azirbel's comments

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)

Playbook (https://www.playbook.com) | Software Engineer | San Francisco or Remote (US timezones +/- 1 hour)

The tools for keeping track of creative work haven't gotten an update since Dropbox launched. You wouldn't expect the creative process to involve hours of digging through folders and files, but it does, and we're here to change that.

Playbook is a visual cloud storage platform for creatives. Whether you're a designer, marketer, photographer, or artist, your tools should help you stay in flow. Your current and past work should be right at your fingertips, and it should be a snap to bring in collaborators or share your projects with the world.

We're a small team of ~10, growing quickly and looking for help as we scale. We're hiring generalist software engineers (2+ years exp) and a senior infrastructure-focused software engineer. Our stack is Rails/React/GraphQL/Postgres. More here:

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/software-engineer/

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/infrastructure-engineer/

Email me directly to apply or ask any questions! [email protected]

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)

Playbook (https://www.playbook.com) | Software Engineer | San Francisco or Remote (US timezones +/- 1 hour)

The tools for keeping track of creative work haven't gotten an update since Dropbox launched. You wouldn't expect the creative process to involve hours of digging through folders and files, but it does, and we're here to change that.

Playbook is a visual cloud storage platform for creatives. Whether you're a designer, marketer, photographer, or artist, your tools should help you stay in flow. Your current and past work should be right at your fingertips, and it should be a snap to bring in collaborators or share your projects with the world.

We're a small team of ~10, growing quickly and looking for help as we scale. We're hiring generalist software engineers (2+ years exp) and a senior infrastructure-focused software engineer. Our stack is Rails/React/GraphQL/Postgres. More here:

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/software-engineer/

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/infrastructure-engineer/

Email me directly to apply or ask any questions! [email protected]

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

What I found most interesting:

> His latest Twitch deal includes a performance quota; he streams 200 hours a month.

50 hours a week of on-stream time! And any other business/branding/merchandizing must happen on top of those 50 hours where he already has to be 100% on. It does sound exhausting.

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)

Playbook (https://playbook.com) | Software and Infrastructure Engineer | San Francisco or Remote (US timezones +/- 1 hour) The tools for keeping track of creative work haven't gotten an update since Dropbox launched. You wouldn't expect the creative process to involve hours of digging through folders and files, but it does, and we're here to change that.

Playbook is a visual cloud storage platform for creatives. Whether you're a designer, marketer, photographer, or artist, your tools should help you stay in flow. Your current and past work should be right at your fingertips, and it should be a snap to bring in collaborators or share your projects with the world.

We're a small team of 9, growing quickly and looking for help as we scale. We're hiring generalist software engineers (2+ years exp) and a senior infrastructure-focused software engineer. Our stack is Rails/React/GraphQL/Postgres. More here:

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/software-engineer/

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/infrastructure-engineer/

Email me directly to apply or ask any questions! [email protected]

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)

Playbook (https://playbook.com) | Software and Infrastructure Engineer | San Francisco or Remote (US timezones +/- 1 hour)

The tools for keeping track of creative work haven't gotten an update since Dropbox launched. You wouldn't expect the creative process to involve hours of digging through folders and files, but it does, and we're here to change that.

Playbook is a visual cloud storage platform for creatives. Whether you're a designer, marketer, photographer, or artist, your tools should help you stay in flow. Your current and past work should be right at your fingertips, and it should be a snap to bring in collaborators or share your projects with the world.

We're a small team of 8, growing quickly and looking for help as we scale. We're hiring generalist software engineers (2+ years exp) and a senior infrastructure-focused software engineer. Our stack is Rails/React/GraphQL/Postgres. More here:

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/software-engineer/

https://www.playbook.com/p/play/infrastructure-engineer/

Email me directly to apply or ask any questions! [email protected]

azirbel | 4 years ago | on: The Crime of Curiosity

What I got from the article was that system as a whole is consistently throwing roadblocks in the way of experimental/small-time science. The author focuses on YouTube, but also cites a government investigation as well as deplatforming by PayPal, Square, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, and Patreon. These are private companies, with their own policies, but private companies are part of the system too. So I don't think the concerns are conflated.

Regarding YouTube, I think the author would agree with you:

> The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.”

I don't think we need to assign blame to YouTube here, but it's still the reality, and we should consider what it means for access to science.

