init

    Location: Sweden, EU

    Remote: Yes (UTC +/- 5)

    Willing to relocate: No

    Technologies: Go, Python, Java, C++, GCP, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Linux, CI/CD, WebRTC, gRPC, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, PyTorch, LLM APIs

    Résumé/CV: Available on request

    Email: (initproc) at (proton.me)

Looking for fractional, advisory or short-time consulting engagements.

10+ years building infrastructure and backend systems at FAANG, FAANG-adjacents and early-stage startups. I've led projects across the full stack, from cloud infrastructure to product, through developer productivity and ML/AI pipelines, payments and real-time communication systems.

I'm particularly useful early on: greenfield architecture, getting a team to move fast without accumulating debt, and navigating compliance (SOC2, GDPR) without it becoming a distraction.

I've built and worked on this exact problem before at bigtech, startup and personal projects.

Regex works well if you have a very limited set of sender and recipient accounts that don't change often

Bayesian or DNN classifiers work well when you have labeled data.

LLMs work well when you have a lot of data from lots of accounts.

You can even combine these approaches for higher accuracy

  Location: Sweden, EU
  Remote: Yes (can work within UTC +/- 5)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: C++, Java, Python, Go, Linux, GCP, AWS, Terraform, Bazel, CI/CD, Github Actions, WebRTC, Data processing (big and small), Machine Learning and AI (Tensorflow, LLM APIs and local models).
  Résumé/CV: Available on request
  Email: (initproc) at (proton.me)

Looking for short-term or part-time consulting projects.

Background: 10+ years experience across startups and big tech (ex Google and Stripe). Lead and contributed to projects in compliance/security, distributed systems (Fintech, payments processing, real-time communication), machine learning and AI, as well as developer productivity and release engineering.

6700 / 10000. I guess because I didn't zoom on the map and got the time off by 34 years of the actual event.

The scoring could be improved.

This reminds me of Microsoft FrontPage more than 20 years ago.

> Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).

If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.

Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.

That's where the integration effort stops.

Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.

Making their APIs easy to use like they used to be 10 years ago will be equivalent to releasing their core assets. In the past you could do almost anything from the Facebook API that you could do with their web or mobile app.

They release a lot of open source stuff as other commenters have mentioned but you can't build a Facebook or Instagram competitor just by integrating those components.

In a past job I built a code search clone on top of Kythe, Zoekt and LSP (for languages that didn't have bazel integration). I got help from another colleague to make the UI based on Monaco. We create a demo that many people loved but we didn't productionize it for a few reasons (it was an unfunded hackathon project and the company was considering another solution when they already had Livegrep)

Producing the Kythe graph from the bazel artifacts was the most expensive part.

Working with Kythe is also not easy as there is no documentation on how to run it at scale.

I've used both Code Search and Livegrep. No, Livegrep does not even come close to what Code Search can do.

Sourcegraph is the closest thing I know of.

Henry Kissinger has a heavy German accent that didn't prevent him from becoming one of the most influential American politicians of the 20th century.

I worked on something like this more than a decade ago back when bayesian classifiers were SOTA for sentiment analysis. It's relatively easy to use an existing model to bootstrap and fine tune a new model. The hardest part is collecting and cleaning up the data for training.

Unfortunately this has already been happening for a decade or more since the NATO "intervention" in Libya and it has little to do with climate change.

I'm interested in this space and other mining-adjacent industries in the DRC-Zambia copper belt region due to the potential of this region to be a key player in central Africa's development and the world's move into electric vehicles.

The main challenge is getting capital.

Let's get in touch!

The CMU Database Groups YouTube channel has a very good material on this. I highly recommend the Intro to Database Systems videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/CMUDatabaseGroup/playlists

Thank you for sharing this link. The Internet Archive is truly a marvel of unequaled value. Didn't know it had such a trove of warez without the risk of pwnage that warez and torrent sites came with.

Software is already having a big impact. Just think of all the tools that allowed us to work from home and not commute during the pandemic and how different the world would have been if we did not have them.

A area where software will have a huge impact is crypto mining. As a community we should be proactive in reducing the amount of energy wasted on crypto mining. If you think about it, only the rich have the ability to mine lots of crypto coins and these are people who could have used the same investment to do more positive things in their communities like donating computers to local schools or let the electric power they consume be used for more meaningful purposes instead of buying yet 10 more GPUs and plugging them into the grid. NVIDIA was on the right track with their firmware changes to slow down mining.

Maybe the better question to ask is "why isn't file reversion control adopted more outside of software engineer?"

Git a is distributed version control system that most people shouldn't have to deal with. It has awful tools and doesn't work well with binary files, large files and moved files. Just an example: How do you diff two copies of an excel document with Git?

Most people don't have to deal with multiple "master" branches with no single source of truth because that's really what Git is for.

What most people need, including software engineers working in closed source, is a single source of truth with good history, diff and large files support.

