ritchiea

Arbour | Frontend Developer, Backend Developer | Berlin, Germany

Arbour is building a technical platform to help pension fund investors invest in small to medium sized enterprises. Small to medium sized enterprises shape the real economy. Unlike private equity, VC and complex financial products.

We're building out a technical team to release version 1.0 of our platform. Using React/Next.js on the frontend and Java Spring Boot on the backend. This is a chance for you to help build a software engineering culture focused on best practices and a great developer experience. We value writing well tested code to be read and understood by humans first. We're pragmatists that believe in Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming.

To apply or if you have questions email andrew.ritchie@arbourglobal.com, include a bit about yourself and a link to or description of a product you're proud of building.

From the jobs I see Javascript, Python, Java & iOS are pretty much the entire market so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to actually work with other langs and get paid for it.

I live in Berlin now and Ruby isn't very popular here. It's much more difficult to find Ruby/Rails developers than React developers. The tech industry here is growing but still in its infancy, there aren't a glut of devs who started working with Rails when it was a hot new thing that have an appreciation for it. Javascript and Python are very popular, Ruby not so much.

I have 98% confidence Next will be alive in 2 years. In five years if this company's biggest technical problem is needing to refactor an older front end framework then I have absolutely succeeded in my job building version 1.0.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm also a fan of opinionated frameworks. I was an early Rails developer and over years of freelancing seeing both framework codebases and micro-framework or from-scratch codebases I believe frameworks make decisions for you that are unimportant to your work in 80-90% of use cases.

Which is why I am trying to get additional background on the tool before I commit to it.

Mostly to double check my assumptions and try to dig around and see if there is a downside to Next I'm blind to. Or any gotchas or problems that arise that I wouldn't expect a year or two into the project. Maybe excessive due diligence?

But I'd rather ask around while I have the chance before committing a ton of code.

Interesting. Having worked with both Gatsby and Next I definitely prefer Next. But also this web app is going to need a lot of dynamic content so I would not choose a static site generator like Gatsby for the use case.

Managers need developers to write tests so that when that developer job hops the new dev on the team can actually make changes with confidence. As it happens, writing tests and adhering to best practices has a side effect of keeping turnover low because developers can do their jobs with less friction.

I would think the idea of C2H is instead of having an intense interview you have a performance review and talk about how you work together. If you still have to pass a high pressure interview attempt to filter you out after working with a team for 3 months there’s no advantage to C2H.

Aren’t there times when an ad hominem attack is fitting?

If I have a documented history of a certain type of bad behavior and turn around to say I’m a victim of exactly that same sort of behavior. If I write a screed about my victimhood it does lie in the background that my own behavior likely seeded the negativity I received in return.

In that sense this goes beyond “ad hominem attack”. The accusation is more accurately that Bari Weiss is a bad faith actor in a system of mutual journalistic integrity, accusing her current colleagues of being bad faith actors. I don’t know if her colleagues are bad faith actors are not but Weiss does seem to be a case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or whataboutism which should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as ad hominem.

So you’re objecting to equating “predatory practice” with “scam”? A bit pedantic?

Many if not most people believe payday loans are predatory practices that prey on people without access to capital and/or financial literacy.

I see these kinds of comments all the time here on HN “X developer colleague of mine was really clueless about Y technology they were using” and they are so unfathomable to me. I’ve worked with bad colleagues & people who made foolish comments but usually the worst colleagues I’ve had err on the side of immensely increasing complexity. And generally everyone I’ve worked with had a basic understanding of the tech we were using or was a junior with some curiosity.

Who are these completely clueless developers? How do they get hired?

Customize your device for your comfort. Even if there are studies that show on average humans retain information better reading in light mode. That's merely the average! Variation is the only certainty in biology. It's good we have options.

First I found I read my kindle more than physical books even though I prefer the look and feel of physical books. Then I found I read even more on my ipad with the kindle app showing white text on a black background.

Find what works for you. Or if you are a UX designer, provide options.

I empathize with how bad corporate America is, I struggle with it all the time. I didn't intend my comments to sound like finger wagging. A lot of it is turning to advice that legitimately helped me. When I felt most like "the whole system is rotten" or "I don't feel like I have the status I hoped for" it helped me when people close to me reminded me to think carefully about what I'm actually looking for. The advice might not help you but it comes from a good place and is not intended as finger wagging.

First I would take a step back and try to view the situation with less judgment. It's easy to look at the past and mythologize it and imagine it as perfect. Maybe there are more MBAs and executives and thought leaders today but the past you're romanticizing would have its own frustrations and road blocks.

The other thing it sounds like you're doing is looking around for a great opportunity rather than zeroing in on a thing you really care about and working on it. Your comment about engineers being a peasant class makes it sound like at least a part of you is more concerned about status than doing the kind of work that you say you're interested in.

Sounds like you need to answer for yourself what you're really looking for, how you would like to spend your days, what you would be proud of looking back on, etc. Rather than looking outward at the state of the industry, the status of developers, phds, MBAs, VCs or execs. If you want to build, start working on a product, figure out a market for it. But also know that at some point products do need to be sold, so eventually, you or a co-founder or your employees are going to have to figure out how to make money.

One of my favorite general pieces of advice is "you can decide what you want but you can't decide what it will cost you." You can decide to be a builder and an engineer but it probably won't come with the adulation you feel for Jamie Zawinski or Alan Kay. And if you talk to most people who are admired and have a lot of adulation, even if it's deserved, it's not something they tend to say they relish. They tend to still relish the work they valued for themselves and feel the adulation is overblown or doesn't actually give them anything of substance.

