gedrap

Digital Ocean has so called one click apps, that they can deploy and setup at any droplet and gitlab is one of them: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/gitlab/

I have tried it before and it just works, took my less than 5 minutes to have a fully working gitlab instance on a $10/month droplet. It's not the cheapest option probably, but very low effort so it's quite worth it.

There is some potential for harm: people making decisions based on incorrect information.

Yes, you shouldn't trust such a device completely. But if you can't trust it... What's the point, other than an expensive cool toy?

The best interview experience that I've ever had. Totally recommend.

I really like the idea of it. Especially if the working hours are not very flexible - downtime is inevitable. Whether you are waiting for something, or it's just one of those days (or mornings or whatever). I always have some side/fun/educational projects active and it would be really cool to work on them on such time and, very likely, beneficial to the company because of new skills I'd pick up, etc.

But that's in theory. Curious how do such things work out in practice :) I guess you need really strong technical leadership to pull this off, to convince non-technical execs that it's not time wasted, etc.

The problem with GitLab's calculator is that it's simply... too ambitious. They try to calculate the salary for pretty much every somewhat major city in the world and it's simply impossible. You can't capture the details of so many different local economies.

For example, when I lived in England, the difference between rent for a room in a shared house outside city center and a 1 bedroom apartment in the city center was usually at most 100% (excluding the very top and very bottom of the ranges). Meanwhile in Lithuania, where I live at the moment, the difference is about 6 times. You can't capture this in a calculator with such broad coverage.

Approach by mozilla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881004) seems much more reasonable to me, to be honest.

This is exactly what I meant. Home tests are totally fine, given there is some reasonable interest from the company already.

Home test is totally fine after a phone call or a two. However, they are not fine at all just after submitting an application and no real contact.

I don't think that this is a proper justification for sending coding projects to everyone who submitted a CV. This is a big imbalance in time investment from both sides and quite disrespectful from the applications point of view.

>>> participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job

Obviously it's anecdotal data at best, but still curious, what are the results? Because it sounds very similar to the frequently given advice for software engineers 'push code to github to land a great job'.

Highly doubt it :) HN crowd is a small subset of all professional engineers.

I live in Lithuania and random places are trying to introduce it, such as news agent type of convenience store. "A pack of cigarettes and here's your tip", em, no.

It actually is but obviously varies from person to person and from one environment to other.

I am from Eastern Europe and did my degree in England. In the first year, I lived in university halls and out of 8 people in the flat (including me), 6 people were English. It was really really hard initially because I could understand only about half of what they were saying because of the accents, so it was hard to participate and much easier to just browse internet in my room.

However, I picked up the language really quickly since I was very often surrounded by native speakers so all was good at the end, just the initial couple of months were really tough.

I get your point, and attitude such as "lol who needs ops, developers can do it" can lead to really shitty situations indeed.

On the other hand, you have developers / small teams who are just trying to get things off the ground and want some basic redundancy and other benefits of load balancing. That's the primary audience of such service, in my opinion. Sure, you can just spin up HAProxy and even a very basic configuration might do the job. But it's one more thing to learn and maintain, often one more thing to train people to work with, etc. The same can be said about other popular managed services, including Amazon S3, RDS etc. It's a decision you have to make.

So I truly understand your position but I don't think that such sarcastic attitude actually helps anyone.

Jobs find you, probably.

Well, relatively speaking Postgre might have lower adoption than MySQL, although I am not too sure about it. However, if you look at the absolute numbers, Postgre has huge adoption, even if it is smaller than MySQL's. So it doesn't really matter as chances are, you will able to find an experienced developer. Can't say the same about HBase, etc since there are significantly fewer projects requiring it compared to MySQL/Postgre.

Are you using some sort of leverage (haven't heard about leverages for btc though)? Looking at btc price movements, it seems that you need either 1) very high bankroll or 2) loads of transactions to make it work, as minute/hour price movements are rather low, and even lower for smaller time ranges. (maybe that's a lame question, I have no trading experience, just curious and reading a bit about it).

I guess that's where the 'high speed' bit comes in? It's almost instant, not completely instant :)

Reading mode strips out the ads, so I can see why Google is not too excited about it :)

>>> People pay us (Cloud SQL) and AWS (RDS) a surprising amount of money to run MySQL in a VM for them.

As a happy RDS user, I totally agree. Surely, I could run MySQL and the result would be mostly fine, after some mistakes and lessons learned. But all the things such as upgrading, etc still take time, add a bit of stress, one more thing to care about. Could that time and energy be spent on more valuable (from business point of view) activities? Yes.

I have regretted this decision.

Firefox has 'reading mode' that does similar, strips out all the stuff such as sidebars, etc, without most of the downside associated with AMP (being open, to start with). Occasionally it misses some media stuff (e.g. embedded videos), but works well vast majority of the time so I'm happy with it.

Technically yes. But then it's very obvious that this is not what this discussion is about.

Or just a custom pacman repository? As far as I remember, packages in official Arch repositories are constantly updated. If you update your system in the morning, then there will be new updates in the evening. So it kind of makes sense to have a custom repo.

I'd say Ubuntu simply because of it's popularity, most of the problems have been fixed or can be simply googled and solution is usually in the first result.

What's the reason behind choosing Arch, which is definitely not a common distributions for new users? Is it that you are experienced in it and able to customize to their needs easily, as you talk about customization in your post?

Thanks for such a detailed response :)

>>> The worst sysadmins get in the way of developers. Ones that scale down your CI server to the cheapest, throttled, one the hosting company has, leaving $800/day contract developers waiting for builds that run in 20 seconds on their laptops take nearly an hour.

How likely is that the sysadmins were told to 'just make it run cheaper, I don't care' by someone higher in the foodchain?

>>> cannot understand it from a business perspective

This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.

Well, you are right that uber users is not a representative sample of the city population. Biased data is not inherently bad, it's just that you need to be aware of biases.

That's what I did at my tiny engineering team (3 folks) and results have been great.

If you have a small organization (say <10 engineers), it's crucial that every developer writing server side applications can also do at least some sysadmin work. As the article says, it leads to deeper understanding and it really helps when thinking about scalability, fixing certain kinds of issues, etc. It also often shortens the feedback cycle and requires less throwing over the wall. As a bonus, you increase the bus factor.

Automation is the key though. If everyone connects to the boxes and does random things manually over ssh, nothing good will come out of it.

Still, you need to have a person or two who are responsible for the vision of the architecture/systems and who make sure that things don't go off the rails.

Async means reducing likelihood that your work will be blocked by someone else (e.g. waiting for response from someone) as it might cause big issues when someone is 10 hours away. If you can't get any work done because you are waiting for someone who is sleeping, that's really bad.

Single source of truth can be google doc, wiki, github issues/wiki, whatever. As long as it's single. The problem is when critical information is scattered in slack history, github issues and PRs, wiki and some odd google doc. It makes it hard to find information and you will end up finding contradictory information. Lack of single source of truth or not updating one will reduce the async property of the whole operation, among other things.

Yes, the first chapter or two is dedicated to the basics of R (syntax, etc).