jbarham

Location: Melbourne, Australia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Go

Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham-resume.html

GitHub: https://github.com/jbarham/

Email: john@wombatsoftware.com

I'm looking for contracts in Melbourne, or remote anywhere.

My expertise is Django web app development and high performance distributed systems in Python and/or Go. I've also done embedded and desktop app development.

I created and operate SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/), a DNS hosting service, and co-founded and developed the website for YouPatch (https://www.youpatch.com/), the world's most popular pixel quilt pattern generation service.

For anyone interested in Japanese house architecture, the book Jutaku, published by Phaidon, is fantastic: https://au.phaidon.com/store/architecture/jutaku-japanese-ho...

Right now only Australian citizens and permanent residents are allowed to enter Australia. As soon as they land they are driven to a local hotel where they are forced into quarantine for two weeks.

The government is not messing around because many previous arrivals who were told to self isolate at home turned out not be self isolating, and most of the infections to date have been traced to overseas arrivals vs local "community transmissions".

Most states have also shut their borders, the only exceptions being NSW and Victoria. E.g., anyone entering South Australia or Tasmania from interstate has to spend the first two weeks in self isolation.

I can see the domestic travel restrictions being eased in a few months, but think the Australian government will be very reluctant to relax international travel restrictions until there is a vaccine.

A couple of years ago I was working out of a local co-working space where one of the other tenants was an agency running a racket where they got international students to pay $1000 for the privilege of doing an unpaid internship [1]. It was a huge scandal and the agency was kicked out of the co-working space. On top of that it turned out that the interns weren't actually expected to do any work, they were effectively just buying a certificate saying that they had completed the internship which they could then use as documentation to prove that they had met the course requirements. For most international students in Australia the end goal is actually to get permanent residency. The degree/diploma is just a means to that end.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/82sxp9/pay_1000_...

There's a flood of student & ex-Airbnb apartments for rent in central Melbourne, currently ~6300: https://www.realestate.com.au/rent/in-melbourne,+vic+3000/li...

I can't see international travel restrictions to Australia being relaxed until a vaccine is developed, so universities and landlords are going to be in a world of hurt.

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

I did COBOL development on mainframes for the Canadian government and Xerox from 1996 - 1998, my first "real jobs" after university.

COBOL in isolation isn't that bad a language. With a bit of discipline ("structured programming") it can be fairly readable. Most of the time it's used for large scale batch record processing in big institutions (e.g., governments, banks, insurance companies).

The problem with using COBOL in a mainframe environment is that mainframes are basically an evolutionary dead end so you're stuck using the associated gunk that has hardly changed since the 70's (editors, JCL, CICS). JCL in particular is notoriously user hostile and has been called "the worst programming language ever designed" by Fred Brooks, who managed its development (http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/MVSDS/'HTTPD2.APPS.ZOSCLASS.PDF(ZCLA...).

> mainframes and COBOL

Exactly. My first job out of university in 1996 was with the Canadian government. One of my first tasks was to update a COBOL program that had originally been written in 1972. I left that job in 1997, but I doubt the program I updated has changed much in the 24 years since, so it's at least 48 years old at this point.

Sure, I rent a large, new, 3 bedroom house 20 minutes by train from the Melbourne CBD for $2250/month. It's great. I certainly couldn't do that in Toronto or Vancouver.

Granted if you want to buy a house, Australia (especially Sydney) is expensive for a bunch of reasons (negative gearing etc). But Toronto is still more expensive than Melbourne and Vancouver is much more expensive.

I've also lived in Toronto and Vancouver. Did the obligatory move to work as a software dev in California and now live in Australia. The fact is that tech salaries in Canada are still much lower than the US while the cost of living, especially housing, is still very high, for Vancouver and Toronto in particular. Not to mention the lousy winters.

Spend any time browsing /r/vancouver or /r/toronto and you'll quickly realize that the cost of living is a huge problem. The Vancouver housing market in particular has been absurdly inflated by out of control money laundering. Local salaries and house prices are totally out of whack.

Follow https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/ to see what money laundering has done to the Vancouver housing market. https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/status/1221315000897163264 is a particularly amusing recent thread showing where a would-be landlord writes: "This home is in rough shape and needs painting, and TLC. Looking for long term tenant willing to put labour in while landlord covers all material costs." All this for only $5650/month!

Headline from this past weekend in Toronto: "Three dead, two injured in shooting at Airbnb rental in downtown Toronto" (https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/01/31/four-injured-pos...)

But you have to put up with cold winters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal#Climate

I've personally witnessed scammers using people's trust in calculators being correct to cheat them.

