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whichdan

1,260 karma · joined February 3, 2011

(They/Them) Director of Engineering in Boston
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whichdan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2014)
Vista Higher Learning - Boston - Systems Architect

Why join us? We at Vista Higher Learning are proud to say that we’re not just another publisher. We’re the leading specialized language publisher for U.S. and Canadian higher education and secondary school markets whose first-hand knowledge of languages and diverse cultures sets us apart from other publishers. We’re passionate about developing educational materials that incorporate authenticity and culture. We bring a fresh new approach to teaching languages by integrating technology, design, content, and pedagogy to make learning easier, more practical, and more rewarding. With current programs in Spanish, French, Italian and German Vista Higher Learning is committed to helping people communicate across languages and cultures.

Summary

Under the direction of the Sr. Director, Engineering, the Systems Architect role oversees and helps to shape the service-oriented vision of our Maestro 3 learning management platform. Working with the Engineering and Information Technology (IT) teams, the Systems Architect transforms high-level architectural plans into actionable blueprints. In this role, the Systems Architect must be able to articulate and communicate complex ideas clearly and coordinate multiple concurrent projects across teams. Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented architectures strongly preferred.

Key responsibilities include:

Specific responsibilities include the following:

- Planning available, reliable, fault-tolerant architectures

- Performing infrastructure performance analysis and tuning

- Reviewing failures, evaluating causes, and implementing preventative measures

- Assisting in planning capacity and forecasting demand

- Trouble-shooting systems and product issues

- Training and mentoring engineers and developers

Desired Skills:

- Experience shipping high-quality, performant, well-tested applications in a consumer-facing environment

- Demonstrated systems-level troubleshooting and performance tuning

- Experience with Ruby/Rails or similar MVC framework

- Strong Unix administration and command line experience

- In-depth knowledge of two or more of: Redis, Memcached, Mysql, Postgres, MongoDb

- Strong written and verbal communication skills

Education and Experience:

- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. Master’s degree preferred

- At least three years of experience in systems architecture, preferably with experience in educational markets

- Team building, leading, and / or management experience preferred

- Experience working with Agile processes within a product development environment

If this sounds like you, join our team and you’ll enjoy a competitive compensation program, a comprehensive benefits package and an exciting work environment in a growing company located within easy access to the “T”. Please introduce yourself by sending your resume, cover letter and salary requirements to: hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

whichdan··on Ask HN: Which headphones should I buy?
I have an Audio Technica ATH-M50 that I'm happy with. It's around the $150 range, sometimes $100 if you find a good sale. Using my iMac, I can never put the volume above 3 notches. It's definitely loud! And comfortable, since it's circumaural.
whichdan··on Ask HN: Companies that don't use whiteboard coding interviews?
As a lighthearted suggestion: have you tried purchasing a whiteboard and practicing writing code on it?
whichdan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2014)
Vista Higher Learning - Boston, MA

http://vistahigherlearning.com/

-----

Web Application Developer

* We're also looking for a Technical Architect! *

Interested in foreign languages, online education, or distance learning? Come help us change the way people learn foreign languages! Vista Higher Learning is a profitable, growing business with a terrific location in downtown Boston. We provide a small company feel without the instability of a startup, and as an engineer in our technology development department you'll have the opportunity to make an immediate and significant impact on our products. We have ambitious plans for the next few years, including extensive development for mobile platforms, and we're expanding our development team to keep up with the company's growth.

We'd love it if you have:

- Development experience with Ruby/Python/Java/Javascript

- Experience building scalable, rich web applications

- Strong OO skills

- Test-driven development experience

- A working style that thrives in a highly collaborative environment

- Experience building REST-based APIs and services

- A GitHub account (or code that you can share with us)

If you don't meet all those requirements, no problem—drop us a line anyway. If you are a good match for our team, we can look at providing in-house and external training to help you get up to speed. If you’re interested in learning more please send your résumé to: hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

----

We're a tight-knit team that pairs frequently and writes test-driven AngularJS and Rails code. We're looking for mid- and senior-level developers to work with us in our office at 500 Boylston in Back Bay.