Human factors. Developers ship a new OSS framework Z because it makes an extremely subjective improvement on framework X in their opinion. And the process of writing Z satisfies an intellectual curiosity to write something from scratch and it also looks great on your resume to have written your own framework. Z framework actually gets popular, other developers, kind of bored at work from using the same tools for ages try out framework Z. And it's nice to try out something new, it makes your work day feel fresh and different and you learn something. Framework Z slowly gets more popular and now it's the hot thing to have on your resume because the smart bleeding edge developers are using Framework Z. So more devs start using Framework Z, try it out on a side project, or a new project. Eventually even the skeptics about Framework Z have at least tried it out and put out a blog post with their thoughts on Framework Z.

Framework Z feels legitimized, it's a boon to a lot of careers. Lots more people use it. Recruiters start to ask for it as a requirement.

I don't want this to sound cynical, because I think it can sound cynical. I suspect the industry starts from good first principles of wanting to learn new things and try new things and make improvements, and grow themselves. But there is also serious capitalist pressure on the whole system. And a lot of real money on the line, and careers and Twitter followers and conference speaking engagements.

So between the good reasons and the bad reasons, in web development in particular, things move way way way too fast for little gain.

To me "be civil to each other" means don't attack people because of your political perspective. It's ok to have a political idea about say, the name of an OSS package, but if you request a change be kind about it, lay out your reasoning and don't expect that you are going to automatically get what you want.

The funny thing here is that RuboCop is an obvious pun on Robocop which is a satire of privatized police forces and corporate corruption.

But I'm not here to tell people what they should not be offended by. Telling people "you shouldn't be offended by X" is as bad as "we should keep politics out of software."

Instead of "keeping politics out of software" how about we try to listen to each other and be civil to each other even when we disagree? Which I think this posts articulates the argument for very well. I'm a lefty but this goes for all sides.

That's great but isn't a site that must be statically built and deployed to add a new page a niche use case for todays web? You can't use it for a site like HN, a content hub, a social media site, so many use cases that rely heavily on dynamic content from a database. And yes technically you can use it for those things but you're building the static front end with lots of page building logic and complex graphQL queries and ALSO a database backend with your content or CMS as a service like maybe contentful? That's a lot of complexity and unique architecture to maximize for the time to first paint metric. It seems like the Gatsby use case is agencies, branding, advertising campaigns. Which definitely is a sizable market, but sizable enough for what kind of returns on a $28M round?

Good documentation is immensely valuable. Likely an absolute must have to be a huge ecosystem like node, rails, etc. But extensive documentation certainly can't replace being a simple, well organized and elegant tool for the job. Last I checked the Gatsby docs felt more complete than the Next.js docs. Writing this out makes me want to head over to to the Next.js repo and start contributing.

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages function. I just couldn't figure out what value Gatsby was supposed to be delivering that was better than any of its competitors.

Gatsby has slick looking docs and a lot of VC money and as far as I can tell a painful development experience. For most use cases you'll still have to write a backend API to handle form submissions, 3rd party calls and other Ajax. What does Gatsby actually do other than package together a bunch of trendy web technologies with Wieden Kennedy designed documentation?

There is a bit of "folklore" here but most of this post is program functionality that should be documented. Really only the details about the window class name and being fully resizeable without flicker are "folkore" details that go beyond the scope of good documentation.

Use Active Admin for your dashboards. Inherited resources for controllers, which generates a set of restful actions for a model. And simple form for your forms. They’re all rails ready ruby gems.

This covers 60-80% of the most basic CRUD use cases. Though with any reasonably robust real world application you'll still need to write a lot of more specific, custom logic for the pages that are critical to your domain.

But this is taking one of the worst parts of the Javascript ecosystem and inventing it for Ruby. Despite Ruby not suffering from Javascript problems like having a subpar standard library and missing essential language features like a standard import syntax.

Apply to lots of places, be honest about your experience. You might have to take less money for a year or two but you are still young. The first job is by far the hardest but the challenge of interviews never goes away because as you get more senior people expect more from you in the interview.

Do you just have code in Github or do you have an app running somewhere that people can actually interact with as well as the code for it on Github? If you don't have something live, push something live. Use Heroku or some other simple hosting solution if you want to get it live quickly.

You can also try to get involved with an existing substantial open source project. Try fixing a bug or adding a feature. Get advice from the project maintainers and work from there. That's as close as you can get to work experience of collaborating with a team. Get something merged to an OS project. And then when you interview you can talk about that experience so the company knows you can work with others to get production code shipped. You might have to log into IRC or Discord or send a bunch of emails to get started with the kind of direct communication necessary to do this. But learning how to take that kind of initiative is valuable in a company setting as well. If you do good work those open source maintainers could even become leads or references to help you find a first dev job.

Lots of people change careers into software development with less technical backgrounds than yours (I've met former actors, artists, lit majors...). You have much more than hope, if you're persistent you will find the job you're looking for, it just takes some hustle.

Hey I am a bit younger than you but have a very similar resume of working contracts, never applying to FAANGs and reaching out to people/networks when I am looking for work. I definitely feel like I'm doing well but it would be great to speak to someone else who has succeeded at this sort of "alternative" career path. Is there a way I can reach you to ask for some specific advice? Or would you contact me? ritchiea at gmail dot com

Mortality rate has also shown to be highly dependent on comorbidity which varies country to country. Presumably a county where residents have easy, affordable access to health care will be healthier on average and have fewer comorbidity concerns that will lead to death from Covid19. Just speculating but perhaps this is one of the things going on in Germany? Germany has a much lower Covid19 mortality rate than other countries.

I don’t remember it it was specified at the time but supposedly businesses in Berlin that didn’t follow the first set of safety precautions (retail stores closed, restaurants closed for indoor seating at 6pm, tables 1.5 meters apart, takeaway only after 6) got 5k fines if caught by the Ordnungsamt. So there is some effort at enforcement.