isaaclyman's comments

Edward is a webapp for writing novels. I built and launched it over the last six months as a side project. The app was made with Vue, Node, and PostgreSQL. There's an unlimited-time free trial, so give it a look and let me know if you have any feedback.

This reminded me, I keep wondering why the tamarind fruit has been left out of Western cuisine. You find trace amounts in Worcestershire sauce and the occasional Indian dish and you can get tamarind juice/candy at some Mexican places if you know what to look for, but by and large it's unheard of and unobtainable. Pity, too, it's got such a nice texture and flavor when prepared correctly.

I know tamarind trees aren't native to the Western hemisphere, but that hasn't ever stopped us before.

Huh.

This is harsh, but true. I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich." Every dang middle-schooler in the US wants that. Companies are a means, not an end. Successful ones always start with someone who's passionate about a very specific problem.

This really comes out in corporate mission statements. Even if you're Xerox, your mission statement is something like "Improve the rate of business communications by creating the world's most excellent copy machines."

If you don't have an idea for a startup, you're missing the key ingredient. The team literally cannot exist without that visionary person who knows exactly what they're after.

Impressive. What area/industry are you in that you can find accommodations like this?

Around here anything above 15 is a lot.

It's a Utah company called DirectScale. The company is really great, but some circumstances surrounding the product and work environment were making me feel really unproductive. Which might not be a big deal for everyone, but it was for me. I rode it out for a few months, lobbied for some changes, and eventually decided it was time to move on.

That is not always the case. My last job had unlimited PTO and some of us took 20+ days per year.

I left a startup job recently. They did a stellar job handling it. They spent a day or so making offers to get me to stay, then the remainder of my last two weeks listening to my reasons for leaving, making plans to fix their problems (so nobody else would leave), expressing their appreciation for my hard work and helping me find leads for a new job. At least three people on the executive team offered to provide a glowing reference for me, should I ever need one. My last paycheck was deposited a couple of weeks after I left. One of the classiest groups of people I may ever have the pleasure of working for.

I should point out that they lost nothing by this.

An employer who sends nasty emails and withholds pay is ruining the possibility of a valuable future re-hire, causing needless guilt, turning his own employees against him, building himself a poor reputation, and begging for a lawsuit. It's a heavy price to pay for his own pettiness.

A year later, SpitScript is back with:

- TypeScript annotations everywhere

- Unit tests (via AVA)

- Several bugfixes for line comments, block comments, and more

It's more useful than ever.

Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.

This. I love my California King. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

1. I'm very suspicious of studies whose main metric is self-reported happiness. Do people know how happy they are? Is that measure consistent enough over the course of a day to be meaningful? 2. If you ask someone if they have a maid or eat takeout, then ask them how happy they are, of course they'll be happier if they aren't thinking, "I need to figure out what to cook tonight" or "ugh, I need to clean the house." I assume the study was designed better than that, but secondary sources tend to gloss over this stuff. 3. Is it heresy for me to suggest that day-to-day happiness isn't the only thing worth having? There's a complex interplay between various factors in one's internal life. But I think my work ethic would degrade if someone else did my cooking, cleaning, gardening, and so forth. And my work ethic is important to me, and not necessarily because it makes me happy. And what about my financial future? If I can trade a little temporary happiness for financial security in the future, I will often choose that. I think there's something to be said for not trying to max out your happiness all the time. But I might be the only one who feels that way... crickets

Yeah, it might need to be a custom-made camera, made for news organizations and wealthy vloggers. And each device would need to be audited regularly. It would be a nightmare but not as much of a nightmare as not knowing whether anything you see on video is real or computer-generated.

This demonstrates an immediate need for a trustworthy video hosting service--maybe with a companion app that records using some combination of crypto/proprietary formats/trust networks/I don't know what else, this isn't my area of expertise. Things are going to get pretty bad here soon if video evidence loses its street cred.

Apologies for the random italics. I meant to add asterisks indicating that names had been changed.

A true story for your consideration:

One of my first jobs was as a dishwasher at a pasta shop. A few of my friends worked there and helped me land the job. One of them, Kevin, was a particularly good dishwasher--fast, efficient, conscientious. The managers were vocally appreciative of his work and used him as an example.

One day, I was talking to one of the other friends, Macey, and I mentioned that I thought Kevin was probably up for a promotion. The career path at this pasta shop was dishwasher > cook > waiter > manager, and at a place like that you could move up pretty quickly because turnover was so high. Macey said with some confidence that Kevin would never get promoted. He was just too fast at washing dishes. He'd made himself indispensable, especially on high-traffic evenings, and the management would never gum up the works by moving him to another position.

Macey was wrong. Kevin was promoted to cook within a few weeks.

I guess there are managers who won't promote their most productive employee. And there are managers who will.

This is a valuable discussion to me right now. At work I've been tasked with looking into a number of front end frameworks (Angular 4, React, Vue, Aurelia and Mithril) to see if we'd like to start writing new pages and components in one of those as opposed to AngularJS which we currently use. AngularJS has a few specific pain points for our web app, a complex and (unfortunately) ambitious SPA.

I'm building a prototype of one of our actual landing pages in each framework to get a bird's-eye view of what works and what doesn't. So far I've been really impressed with Vue, but my team has a couple of objections from the outset:

1) Most mid-level developers haven't heard of or used Vue, so the pool of candidates we can hire as our company grows will be smaller if we switch from a common denominator like AngularJS to something relatively unknown like Vue. I personally love to learn new tech, but not everyone does and a "Vue developer" job posting may not get a lot of hits.

Then again, if (e.g.) 15% of devs want to use Vue and only 10% of companies use it, that's a clear advantage over 75% of devs wanting to use Angular and 80% of companies using it. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers worked out like that.

2) Vue is kind of a one-man band, whereas Angular and React are backed by large cap companies. This is the weaker argument IMO, since there's no law stating that Google and Facebook can't run up on hard times and decide to drop support for their open source projects. And after seeing how sloppy Angular's documentation is, I've lost a lot of confidence in the "bigger is better" argument. However, in a rational universe, it may be fair to say that Vue would die more easily than Angular would.

My view on the situation is that it's better to use the right tool for the job and have less developers/support than to use the wrong tool for the job and have more developers/support. But I'm more technically-minded than business-minded, so I understand that I might need to be open to business concerns outside of my normal decision-making criteria.

I'm keeping detailed notes as I compare frameworks, so I may do a write-up when I'm done if anyone's interested. (Although the "battle of the frameworks" genre has been done to death...)

The Exploratorium is a huge hands-on science museum. Everything sciencey that you could ever want to touch (or never imagined touching) is there. It's slightly geared toward the younger crowd, but my wife and I went last year and loved it. Stayed almost the whole day. Everyone should visit at least once.

Thanks for advocating the other side. I've played and enjoyed Splendor, but never saw it as a resource-management eurogame. As far as Speicherstadt, I'll have to try it. My opinion is definitely open to revision.