jonpurdy

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware.

My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade).

So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware to save companies a few cents on bandwidth. H.264 got a good run in, but there isn't a "universal" replacement for it where I can buy hardware with decoding support that will work for at least 5-10 years.

This was really so much cooler than expected! Might actually use it to replace brain.fm when working.

I’d love to see this applied as a general streaming API ingestor, or even used for live tailing log files and playing sounds that match particular events.

(This is where people will comment below with all sorts of examples I haven’t heard of, one of the reasons I love HN)

Location: SF, experienced and fully equipped to work remotely

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Technology/Skill keywords for grep: Scrum Master, Agile Scrum & Kanban Methodologies, Multi-team Coordination, Jira, Python, Containerization, Docker, Vagrant, Ansible, Cloud Infrastructure, DigitalOcean, AWS, Azure, Terraform, ELK stack, Blockchain, Ethereum.

Résumé/CV: https://jonpurdy.com/resume-jon-hn-202007.pdf

Work Projects: https://jonpurdy.com/projects

Email: hn-202007 AT jonpurdy.com (will respond from my real one)

I recently moved to SF with my wife (I already have a Visa and EAD, but still very bad timing!). I'm primarily a Project Manager looking to move into a Technical Program Manager or Technical Product Manager role, and open to project or coaching roles as well.

I specialize in working cross-functionally and bridging the gap between technical and business teams. Ideally, I'm looking for a SF Bay Area-based company that is working on an MVP and is looking to scale the development team's size and efficiency, technical infrastructure, and product documentation. I'm also looking at working on teams at unicorns or FAANG companies that have already established products and workflows but want to improve cross-functional communication and work more efficiently with other teams.

On the tech side, I have built support workflows, tooling, and documentation for an emerging telecom product. I have architecting and executing multiple dedicated hardware to cloud migrations. I also built numerous internal tools to make developers' lives easier. After getting my Scrum Master certification in early 2018, I moved into a PM role for a blockchain startup. I helped the team build and successfully launch wallets for multiple blockchains, including Ethereum and Polkadot. I also helped build non-public-facing products, including a blockchain explorer and a certificate verification tool.

Thanks and please email me if you have any questions or just want to chat!

My father actually worked for a startup providing wireless access to rural and urban areas back in the late 90s. It was nice to have a 27 megabit connection to my house when the hottest thing was a 2 megabit DSL line.

What cost that company $200,000 in 1998 and took up an entire rack now can be bought for about $2,000 from Ubiquiti and mounted in a few U in a rack. They even have the software available to run your own ISP!

I checked before we moved to SF, and apparently FibreStream has 5Gbps service in select buildings in downtown Toronto. Pretty awesome!

See the post above yours; they do both. I'm in a building where Sonic is offered but it's through AT&T. I went with AT&T since the price was the same, would still need to rent AT&T's stupid PON device (which I bypass anyway), and Sonic mentioned that AT&T provided poor customer service for Sonic customers.

I'd love it if the fiber in the building was public so I could just pay 1/2 what I pay AT&T for Sonic instead.

I require symmetric since I upload a lot, plus I am on videoconferences frequently. I'd personally rather go for 100/100 than gigabit/something less than 100.

DOCSIS 3.0 (I think that's the latest) allocates a particular ratio of download vs upload frequencies, so even when speeds increase the asymmetry is still the same. I heard the next version of DOCSIS might change that though. Ideally there'd be enough fiber to not require DOCSIS anyway, but I don't have my hopes up for that.

Hopefully with a lot more WFH arrangements people start demanding symmetric connections. But

Back in 2016 in Toronto, I chose a condominium specifically because it had Beanfield fiber (it was $50CAD/mo for 250 Mbit symmetric, no cap). Other buildings had Bell or Rogers at double the cost, with caps, and sometimes asymmetric. Those other buildings signed agreements with either Bell or Rogers and for the rest of the life of the building, those residents will be stuck with inferior, more expensive service.

When we moved to SF a few months ago, Sonic wasn't available in our building so we had to get AT&T. I'm paying almost double what Sonic charges for basically the same service.

In both cases, where buildings had exclusivity agreements or had the fiber providers lay the fiber themselves, residents are worse off. Buildings should be running their own fiber and letting residents hook up to whoever they want.

Same thing with residential house internet; cities should own the last mile infrastructure (sure, pay providers to dig it and run it if you have to).

Especially since we're migrating off of copper and onto fiber; this is the chance to get it right for the next few decades!

It's worse. Hey doesn't take payment and only allows users to log in from the app, not sign up. Many apps already do this, including Netflix, Fastmail, and many more.

Apple is saying that because Hey offers a subscription elsewhere, Hey should provide an in-app purchase as well, despite other apps not being forced to do this.

Either no UI, or using system standard frameworks and APIs (no custom UI stuff, and absolutely no Electron garbage).

