kevinmannix

unrelated: I love your website design!

Your second point broadly makes sense. In fact, it's almost a truism: if you don't put time into learning, you won't have the skills necessary to be able to execute.

However, it seems detached from your first point.

If one's role is a front-end developer, is it necessary that they know about back-end development? If it is outside their intended job function, why would they need to know about it, if it doesn't get in the way of performing their job? If you are a backend developer, do you need to know about how to host your own infrastructure? Handle your own networking? Chip design? Your logic could be applied to any job function. Each level of the stack benefits from the levels below it being abstracted. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and we're all much better for it.

Overall, I do think it's better that one has a good understanding about the various components one interacts with. Having a grasp of the overall system will come in handy. A curiosity into other parts of the system is beneficial, and likely is one of many indicators of success. However, if job functions can be simplified and superfluous context removed, why should we fault those for taking advantage of that?

This issue with "lowering the bar" and being glad that a simplification has "failed" (which, is yet to be determined), reeks to me like gatekeeping. The same logic could be applied to any job role which benefits from simplification. In an extreme example, this logic could be extrapolated to support the notion that anyone who cannot build their own machine from the ground up should never work in a programming position. What height is appropriate for the "bar"?

Good luck! This seems like an awesome idea.

One thing the company I currently work for has done is to use our "corporate blog" as a directory for technical employee's personal blogs. Many of our tech team members write blog posts on their own time about technical problems they're particularly interested in. Having our corporate blog (https://codeshare.getfreebird.com/) redirect to their personal blog allows our company to highlight our team's ability and provide interesting content, while the authors get a signal boost from having their content referenced from the company's technical blog.

We're a small technical team so I'm not sure how well this scales, but it's worked out well for us so far.

This seems to be the third or so day in the past week I've had issues with GitHub around this time in the morning. They've typically been really good. I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been more talk about it on HN.

could more context be provided here?

Having a password manager on mobile is needed, so I need multi-device support. I was really happy with the password manager support the last iOS included. Password entry and persistence are streamlined.

A 200 person wedding on a $2000 budget is a remarkable feat.

I second EveryDollar. It allows your budget to be flexible month-to-month because spending in different categories will always ebb and flow.

This is from 2016. Can we update the title?

Content aside, I love the ToC to the left with clickable links. Helps prepare a reader for what information their about to consume, and provides relevant context for each section.

I've thought the same and chalked it up to 1) lack of a better way to easily gauge the ballpark value and 2) better headlines. I believe that's the way public company market caps are calculated as well, though with less of a chance of going to absolute zero.

I'm curious of the manual review process. Is this synchronous, i.e. immediately when publishing a package? Or is it after the fact, where suspicious code code have already been distributed? There are plenty UX trade-offs in either direction, of course.

I really don't think liking Node is a cross to bear

I googled Dave Thomas, and was not disappointed by the images of Dave Thomas of Wendy's fame with a description of the computer programmer and author underneath.

Yes, mine is built for SoundCloud, not YouTube or video sites, given the context of the article

Shameless plug (has collected a bit of dust): https://github.com/krmannix/downcloud

It's a node tool built a few years ago to download the playlists of users through your command line. Might be helpful for a situation where you'd like to back up your own playlists.

You'll need to get an API key - no sure how feasible that is at this moment.

This is unfortunate. I hope you find a new place quickly - having the rug pulled out from under your feet does not seem to make for a pleasant experience.

It's an interesting look into a management team convincing itself of a better financial situation then what the actual situation was, and makes you wonder how far down the chain any indication of impending layoffs / tight financial situation traveled. I must imagine the CTO would know himself, but perhaps he was given explicit affirmation that financials would be alright for hires like this, until all of a sudden it wasn't?

here's my go-to playlist - I added a few tracks every week. Mostly softer songs without lyrics:

https://soundcloud.com/sound-of-dev/sets/milieu

SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing.

I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listening experience quite poor from just using the activity stream. I've also been really unimpressed with the lack of track uniqueness - if 2 artists repost the same song, it'll show up in my stream twice. Even more frustrating was the lack of uniqueness between tracks & playlists, where one could conceivably listen to the same song multiple times in a row because artists would post the track and then a single-track playlist with that track inside it.

The UI is also lacking for quickly adding to playlists, etc. The simplicity was a feature, not a bug, and the power of SoundCloud has been their artist community.

In JavaScript, "falsy" is null, undefined, 0, '', or false. Everything else is truthy, including empty objects, strings with only whitespace.

Many bugs have been caused by incorrect uses of truthy and falsy.

That's true. Stats can be cherry-picked or distorted. That's why it's preferable to choose the goals / metrics at the start of the period so that other metrics can't be cherry-picked based on what might show "good" growth to employees.

When growth numbers are consistently not hit. Always push for transparency at a smaller company - if there isn't one already, attempt to implement an all-hands meeting at least bi-weekly that reviews goals for the quarter / year and the company's progress. If direction is constantly changing at a 1 or 2 month cadence, it's likely that there may be a shakeup coming sooner rather than later.

It's wise to have a bit of cynicism when discussing company goals, progress, outcomes - things may not always be as bright as they seem. It's a good exercise to take these numbers and reduce them by a certain percentage, and see if those numbers are still good for company growth & stability.

Yes. I've had an app break due to a dependency's dependency update. Was the night before a big product launch. Learned to rely on npm-shrinkwrap the hard way.

What are your competitors, and how do you differ? I find small screens like iOS and Android (assuming most users use a mobile phone-like device) are hard to do any significant work on - how does this influence your instruction flow & corresponding UX?

I get that they're hand-picked examples, but it's still a bit misleading when every "older" engineer in the article is quite a remarkable individual with incredible resumes. They'd likely be warmly welcomed at any tech company.

I'm more curious about the average age across the engineering organization, and specifically older engineers who are solid, good workers but aren't creators of popular languages or pioneered tech migrations for large company.

How does one submit?

Not sure if that's a typo or intended...

Pretty cool! As a developer who's currently quite lacking in design capabilities, it's nice to hear about the more product-focused side of things. Will definitely be following this site & the interviewees on Twitter.

They had an app where you could easily schedule a ride for the next day. It took away the opaqueness that comes with using private transportation.