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traviscj

347 karma · joined August 30, 2013

I:

- am a principal software engineer at PointCard! - worked at Square for 7.5 years. - studied enough applied mathematics to earn a PhD.

More about me: http://traviscj.com/ My blog: http://traviscj.com/blog Get in touch: traviscj@traviscj.com or https://twitter.com/traviscj

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/traviscj; my proof: https://keybase.io/traviscj/sigs/JevjENzfsY9OoqMKH7gl9y_hQu6o2Mji-ERRb18kXpE ]

submissionscomments
traviscj··on Keeping a long shell history
I’ve done this enough times I chain the desired command and the cd together:

    cd ~/x/y/z && my-command
So that when I CTRL-R for my-command it automatically reminds me.
traviscj··on How to burnout a software engineer, in 3 easy steps
I used to feel this was true for me, and to a large degree still do. But lately I’ve been wondering to what extent this is a self-limiting belief, and how much I can train myself to remain productive in the face of interruptions. My life is more complicated now than when my career started, and the interruption causers seem to be multiplying, so I’m seeing it as something I need to learn to deal with if I’m going to be able to stay in the field.
traviscj··on Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common
Database indices.
traviscj··on Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
Possible, yes, and frequently used I’m sure, but entangles the retirees financial future with the business’s future — the retiree loses if the new owners make bad decisions, overleverage, and end up defaulting / bankrupting themselves. I don’t think it’s reasonable to force all businesspeople to retain this risk after disposing of the business concern.
traviscj··on Terrible real estate agent photographs
Building inspections are not really the same as purchase inspections, or at least don’t seem to me like they should be. Purchase inspection generally might not see a partially-constructed building or blueprints or otherwise be able to verify the engineering plan is being followed—They’re looking for broken/nonfunctional appliances/mechanicals/systems, clear fire hazards, mold, infestations, and the like.

The outcome of a building inspection is a certificate of occupancy where the authority is stating the home is safe to live in, the outcome of a purchase inspection is a report of things to ask for a discount on, part of the purchase negotiation.

The Chatham County thing is crazy, I’m hoping the family manages to find someone accountable in that mess — clearly either the original architect, the builder, or the county let them down somehow. I’m just not sure it’s really an indictment of the “inspector” profession as discussed in this thread.

traviscj··on Ask HN: Is GitHub down?
found the neteng guy
traviscj··on Github.com is down
maybe they used gitops
traviscj··on Please don't be spooky
I had a manager — who I basically loved — that loved to say “assume positive intent”, perhaps from teammate $T

And I tried!

But my priors were that teammate $T has rejected ideas from most of my design documents for (imho) inconsequential reasons — Eg there were framework scalability concerns of using a framework that handles 1x-1000x the projected growth of the current project.

Telling me to “assume positive intent” from feedback saying it wouldn’t work “because scale” (when we were comfortably 4-5 orders of magnitude away from those problems) felt pretty empty.

More honest pushback would essentially be “this solution didn’t need this scale yet”, or “we can afford to re-architect this right now” — “finding deals” becomes a rent payment from someone figured

traviscj··on If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever
I read as “only one person on the team I was interviewing for”, not “only one person was swe”
traviscj··on Show HN: Kvass, a personal key-value store
I use a similar setup to store code snippets (certain Java annotations for integration/unit tests, various things like that), vehicle license plate/vins, internal (but nonsensitive) ids for test accounts, tons of things like that.

Honestly a password manager would probably be technically better—or a bunch of flat files lol—but there was a certain charm to having it displayed / function exactly as I like it, and lightning quick with nothing I didn’t need.

IDE would be another natural place for a lot of my usages, but I kept finding I needed to leave it in a pull request review or slack conversation or similar, not necessarily programming myself.

traviscj··on Show HN: PocketBase – Open Source realtime backend in one file
Really neat! I’ve been wanting to make something similar for _years_ to be a standardized data modeling testbed as I explore/experiment/prototype some new feature or problem space or even doing ad-hoc fixes. I think this is a much better starting place than spreadsheets/similar.

Good luck with the project! Seems like you’ve got some good interest :-)

traviscj··on Ask HN: Codebases with great, easy to read code?
I’ve learned a TON from the [okhttp3](https://square.github.io/okhttp/) codebase, highly recommend studying it.
traviscj··on My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll
The original seems to have been designed with different goals in mind. I have no doubt that the new ux better optimized their new goals, I just don’t agree that the new goals were as useful to me personally.
traviscj··on Radiation spikes in Chernobyl
Seems like GP means it’s noticeable but difficult to interpret?
traviscj··on Facebook loses users for the first time
BYOC :-(
traviscj··on Settings are not a design failure
Gotta love military-grade pragmatism.
traviscj··on Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)
I am SUPER worried about this when it affects something really important, like getting the client/customer/merchant/cardholder their money. It seems like the world has moved on without me —- “ohh, three nines is enough”… “hrmmm maybe?…”
traviscj··on The growth of command line options, 1979-Present (2020)
I have the same problem with textmate :-(
traviscj··on Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
Probably not, but could emulate SNES on a Linux!
traviscj··on Ritalin and similar medications cause brain to focus on benefits of work (2020)
Really interesting. I've been on Adderall for almost 10 years and am constantly accused of being overly optimistic, which sounds a lot like the "the brain to fix its attention on the benefits, rather than the costs, of completing difficult tasks." from the first paragraph.
traviscj··on Square Banking
Everything is a probability game; it’s not about reducing risk to zero (impossible!) but having less risk than the alternative.
traviscj··on GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
Yeah thing $T _might_ (but probably won’t) happen, so the idea is automatically terrible.
traviscj··on What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis (2016)
I really love the pragmatism behind saying: yes, X sucks, but it’s still useful.
traviscj··on I no longer trust The Great Suspender
There's also the occasional _necessity_ for making a breaking change, in particular _breaking some exploit_ and thereby making the software more secure.

I don't envy Chrome leadership's decision or having that problem to solve.

traviscj··on GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran
I can’t imagine what a bad workday this is gonna be for the rest of the company.
traviscj··on Slack Running Slow / Hanging?
ahhh this is a much better theory than mine: my first thought was the lifting of a holiday deploy freeze.
traviscj··on Slack Running Slow / Hanging?
Down for me on work + personal accounts.

I guess their holiday deploy freeze is lifted? :-)

traviscj··on Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working culture?
I’d never heard of 120% until this thread, but I immediately interpreted it to mean “you’re free to do your self directed 20% work on nights/weekends/your “own time”.”

It actually took me a second to see yours, but I guess you mean more of a “ya you can do whatever you want on fridays as long as you get 100% of work done by Thursday” vibe?

traviscj··on 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
Then parameterize & return results for one specific duration, return that duration with results, and make it easy to adjust afterward.

“Here are the results I found for the last week...”

“Show the same for the last 10 days”

traviscj··on YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
In this case, it "steals" the ad revenue that the copyright tries to protect, no? Or am I thinking about this incorrectly?
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