If Dropbox had remained the same as it did back in the early days and focused on continuing to only update the product to be faster and more reliable and not adding additional features, it would have still been great. (Unrealistic considering that the investors need to get their ROI.)

Same here. I tend to do work in super efficient batches. I've completed two months worth of small tasks in under an hour sometimes.

My default is to put everything off and do it in a batch right before (or after) it's due. But the past few years I've focused on doing batches way ahead of time. Less stressful and much more satisfying. Getting into Project Management certainly helped with that!

Title sucks, but I did enjoy reading the review.

I'm a Dropbox user since 2009 who recently switched to iCloud Drive. I miss the old Dropbox that just worked and stayed out of the way. Once Dropbox rebranded (2017?) I knew it was the beginning of the end. I cancelled my subscription a couple of years ago and just kept it around for syncing preferences, which I ditched a couple of months ago.

iCloud Drive works well enough, but it doesn't indicate whether files are synced (with a checkmark like Dropbox used to do). I typically avoid Apple software because in trying to simplify it they end up making it vastly overcomplicated.

I've heard good things about NextCloud but didn't want to self-host. I've tried SpiderOak and Google Drive before and both were just too slow (and Google Drive was very flakey).

Ah thanks, I’ll give this a try!

Author here. I mention in the article that this deviates a bit from Agile/Scrum best practices. No guarantees on estimation quality (impossible to do for software) but it helps to provide a rough order-of-magnitude guide for innovative/never-been-done-before projects.

This method is more accurate for types of software projects that have already been built (web stores, etc.) since it's easier to know the difficulty of the components of those projects.

For quick sketches during sprint planning meetings or design sessions, I started using Witeboard.com a couple of years ago but have been experimenting with Excalidraw for the past two months.

TL;DR: I still tend to use Witeboard.com for quick sketches, but if I plan on doing something more complicated and not time-sensitive I use Excalidraw.

What I like about Witeboard.com:

- fast to load and easy to get started

- quick keys (t: typing, p: pencil)

- pencil modifier keys: hold down l to switch from free drawing to drawing a line, or r to draw a rectangle

Dislike about Witeboard.com:

- It's like MS Paint, once the pixels are drawn you can't move them around (despite being vectors (I assume, infinitely zoomable))

What I like about Excalidraw:

- Can move shapes around (fixes biggest gripe with Witeboard.com)

- Sloppiness levels: Artist is what I use and is PERFECT for my needs, but nice to have options for other users

- Also has quick keys (8: typing, 7: pencil)

- Exports editable drawing as a file, not saved in cloud. So you can just import that file again and not rely on saving the URL.

Dislike about Excalidraw:

- Preventing me from switching to it: once a tool (ie. pencil) is used for a stroke, it reverts back to mouse cursor (I'd rather have it stay as pencil and hit 1 for it to switch to a cursor)

- Majorly annoying: the open/save/color/stroke palette in top left is too similar to a square ratio, so it blocks a corner of the image

If those two dislikes were fixed, I'd likely switch to it fulltime. For both products, I'd easily pay a few bucks a month for them.

As a photographer, as well as a Technical PM who spends all their time on a computer, and a non-zero amount of time optimizing my setup, and someone who has taken photos of computers and done exactly this to get the exposure correct: I don't know why I didn't think of doing this on a daily basis!

> So if Disney+ or Netflix—or, more importantly, a smaller company trying to compete with the big guys—wants their content to be on a level playing field, they will have to pay a fee that HBO Max does not.

Can you imagine if AOL zero-rated any minutes on their dial-up connection used towards surfing AOL sites and using AOL's search engine? I'm sure Google would still exist today, but it would probably have taken a lot longer to gain traction with the mainstream if so many AOL users just wanted to conserve their dial-up minutes.

So what services will end up not existing in the future as a result of this?

ISPs should be a neutral pipe, that's it.

In my case, I have found using an SRS like Anki helps me the most. - Forces me to break down what I need or want to learn into small digestible pieces (in the form of question/answer, or a cloze deletion). - Fast and easy to add to Anki which means I don't lose context and can continue reading easily. - The nature of SRS means I will remember this later on.

Thanks for previously posting that link to the 10 strategies in your reply below!

100%. I wrote a post about this (among other basic tweaks) a couple of months ago: http://jonpurdy.com/2020/03/how-to-improve-your-zoomskype-te...

I have some screenshots of waveforms showing laptop mic vs headset, and the signal-to-noise ratio with the headset destroys even good noise-cancelling using a laptop mic that's farther away from one's mouth.

Somewhat related. For those who are new to SDRs, you can easily view airplane altitude, heading, speed, and other stats of passing aircraft with a cheap SDR. Aircraft transmit this using ADS-B and it's totally open and unencrypted.

FlightAware (among other services) work by aggregating data from users around the world. You can even get a free premium subscription to their service by contributing. Easiest way is to use a Raspberry Pi, install their software (much easier now than back in 2013!), and you're good to go!