It was at the Zambia-Zimbabwe border at Victoria Falls in 1999. We needed to change USD into Zimbabwe dollars and were approached by an informal money changer who ostentatiously did the calculation on his calculator in full view. We knew roughly what the exchange rate should be and confirmed that the money changer was using close to that on the calculator. However, the final result of the multiplication on the calculator was fraudulently low. I thought the result was "off" but given the relatively high exchange rate (this was pre-hyperinflation), by the time I'd done the math in my head he'd taken our USD and disappeared. Not a huge deal as we were only out by maybe tens of USD, and we had to grudgingly admit that it was a very effective scam.

Both https://12factor.net/ and the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Factor_App_methodology credit Heroku developers for formalizing the 12 factor methodology.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang, which are ubiquitous and cheap

I agree that there used to be a noticeable markup for e.g. electronics sold in Australia when the AUD was worth more than the USD. However, now that the AUD is worth ~USD 0.67, prices are close to the exchange rate plus 10% GST. For example, I recently bought the Pixel 3a for A$650 which is close enough to US$400 + GST.

ISTM that "tiny homes" are just mobile homes rebranded for hipsters without the stigma of living in a trailer park.

> This sounds a bit like the general situation in Australia.

As a Canadian living in Australia since 2011, I have to disagree. Politically Canada is much more of a protectionist nanny state than Australia.

For mobile service in particular (i.e., the topic of this dicussion), Australia is much more competitive than Canada despite also being a very large, sparsely populated country. I pay $25/month for unlimited calls and 18 GB of 4G data (https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/). Unlike Canada, Australia allows strong, foreign competitors to provide mobile service (e.g., Vodafone and Optus).

Other ways in which Australia is less protectionist than Canada: - parallel private healthcare system - parallel private education system (although not at university level) - buy alcohol anywhere, not just at government owned stores - no dairy and poultry "supply management" - foreign owned supermarkets (e.g., Aldi)

Australia is far from perfect (e.g., the natural gas cartel is far too powerful) but on the whole there's far less government interference that protects cozy domestic oligopolies compared Canada.

DevOps Borat: "To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops."

https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/status/41587168870797312

At one point the Go FAQ said that Go got its name because “Ogle” would be a good name for a Go debugger [1]. This was removed from the FAQ as a "non-answer" in 2015 [2]. I suspect the real reason is that it was a slightly risque joke...

Of course the Go keyword go is a constant reminder of Go's strong support for concurrency. (Note too the goroutine/coroutine pun.) It would be interesting to know which came first, the keyword or the name.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182658 2. https://github.com/golang/go/commit/e4bd8e04087ac9e7c8b754df...

I'm surprised how expensive this is. In Australia I pay A$25/month (around US$17) for unlimited talk & SMS and 18 GB of fast 4G data: https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/.

And the Korean DMZ: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/13/wildlife...

> It comes off as the old "Jews control Hollywood and use it to spread their ideological propaganda" conspiracy theory.

Thoroughly debunked here: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-19-oe-stein...

> people are either (1) forced to use something inferior, or (2) don't know any better

Here's another fallacy for you: false dilemma.

Imagine what Ken Thompson could have accomplished if he hadn't made all those poor design decisions!

And yet hundreds of thousands of working programmers around the world are productively using Go while still continuing to ignore the supposedly superior solutions.

> Right, you need to specifically throw money and people at the problem of making LLVM faster

I repeat, Apple is the major sponsor of LLVM and is sitting on ~$250 billion in cash. If LLVM could be made significantly faster by simply throwing money at it, presumably this has also occurred to Apple management. I can't believe they're not doing it because it doesn't align with their marketing pitch.

Given that Apple are the major sponsor of LLVM and they're not exactly cash poor, I think it's reasonable to conclude that being able to throw money and people at LLVM development doesn't explain why it's still much slower than the Go compiler toolchain. In hindsight the Go team made the right call to use their own toolchain.

As enneff alludes, Ken Thompson's antipathy towards C++ is well documented: https://bryanpendleton.blogspot.com/2009/12/coders-at-work-k...

> or in this case, Toronto

Yeah, roaming around Toronto on a bicycle in summer is fun. In winter? Not so much. (I've done it, when I was younger, poorer and single.)

Riding a bicycle (or scooter/motorcycle) when there's ice/slush on the roads is uncomfortable and dangerous, which unsurprisingly is why very few people commute by bicycle year round in Toronto.

I'll believe governments are actually serious about combating climate change when they start offering serious tax incentives for people to work from home or local co-working spaces.

> Same goes for majoring in oil painting after the arrival of Photoshop (or for that matter, after the arrival of photography)

Based on the books my kids read, illustration/painting is alive long after photography was invented. (Granted some illustrators "paint" digitally but that doesn't mean the computer is doing the creative work.)

Also the complexity and unpredictability of some media such as watercolours isn't even close to being replicated digitally. E.g., check out the work of master Melbourne watercolour artist Joseph Zbukvic at https://www.instagram.com/josephzbukvic/.

Several years ago Scottish chip company FTDI took matters into their own hands by releasing a driver that would brick counterfeits of their USB to serial converter chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI#Driver_controversy