sbilstein

I feel very nosy for knowing this but it was the marketing manager for Google Glass. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...

These analyses are a great way to get educated about distributed systems, even if you aren't in a position to evaluate choosing one. Thanks for growing and creating Jepsen!

thats the most fun I've had with a jobs page ever!

Bert! Great use of those platform APIs

Same with the music industry. Professional for profit schools for audio engineering jobs that don’t exist, tons of home recording gear you must have, publishing companies to distribute your music, expensive studio time. So many ways to throw away your money, so many hobbyists willing to play for free or cheap (I’m guilty) that music venues don’t need to spend a dollar to book shows every night. Music sucks for most independent musicians and they have to hustle really really hard to make a living wage. Otherwise they just have to teach lessons to earn money which can really take away time from further developing your craft.

I’ve been a hobbyist and am increasingly exposed to professionals, people trying to make it and I feel sorry for them. Way more skilled at music than I will ever be at programming, yet struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

I'm a founder working with my fiance who is CEO.

Advantages: Complete trust. We have a lot of experience with difficult conversations. We have complementary skills and personality traits. We have both bet our future on this company and thus are equally dedicated. We're also aligned on motivation to succeed.

If you are willing to entangle your life with someone financially, romantically, and domestically, you may as well start a business with them :)

Playing piano for short breaks is pretty nice but I've found that picking hobbies can really get me sucked out of the work I _need_ to do. What I do these days is either set a timer when I want a longer break from work (15m-30m) or hit the eject button on any task really quickly. If I start reading an article, I try to decide within 90 seconds if I should just start working again.

I strongly agree with all of this. About improv: you don't need to become a major improv hobbyist to benefit from it. One semester made me much more mindful of verbal and non verbal communication. Acting, even badly, improved my ability to listen and be myself around others.

I don't really love improv as a form of comedy but the practice is beneficial. I've even recommended it with success to direct reports of mine.

The pubsub for live connections and socket events is Java but everything else is PHP. The Java mostly tries to federate stuff from PHP to clients and doesn't write or read directly to the primary store. I used to work at slack.

In my handful of years in the bay area I've seen rent controlled 4 bedroom apartments pass through chains of friends (usually alumni of the same university) several years in a row. Most of these tenants have been well compensated tech workers. I think price control without regulating who can access lower controls can increase inequality. Something I have observed anecdotally to work is fixing a percentage of units to be reserved for low income people. It's a nice way to let us tech workers subsidize the less fortunate and still allow landlords to make money.

There is so much risk in hiring an early employee, it's totally reasonable to try and only hire from a personal network for the first three.

Managing great employees can be challenging; managing someone you don't know is great can be 10 times more difficult.

My startup is trying to solve this problem for older adults. Seniors often feel disconnected and isolated as their social structures change. Ayuda is an service for finding senior-friendly events. We bring artists, educators, musicians and more to an audience they may not have considered before. Events are curated to be social and accessible for older people, not your typical concert in a loud bar.

Check us out on www.ayudacare.com if you are interested in what we're about.

I would have loved to attend a boarding school growing up...but living in a toxic family environment isn't so simple for the family or the kid. My mother enabled my alcoholic father, my sisters and I tried to protect each other, it would have been tragic to pull us all apart. I was out of the house as much as possible with school clubs and extra curricular like the boy scouts. Leaving my extended family, friends, etc and the shame of being a "foster" kid is a huge charge for someone in a toxic environment. Also abusive families are not black and white, there are good moments. After school programs, sports, music etc are a lifesaver for students with problems at home.

if you're able to get an ssh tunnel going to the machine...i think you already have control over the server

That's incredible that you got to work on something with Steve Reich. I saw him recently at the SF Symphony and he performed some clapping music pieces alongside Michael Tilson Thomas. Steve Reich is a legend for sure!