Feel free to send me questions, but please send all cover letters and resumes to hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

whichdan··on Ask HN: Where to sell domain names?
http://dnforum.com and http://namepros.com
whichdan··on The Return of Email Startup Acquisitions
It would be worth mentioning Opera's acquisition of FastMail, and FastMail's subsequent split from them.
whichdan··on Japanese electronics firms: Eclipsed by Apple
If the referrer is Google, it won't show a paywall, so that Google will index the entire document. If they don't do that, Google will either only index the beginning of the content, or they'll penalize the site for hiding content that was indexed. If the referrer is HackerNews, they can reliably show a paywall without worrying about taking an SEO hit.
whichdan··on Dropping Loot
Final Fantasy Tactics was a lot like that -- every random enemy in every random battle had a randomly generated name, and human enemies always had an interesting mix of level-appropriate armor and spells.
whichdan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2014)
Vista Higher Learning - Boston, MA

http://vistahigherlearning.com/

-----

Web Application Developer

Interested in foreign languages, online education, or distance learning? Come help us change the way people learn foreign languages! Vista Higher Learning is a profitable, growing business with a terrific location in downtown Boston. We provide a small company feel without the instability of a startup, and as an engineer in our technology development department you'll have the opportunity to make an immediate and significant impact on our products. We have ambitious plans for the next few years, including extensive development for mobile platforms, and we're expanding our development team to keep up with the company's growth.

We'd love it if you have:

- Development experience with Ruby/Python/Java/Javascript

- Experience building scalable, rich web applications

- Strong OO skills

- Test-driven development experience

- A working style that thrives in a highly collaborative environment

- Experience building REST-based APIs and services

- A GitHub account (or code that you can share with us)

If you don't meet all those requirements, no problem—drop us a line anyway. If you are a good match for our team, we can look at providing in-house and external training to help you get up to speed. If you’re interested in learning more please send your résumé to: hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

----

We're a tight-knit team that pairs frequently and writes test-driven AngularJS and Rails code. We're looking for mid- and senior-level developers to work with us in our office at 500 Boylston in Back Bay.

Feel free to send me questions, but please send all cover letters and resumes to hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

whichdan··on SF people, you are hypocrites using services like Uber and Lyft
That's how I feel in Boston. I pay $75/mo for an MBTA pass, but usually take Uber/Lyft once or twice a week. To get from Allston to Jamaica Plain, at night, I either need to: take a train into the city, and then a different train out of the city (well over an hour), or, wait up to 15m for one bus, then wait up to 15m for another bus, which means it will take anywhere from 30-60m to get home. In the meantime, I can have a cab reliably get me home in 15 minutes for all of $12. It's quite lucrative when one has work the next day..
whichdan··on Quitting Chrome: Because Google+
Each tab and plugin has its own process, plus another process for the browser itself. Take a look at Chrome's Task Manager for some more insight.
whichdan··on Moniker.com's new and revamped interface is a disaster
I just migrated from Moniker to eNom after having used them for years. Their support is abysmal. Two weeks for them to manually change a nameserver since the web interface wasn't working properly, and another full week for them to remove a domain from my account that I had transferred out, yet was still receiving pending deletion notices for.
whichdan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2014)
Vista Higher Learning - Boston, MA

http://vistahigherlearning.com/

-----

Web Application Developer

Interested in foreign languages, online education, or distance learning? Come help us change the way people learn foreign languages! Vista Higher Learning is a profitable, growing business with a terrific location in downtown Boston. We provide a small company feel without the instability of a startup, and as an engineer in our technology development department you'll have the opportunity to make an immediate and significant impact on our products. We have ambitious plans for the next few years, including extensive development for mobile platforms, and we're expanding our development team to keep up with the company's growth.

We'd love it if you have:

- Development experience with Ruby/Python/Java/Javascript

- Experience building scalable, rich web applications

- Strong OO skills

- Test-driven development experience

- A working style that thrives in a highly collaborative environment

- Experience building REST-based APIs and services

- A GitHub account (or code that you can share with us)

If you don't meet all those requirements, no problem—drop us a line anyway. If you are a good match for our team, we can look at providing in-house and external training to help you get up to speed. If you’re interested in learning more please send your résumé to: hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

----

We're a tight-knit team that pairs frequently and writes test-driven AngularJS and Rails code. We're looking for mid- and senior-level developers to work with us in our office at 500 Boylston in Back Bay.

Feel free to send me questions, but please send all cover letters and resumes to hr@vistahigherlearning.com.

whichdan··on Ask HN: How do you *really* get a good Software Engineering job?
"know how to code in multiple languages and provide decent coding examples" "a fully functioning and non-trivial web app"

If you haven't written a full app in a language, can you really claim proficiency in it?

whichdan··on Ask HN: Pay myself dividends instead of salary?
Talk to a CPA. Seriously.
whichdan··on From Gmail to Fastmail
Same here. I've been with them since 2007 and they've made huge strides, especially with the recent interface overhaul.
whichdan··on Ask HN: Engineers' hatred toward working at e-commerce startups
Scale. Twitter and Dropbox are dealing with problems in a completely different realm than Gilt or Birchbox. Shopify would be a more interesting comparison; it's an e-commerce platform, rather than an e-commerce site, which undoubtedly deals with a lot of issues Twitter and Dropbox had to in their earlier days.
whichdan··on Things I Learned Designing at Disqus
To elaborate, for anyone who hasn't used Photoshop (in several years): you can have layer groups which act as folders containing several related layers, so when you're browsing layers, it isn't just a mess of 500 some-odd rows.
whichdan··on Is it possible to apply CSS to half of a character?