I believe a tool like Dropbox or even centralized version control systems like Subversion or Perforce are better positioned to solve this than Git.

Many cloud based tools already have features that give them the upper hand over git. For example, Google docs allows collaborative editing and editors have access to file history and can revert to specific versions.

Maybe there are tools to diff binary files like two versions of an audio file or two excel documents or whatever two [domain specific file format] documents.

I will be happy if version control came at the file system or cloud drive level and the app just leveraged this integration seamlessly instead of forcing everyone to learn the difference between between branching, rebasing, cloning, copying, stashing, etc...

If you have access to free university or you can get a loan then by all means go get a degree.

Your existing programming experience will give you a head start in a few courses.

Most importantly, it will be easier for you to get an internship while studying and you will get exposed to real world software engineering in a hopefully successful software company.

The degree will also make it easy to relocate across the globe. Some countries require university education or many years of experience to even let you work there as a software engineer.

It's worth noting that La Gomera is quite far from the more western islands: Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. Visitors staying on those islands might need to plan their La Gomera visit ahead of traveling to the canaries.

I've never used Wise because it doesn't serve my country. In fact there's no shortage of remittance services besides Wise.

The main problem is that the KYC and risk checks run by european and american companies don't take into account how people relate to each other in Africa and how money flows in the continent. It's possible that one person regularly sends money to several relatives with different names and in different cities in the span of a few weeks. Fraud detectors at the european/american remittance companies don't like that.

Many of us are also living abroad temporarily and want to retire in our home countries. We want to repatriate most the money we earn abroad but banks in the west don't make it easy.

These are my biggest pain points and your solution is similar to what I had in mind but more geared towards the lesser served markets: Portuguese and French speaking countries.

Congratulations from a fellow African! Looking forward to your success!

Moving to the US and Europe was a shock for me. It is hard to send money to my home country. If a relative back home needs money within two weeks I usually have to ask other people to send money on my behalf or I have to ask other relatives back home to help them until I can pay them back. This is constant source of stress when you have a poor family.

I ended up quitting my job in another domain to go work in Fintech with the ultimate goal of solving this problem.

Some issue that make it hard for me to send money:

* Transfer fees are very high for both bank transfer and remittance services.

* The large remittance services like Western Union and MoneyGram have draconian processes to the point that they can just block your transfer with no clear explanation and on multiple occasions they even blocked all customers from sending money to my country.

* Only one bank back home has online banking services and they have lamentable security practices.

* Many banks in the west don't let me send money back home. If they do then they require you to physically go to a branch and prove your identity. This was/is a problem during the pandemic.

* You can only send up to a certain amount. Too little, it gets eaten away by the transfer fees, too high, they don't let you send it unless you give them a sob story and they feel sorry for you and approve it just this one time.

Another feature of Github1s is that it allows you to jump to definitions and references. Github.Dev doesn't do this yet.

The usual advice is to pick up a hobby like sports, weight lifting, woodwork or martial arts. Definitely do that.

You haven't mentioned your location but I assume you're in the US. You were great at your job in FAANG and have a large amount of savings. Consider moving to continental Europe and work for a FAANG or similar company there to improve your work-life balance and reduce cost of living.

Take a look at Germany, Netherlands or Sweden. You don't have to learn the language before moving there, you get more vacation days a year, longer parental leaves (in the case of Sweden you may qualify for the paid parental leave even if have a small child who was born before you moved to the country), and good public transport, no need to be stuck in traffic jams. Free healthcare and education are also a plus.

Good luck finding your mojo again!

As the other commenter responded, I'm referring to the linguistic, socioeconomic and judicial homogeneity. Even though the US is culturally diverse, it still has a single currency, a single dominant language and a single jurisdiction (with minor state specific legal requirements). I only need one US visa to travel to all 52 states. A software company taking payments in the US has access to all 52 states. A peach cobbler is called the same throughout the US even though the recipe might change a little bit from place to place.

This is not the case in Africa or Europe, where countries use different languages, scripts, legal codes, currencies, driving directions, etc...

EDIT: I'm referring the land masses included in the visualization and what they entail in practical terms.

The US can be seen as a single market, the same applies to China and India. Europe has the schengen area, the EU and the EEA. Africa needs similar initiatives.

I'm referring to the European countries included in the visualization.

Africa has 54 countries, thousands of languages and 1.2 billion people.

As an African, whenever I see this map I'm more astonished by how densely populated Europe and India are, how big and populated China is and how homogeneous the US is compared to its size.

Cool project! I designed a similar system many years ago with SES and the AppEngine data store instead of S3.

Using Ubuntu because it was the easiest to setup back in the days. Canonical even used to send boxes of free CDs if you promised that you'll distribute them.

Things I did recently:

* Control the lights on the christmas tree

* Install Pi-Hole

* Run nginx and flask to serve videos of courses I've downloaded over the years.

Things I plan to do:

* Build an embedded operating system by following Stanford's CS140E course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25272229

* Control more LED lights