the technical perspective.

Hope that clears things up a little bit. :)

Two years ago I found out that Amazon allows multiple accounts to be set up using the same email address with different passwords (!!!) - which means that the potential attack vector is larger for no good reason.

I don't recall how this happened but I can only assume at the time I signed up to AWS and I might have reset/changed the password somehow that resulted in the system creating another copy of my account.

So all the information (credit cards, addresses, etc) of the "old" account still existed until I deleted them. But let's say if someone who has no idea that they have more than one accounts with Amazon, they could easily leave their information intact in their "old" accounts, which if they have weak passwords can easily be compromised.

Unfortunately Amazon did not take this report seriously, and to this very day this issue still persists.

I have experienced this from both ends, as the employee who outgrew my current role, and as a manager who my direct report outgrew their role. In this case, apart from trying to create a similar role (which often than not is impossible), the best you can do is to wish them the best, and be proud of the fact that you've worked with such an awesome colleague that they have now surpassed what the role could do for them. :)

Given time, effort and popularity, I could see Lotus::Model to become the de facto alternative to ActiveRecord, overtaking the ROM (Ruby Object Mapper, previously known as DataMapper) project. :)

In terms of the images - they were all from the original interview article (linked in my post).

P.S. I am not sure what gave the impression that the interview was about Ruby, as "Ruby" is not mentioned in the title.

If a blog's target audience is in fact overlapping with the HN audience, then I'd say it kinda makes sense if the blog author wants to encourage the HN dicussion spirit. :)