Maybe we (as a society) should in fact keep experimental science off YouTube. (I don't agree, but I can see an argument.) Even in that case, the decisions made here are disproportionate. The author starts the article by describing how he's banned from even logging in, not just uploading; he ends by saying how he has to worry about being locked out of his email. I agree with the author that we're in dangerous territory by giving companies unilateral control over this process, even if we do it for good reasons.

azirbel | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)

Playbook | Backend Engineer | Remote or SF Bay Area | https://www.playbook.com

Playbook is a media management tool that acts as a beautiful, organized home base for creative work.

We're looking for a senior backend engineer (4+ years experience, Ruby on Rails is a plus) to join our Founding Team. You'll be working on problems like visual search, image similarity/tagging, and large-scale data pipelines. More info: https://www.playbook.com/p/play/founding-engineer.

About us: we're a small team (6 of us total; 4 engineers). We care about creativity, freedom to shape your work, and product-building over cult-building. We're a seed-stage company backed by Founder’s Fund, Abstract, Inovia, and others.

Please email [email protected] to apply or learn more!

azirbel | 5 years ago | on: A Critique of React Hooks

I really like hooks. I previously spent a lot of time in HOCs, and I find hooks much simpler. But I also have problems with #5 (control flow):

The main issue I have with hooks is that I can't easily trace why updates are being triggered in my app; this makes it hard to debug performance issues. For example, my app once got really slow, and the profiler told me that a root(ish)-level component was causing a lot of re-renders. Unfortunately, that component used multiple hooks, and the only way I was able to isolate the problem was by binary-searching, deleting hooks until the re-renders stopped.

Anyone have better ways of dealing with this?

azirbel | 5 years ago | on: A Critique of React Hooks

I for one preferred the diplomacy.

The 'magic' involved in hooks is a tradeoff; there are real benefits in the way you can consolidate logic, or mix in behaviors. Personally, I strongly prefer hooks to HOCs.

Many technologies have magical behaviors and are still very popular and useful (Rails comes to mind). I'm really liking the pros and cons being brought up in the rest of this thread.

azirbel | 6 years ago | on: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

The comments here seem very negative compared to e.g. the Google employee protests over Project Dragonfly. [1]

There are two questions here: whether GitHub should allow ICE to buy its software, and whether employees should influence the direction of their company via protests, petitions, and threats to quit.

GitHub specifics aside, I think employees absolutely should organize and quit over issues they feel strongly about (at least when they have the flexibility to find other jobs). Company policy should be guided by the people who work there, and the a company's leadership structure is set up well to resolve the conflict.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542830

azirbel | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: A little stopwatch for your Mac's touch bar

I made this for a really minimal version of daily time tracking. The touch bar turned out to be a great place for a stopwatch: tapping is easy, and you can easily check if it's running or not - even in fullscreen mode.

More info in a little blog post: https://www.alexzirbel.com/touch-bar-timer

It's open source, code here: https://github.com/azirbel/touch-bar-timer

Finally, thanks to Pixel Point for their Mute Me project, which was the starting point for this codebase. https://muteme.pixelpoint.io/

azirbel | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: JSON storage bins with schema validation

Easy - I'll just inject text-based ads into the saved data!

(Kidding, of course...)

I think it's unlikely that this site can be monetized, so I don't have my hopes up. The clearest direction would be to move up the "backend-as-a-service" spectrum into Headless CMS land (which I have a diagram for here: http://alexzirbel.com/npoint). But I think it would be hard to balance that with the quick setup / unstructured data nature of the project.

One feature (maybe a premium feature) I'd love to add is form-based data editing. Theoretically you could generate the right kind of input fields (text, date, number) from the JSON schema and expose that as alternative editing interface. That would make the tool more like a CMS.

azirbel | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: JSON storage bins with schema validation

Hi HN! This is a side project I've been working on for a while now.

It's similar to https://jsonbin.io (which was an inspiration!), but focuses on the second step of prototyping with data - once you're editing JSON online, how do you make sure you don't break your app? npoint.io lets you enforce a structure using JSON schema (http://json-schema.org).

More background info: http://alexzirbel.com/npoint

Also, it's open source! https://www.github.com/azirbel/npoint

All feedback is super welcome. Also happy to answer any questions here.

azirbel | 9 years ago | on: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes

Ah, they're just tools that can be learned. I had to run around the company quite a bit to make sure I got all the information right.

We don't require experience in any of these tools to get a job at Opendoor. Most programming experience can be transferred between different technologies. We do a lot of pair programming to bring people on board, plus feedback in code reviews.

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