Most employees in my experience want to be useful, want to contribute, and want to get along with their colleagues. I have experienced some underperforming employees but now as a founder of a startup with zero employees, I have no one to coach :)

It is challenging to coach someone who does not care. There are people who take employment for granted, who don't seem to have a survival instinct or believe another job is just waiting for them. Trying to empathize with those who don't see the world the same way I do is an ongoing challenge; figuring out how to motivate someone requires understanding who they are which is non-trivial giving varying life experiences.

I've reported an employee to HR once for some ongoing inappropriate behavior. While they recovered and our relationship recovered and went on to get a promo, in retrospect I should have talked to him 1:1 and attempted to fix it without HR.

I love Dart and used flutter for a few months but once I hit the lack of native support for maps, I had to switch to native iOS development. It was a great learning experience for prototyping quickly but hitting a wall with maps was not OK for any high fidelity app.

With Airbnb’s announcement around React Native, I feel like native dev is still the way to go.

Ugh those keyboards make me feel like such a plebeian with my mediocre apple keyboards. I do not understand the appeal and just put my headphones on.

If you start taking music lessons, you might learn some simple pop songs first and move your way backwards to older, often complex pieces that have stood the test of time. I don’t think everyone just starts learning music playing Bach or medieval music. It’s far far less of a straight path than this article suggests.

I would have loved this explained in my high school physics class

It's beautiful but as a fairly experienced musician, I think it's a bit information dense with all the symbols and letters. The aesthetics are great but I'd love maybe some slimmed down information.

It's been a mixed bag with Wag. The app quality is not great, buggy and major usability issues...but also the walk report card warms my heart.

I was worried about trusting my dog to strangers but it wasn't too bad with Wag. Overall most of the people were decent but I'd occasionally get some really bad walkers who wouldn't fill out the report card, or walk the dog for 90 minutes instead of 30. My partner and I decided doggie daycare was the better bet. About $35 a day to have our dog just hanging out with other pups is worth it...especially when the quality of walker is so variable with services like Wag.

My girlfriend is a trained classical singer whereas I'm a self taught musician. She doesn't really gravitate towards the rock music I like to write but because of her training she can easily jam, riff, or write anything far quicker than I can. Songwriting is a very technical skill indeed.

"Beef brains and veal (juvenile beef) or calf's brains are used in the cuisines of France; Italy; Spain; El Salvador; Mexico, etc. where they are called sesos in Spanish and are eaten in tacos and quesadillas; Pakistan, where they are known in Urdu as Maghaz; Portugal; Indonesia; and in the United States, especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ohio River valley."

People do eat cow brains...I have at regular ol' restaurants in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_brain

The big caveat with a company that historically failed at something is...are the people involved good enough to actually solve this problem this type around given the companies historical trend? Or does it make more sense to go to another social network where abuse has been a focus for a longer time and learn from people who have been successful so far?

Turning around a ship is really hard. I've made the mistake of working at a company with a hugely insurmountable problem (Bing) having viewed it as a big opportunity but I almost certainly pursued a job at the winner (Google) considering I had no experience as a professional engineer yet and would have learned much more. On the other hand if you already are the subject matter expert, it can be a huge opportunity to bring your skill set somewhere it is desperately needed.

Not that I really know first hand social networks that are great at solving the abuse problem but this is one way to look at a career choice.

100% agree. I may be friends with my boss or others but the professional relationship is completely business. I don't expect that to help me out if there are cuts to be made or if I am underperforming, etc.

I wish it would be safe for those to out their offenders...I really wonder which CEO would think to ask such a ridiculous and offensive question.

This definitely happens all the time formally and informally in SV. Sometimes a manager is poached and brings a bunch of old employees along...sometimes a small acquihire happens. Or after an acquisition event some portion of the company decides they would rather be elsewhere and talk to execs at a larger company.

You might have a repetitive job at a start up writing crud for an ecommerce website or you might have a rollercoaster ride at Google inventing spanner. The things you describe are not exclusive to either the startup or the bigco.

I can corroborate this. 250k is very, very attainable.