Author here. TL;DR: - Use 5GHz wifi if you're in the same room or close to your AP (or hardwired if possible) - Optimize your internet connection for symmetric, or get the fastest upload speeds available - Use a headset with a mic - Built-in webcams suck, external webcam is better, iPhone or DSLR is best (if you can deal with more complicated setup)

I keep seeing articles about Zettelkasten pop up every couple of weeks on HN lately. Notetaking and productivity articles tend to get me thinking about how my own system works (I still have a bunch of Zettelkasten articles I would like to read...)

I've been using Anki as my SRS system for language recall for years. A couple of months ago I started putting in random facts and bits of information that I would normally put into a note. This sort of thing tends to get inputted, filed, and forgotten about until I do a purge of notes every few months. But since I've started using Anki for this, I now 100% remember these types of random facts. A few examples: - FQ_CODEL stands for Fair Queueing with COntrolled DELay - ADSB is to air traffic what AIS is to marine traffic - In CAP theorem, must choose between availability and consistency (For Anki nerds, I have these as cloze deletions)

The biggest benefit for me (aside from actually remembering this stuff) is that the cognitive overhead of inputting and studying is super low. I can stay focused on doing important work while not having cognitive overhead of learning new things affect my output.

> The secondary ports go into the primary ports, which are heavy-duty actuators that connect to what’s called a “summing bar,” which is no more than a massive steel rod.

"In Rod We Trust"

I find that CamTwist destroys the i7 on my 2015 13" MBP as well, slowing it down so much that I can barely use Google Sheets at the same time.

And it's easier to delete aliases than create and maintain blocking rules.

Location: SF, experienced with and fully equipped to work remotely

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Technologies/Skills: Certified Scrum Master, Scrum & Kanban Methodologies, Multi-team Coordination, Jira, Python, Containerization, Cloud Infrastructure, Blockchain

Résumé/CV: https://jonpurdy.com/resume-ats.pdf

Work: https://jonpurdy.com/work

Email: hn-202006 AT jonpurdy.com (will respond from my real one)

I recently moved to SF with my wife (sponsorship NOT required). I'm primarily a Technical Project Manager looking to help teams build software more efficiently. I'm looking to move into a Technical Program Manager or Technical Product Manager role.

I have worn many hats having worked for startups and small companies. I started off building support workflows, tooling, and documentation for an emerging telecom product. I moved into DevOps and infrastructure after that. And in the past couple of years earned my Scrum Master certificate and took on Project and Product Management roles. Have a look at jonpurdy.com/work to see some of the projects I've built or worked on.

Aside from my technical skills, I have a deep understanding of the product development pipeline and SDLC, balancing stakeholder requests with what is technically feasible, and gathering user feedback to improve products over time. Thanks to my education background, I can bridge technical and non-technical teams, help team members improve and achieve their career goals, and communicate succinctly and unambiguously.

Ideally, I'm looking for a SF Bay Area-based startup that has built (or is close to completing) an MVP and is looking to scale the development team's size and efficiency, technical infrastructure, and product documentation. I'm also looking at working on teams at unicorns or FAANG companies that have already established products and workflows but want to improve cross-functional communication and work more efficiently with other teams.

Thanks and please email me if you have any questions or just want to chat!

I don't use Spaces since I don't like how I get switched into different spaces just by clicking an app that has windows open in another space. I've tried to use it a few times since it came out a decade ago (that long, or longer?) but just couldn't get used to being thrown around all over the place.

My ideal setup would be that a user NEVER gets switched into another Space/Desktop, even if they click an icon in the dock, or Cmd-Tab. If there's a window in Safari in another space that I wanted, I would switch sequentially to that space and find it.

I do like to hear how other people work and if they like features that I don't; helps me gauge how far along on the curmudgeon timeline I am!

You're likely correct: it feels like it wasn't subjected to any UX research. Knowing how Apple works, it was probably demoed in front of a few higher-ups, but nobody other than the person or team writing it used the feature long enough to notice that some people would be confused by it.

And you're correct, I never use full screen. I don't think it's weird to use it, it just doesn't suit my workflow (single large monitor, so I need a lot of stuff side-by-side).

Astounding to me that automatic rearranging would have been considered desirable. Hard to imagine that it’s just visual folks (like myself) who would lose flow state if the mental map of their Desktops was interrupted if they were suddenly rearranged.

Totally correct. The default modes of communication should be asynchronous, or if a real-time meeting is required then everyone should be on video in separate places, even if most are in the office. This prevents situations where the remote workers are at a disadvantage because of a bad audio or video setup. If the audio sucks for everyone, they'll find a way to fix it (plus it's way easier to capture individual audio than a room full of people).

The benefits are also there for people who go to the office since there ends up being less tribal knowledge and more written down or documented somewhere.