glacials

  Location: Seattle, WA
  Remote: Yes, been successfully remote for last 4 yrs
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Rails, Go, Node
  twos.dev
  linkedin.com/in/ben
  github.com/glacials
  ben@twos.dev

Being open source bought a lot of good will and led directly to a hire because they kept submitting great PRs. Open revenue honestly didn’t have much of an effect.

Development streams are another beast—they helped refine and teddybear some ideas, and again with the good will, but it is at its core a job in entertainment. You will structure other work around it, such as “saving” certain projects for stream time or offline time, you will be distracted by people asking you questions while you’re working, and you will repeatedly explain the same thing over and over to new viewers—if you get any viewers at all.

tldr; it didn’t work out financially but I’m super glad I tried, if only to not regret not trying. The biggest thing I didn’t expect was for capitalist instinct to take over: I liked working on open source because I could work on what I wanted to; but to work on what I wanted to indefinitely, and play the latest video games and go out to eat sometimes or whatever, I needed the thing to make some money.

So an unplanned, surprising amount of time went into revenue generation. I previously had a Patreon page that brought in ~$20 / mo, and during my year I got to ~$500 / mo (Patreon + Stripe). I also picked up some contract work for a few hours a week. No matter what happens the bill comes due, in more ways than one—I grew a new respect for founders, who have more than just themselves riding on this.

Even so, it was freeing to turn my nights-and-weekends fun work into full-time work, to spend stupid irresponsible amounts of time on small things like polish, to be able to drop what I was doing at any time to go hang with friends or walk the dog or go get eggs, and to dip my toes into every trade from design to swag to marketing to customer support to user research. I also used my free nights and weekends to learn a foreign language at a local community college.

Wouldn’t trade it for the world, but probably also won’t be doing it again until retirement.

I have been remote for six years and I love it, but still some of the biggest leaps forward in trust and communication I get with people happen when I spend time with them in person; and some of the most fruitful products and tech I’ve been involved in conceiving weren’t in a meeting set up to conceive them, but accidentally, while having a drink and being in the same room as someone I didn’t plan to be with.

Everyone is different and I’m not saying you should be forced to do any of this. I recognize that often these situations are just painful, depending on who you are and who your team is. Just saying the dollars have a specific purpose when being spent in this way.

For example, my README repo is and must be called “glacials/glacials”; if I wanted to delete it that is what I would type, but if I were an organization and wanted to delete it, I would type something else. This different behavior between acting as a user vs. acting as an organization is what caught the author off-guard. They typed “httpie/httpie” and consciously thought “yes, I want to delete the README repo, which I know must have name httpie/httpie, so that’s definitely what I’d like to do, I’ll go ahead and type that”.

This is not absentmindedness, it is a misleading product inconsistency. Were it not for this, I would 100% agree with you.

Those 0.5 MB presumably also need to be written to disk, making this a trading away of 392 TB in disk writes in exchange for 17 PB over the wire + 17 PB in disk writes? I'm sure this is overly simple and overlooks a lot of technical details, but I can't see how this can be worth it.

[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-music-statistics/

Previously had a fancy schmancy Vue site with components and good practices and a good (for an engineer) design—the works. Then one day I was in the mountains with a bad connection and couldn’t even npm install the dang thing to work on it. Rage-rewrote the whole thing in raw HTML on the spot, haven’t looked back.

I’ve been on WordPress, Blogger, Medium, a custom Vue site, a custom Go server, a Raspberry Pi, the works. Each was either a platform that could rot, or a hobby that could distract me from writing. Raw HTML on GitHub Pages has solved both these problems for me.

> Use illustrations as supplementary, not instead of information.

If anything, the author’s argument explicitly allows meme images and emoji.

This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.

Things that come to mind are evidence in a court of law and having fun looking back on old memories, neither of which seems worth the sometimes incredible amount of trouble.

Once upon a time I built a platform to simplify this [1], but it didn’t take off—between the extra mental effort, the impact to growth, and the inability to call it “open source”, I think most authors just prefer the simplicity of MIT.

[1]: https://license.land/

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame#Documentation/git-blame.t...

> A comprehensive evaluation requires a multidisciplinary team, including a psychologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, speech therapist, and other professionals who diagnose and treat children with ASD. The team members will conduct a thorough neurological assessment and in-depth cognitive and language testing.

National Institutes of Health (https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Educat...)

> ...a formal developmental evaluation may be needed...done by a trained specialist, such as a developmental pediatrician, child psychologist, speech-language pathologist, occupational therapist, or other specialist. The specialist may observe the child, give the child a structured test, ask the parents or caregivers questions, or ask them to fill out questionnaires. The results of this formal evaluation determines whether a child needs special treatments or early intervention services or both.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/screening.html)

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I am now paralyzed for the rest of the day. My brain can't snap my schedule into place, so everything I do is a possible conflict with this promise I just made. Even if it's morning, something may happen -- another invitation to do something in the afternoon, maybe -- that I can't resolve because I don't have the necessary information to. This causes overwhelming anxiety.

My entire brain is blocked on resolving this ambiguity. I can't do hard tasks like programming. I can't pay enough attention to my favorite shows to watch them. If I do, I'll end up rewatching them later because I didn't retain anything. Reading a book is out of the question; I'll just end up rereading the same paragraph 20 times in a row then giving up.

The whole day, zapped out of existence.

To others I will appear distracted, hard to hold in conversation, irritable, and in a hurry. Internally, I'd equate it to the feeling you get on a once-in-a-lifetime special day, like your wedding day or a test that could decide your entire career. It's just that I get it from really small things, and all the time.

I think what most people mean when they say it's not worth getting diagnosed as an adult is the second type, because the only thing it really does is force schools to provide adequate care for students.

I recommend seeking the first type though; I was diagnosed at 30 and it was worth it just to know. I only slightly suspected it though, and the diagnosis is what put me on the path to finding the communities, research, etc., which is ultimately what I got out of it -- so YMMV.

EDIT: Oh and meds! There aren't autism meds, but autism is often linked with anxiety or ADHD, and those can be helped with meds. Diagnosis is a first step to that.

Imagine having tremendous back pain since birth, so that multiple times a day you need to lie down for an hour. You tell people about it and they just say "you don't look like you're in pain", or "yeah everyone has back pain", and they imagine you weak for being so affected by it. As a child you were raised that it's taboo to manage your back pain, so you often have to make up excuses to go secretly lie down.

You even believe yourself that you are just a failure for needing to do this when everyone else can soldier on. You have to turn down hikes, trips, even relationships; if a friend invites you over you need to make sure there's an exit strategy, or at least a place you can secretly take a break if you have a spike.

This is what my life is like. I have been trained to look like I'm not in pain -- to hide my shutdowns and meltdowns and hypersensitivities, through willpower or through physically removing myself. It affects my work, my relationships, and my daily life, but the worst part is just the pain itself.

But when that commit goes to be deployed and you don’t have atomic/transactional deploys across services, you get downtime between the first service’s deploy finishing and the second’s.

> For those unfamiliar with a cap table, it’s a list of who owns your company’s securities, which includes your company shares, options and more. A clear and simple cap table should quickly indicate who owns what and how much of it they own. For a variety of reasons (sometimes inexperience or bad advice) too many equity holders often find companies’ capitalization information to be opaque and not easily accessible.