Brainix's comments

Brainix | 9 years ago | on: Map of gang territories in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley

About a year ago, I got hit on the head (hard) with a metal pole at 9:30 AM, on my way to BART to get to work. The guy asked for my phone. I was too disoriented to take it out of my pocket. He grabbed my earbuds (but didn't get my phone) and walked away.

I lost a lot of blood and had a bad concussion. In the ambulance on my way to the hospital, I couldn't recall my zipcode. I needed seven large staples in the back of my head. After that, the mental fog persisted for about two weeks and I wasn't productive at work.

Up until that point, nothing bad had happened to me. Thankfully, I'm ok now, but I'll never live in Oakland again.

Brainix | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your go-to back end for simple projects?

Flask! It's Pythonic and good. Once you've done a couple of Flask projects, you can spin up a new microservice in a couple of hours. It's much lighter weight than Django, so it forces you to keep fewer moving parts in your head while hacking.

http://flask.pocoo.org/

Lately, I've been using Flask on the back-end, and React on the front-end.

Brainix | 9 years ago | on: Google Is Shutting Down Google Search Appliance (Enterprise Search)

Google built GSA at a time when there were limited options for search, and when most tech companies had to manage their own hardware, and when it was magical to have any kind of search at all. It made sense at the time.

But now, the problem itself has changed. Companies host on the cloud, there are many options for search (even hosted/managed solutions), and customers' expectations are very high for good search results. All of this boils down to the biggest issue that most companies face re: search - the business logic of providing fast/good search results (rather than maintaining a search engine itself). Also, companies increasingly view search engines as a first class information retrieval system (a good compliment to a source-of-truth database), which can empower internal analytics to make business decisions.

Most companies don't need/want Googly algorithms/hardware to power their search. I'm guessing here, but I bet that recent versions of Solr and Elasticsearch put the last nails in GSA's coffin.

Brainix | 9 years ago | on: Flask 0.11 Released

Who's got two thumbs and has already deployed Flask 0.11 to production? This guy.

Brainix | 10 years ago | on: Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired by Capella Education for $18M

I believe that my joke (perhaps in poor taste) isn't being taken as I intended. I'm a Python programmer, and my favorite feature of Python is the community. https://www.python.org/community/diversity/ I was only trying to make light of an otherwise painful reality.

There's a need for women's coding schools, and their alums will only make our field better. Congratulations to Hackbright Academy on an acquisition well deserved.

Brainix | 10 years ago | on: Changing Education – How bootcamps outperform a university education

We're painting in broad strokes as there are exceptions to every trend. But in my experience, bootcamp graduates are more like tinkerers and university graduates are more like engineers.

Most bootcamps don't cover computational complexity, for example. Or functional programming, or objected oriented design, or music or ethics or philosophy. Instead, most bootcamps focus on tools rather than ideas.

Brainix | 10 years ago | on: The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness

Enough with the clickbait. I had to scan the article 3 times before finally finding what the 40% rule is. And when I did find it, it's just like, your opinion, man. Seriously, citation needed (and some Navy SEAL's deeply moving personal anectote is not a citation).
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