  content: attr(data-content);
This is pretty interesting, too.
whichdan··on Amazon Snags Older HBO Shows For Web Streaming
Amazon Prime works on most gaming systems and Roku, just not Chromecast and AppleTV.
whichdan··on Ask HN: Idea Sunday
I really like this idea. It would be great for renters, too, if the services could be opted for a-la carte at a slightly higher rate. For instance, in Boston, I needed someone to help bring over an in-window air conditioner from a friend's apartment and install it properly in a window. I had to spend the better part of an hour vetting different Yelp-style contractor sites, several actual contractors, and calling a few to see whether they'd be interested, available, and affordable. Being able to tap a few buttons on an app that sits somewhere inbetween Uber and Yelp would be amazing.

That said, whatever site mediates this, would potentially need to have 24x7 customer service, a billing platform (with payouts), and potentially some decent liability insurance.

whichdan··on Ask HN: What under $100 item would you recommend everyone buy?
Chromecast is quite nice for the price point, but if you use Amazon regularly, a Roku will get you far better mileage.
whichdan··on Goodbye Gmail
A few months ago I had to drop my spam threshold from 5 to something like 2.5 -- my spam issues cleared up immediately.
whichdan··on Goodbye Gmail
I have about 12.5k messages in my inbox at FastMail, and another 26k in separate folder. Both inboxes load instantly, and the infinite scrolling is seamless. Jumping back-and-forth between message and list view is equally quick. While they currently lack features like a calendar, they do have a lot of powerful tools -- I have several domains and email accounts conditionally filing mail into several folders, with custom personalities/signatures when replying from each folder. Very happy with it, and the devs take bugs seriously whenever I message them. (To be fair, it's usually just UI edge cases.)

Edit: Just to quickly elaborate on the infinite scrolling: FastMail takes the total number of messages in a given folder and uses that to calculate the size of the viewport. When you scroll to a given position, it fires off a small AJAX request for just the messages that are in view. Since each message is a fixed height, it gives them a lot of flexibility for calculating what to show.

Also, FWIW, they do support message threading.

whichdan··on Choosing between two job opportunities
Working remotely may have a small effect on future interviews, but it's negligible -- you can just focus on your work ethic, since you would have been able to produce design/code without someone eyeing over your shoulder.
whichdan··on Choosing between two job opportunities
I used to work entirely remotely, and six months ago started working at a hundred-person office in downtown Boston. It has been, without a doubt, the best career move I've made, and I've made a lot of friends in the process. #1 sounds like a hugely better deal if you can handle the uncertainty of not being hired permanently.
whichdan··on The top free-to-play monetization tricks
Thanks for the suggestion - that looks fun! I already have a DS but loathe the idea of having to carry it around with me. It's definitely a very nice system, and can actually sleep for a few days unlike the 3DS.
whichdan··on The top free-to-play monetization tricks
What sort of regulation are you envisioning?
whichdan··on The top free-to-play monetization tricks
I enjoy it enough that I consider it an expensive way to pass time during my commute. I still dislike the IAP model, though.
whichdan··on The top free-to-play monetization tricks
I've been playing Puzzle and Dragons for about 7 months, and have probably spent the equivalent of a $15/mo subscription over that period of time. The mechanics to make you pay absolutely feel contrived and scummy; the game strongly limits how much you can play in a given time period (stamina), and playing more than that requires the equivalent of $1. Dungeons also have strange difficulty levels, where the boss is significantly more challenging than the levels leading to it, so after you've invested the time to get there, you have the choice of "paying" $1 each time you are about to lose, or leaving the dungeon and potentially having to "pay" $1 to play more -- especially since the harder dungeons eat up a larger portion of your stamina. The worst, though, is that obtaining better monsters requires a slot-machine style gamble, and each try costs around $5. There's such a high chance of getting a mediocre monster instead, that there's actually a term called "Gung-trolled."

That said, the game is very well designed and a lot of fun, and lends itself well to being played during a short commute. There are a subset of players who make a lot of progress without any in-app purchases, but the game constantly makes you question what's worth more: your time, or $1.

Personally, I would be happier with a $5-10/mo subscription fee, but instead I'm left with a twinge of guilt every time I make an in-app purchase.

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