jackkinsella's comments

jackkinsella | 11 months ago | on: Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2025)

SEEKING FREELANCER | MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week ongoing contract

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

jackkinsella | 11 months ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)

MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

jackkinsella | 2 years ago | on: The Average New Yorker Spends $10,454 in Upfront Costs for a Rental

In Germany, it used to the case that renters would be forced to pay the broker fee. At this point, it was typically three month's rent. But the government created a law Bestellerprinzip (Orderer principle) that made it a requirement that the person who initiated the contract with the broker (nearly always the landlord) must also pay the fee.

The fee magically dropped to one month's rent and less since that point; now that the less desperate party had to foot the bill, they were unwilling to tolerate the high prices.

NYC needs the same legislation.

jackkinsella | 5 years ago | on: How to Memorize Faster with the Spaced Repetition Learning Technique

The value of SRS goes way beyond memorization. When applied seriously to a field like programming, it enables you to think about the program-design space in a more abstract manner and quickly call to mind and evaluate possibilities. Look up "chunking" as it relates to performance (e.g. in chess).

I've written (and, more recently, made a video) about my 10 years of experience using SRS (via the free tool, Anki) to boost my IT skills.

https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method

jackkinsella | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Also learning the uke. I wonder what hacks you've figured out? My first insight was:

- it's easiest to remember chords when you think of them as fundamental ur-shapes with the "bar" shifted up (sometimes requiring additional fingers)

jackkinsella | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

After falling in love with the Destroy All Software style of genuinely advanced, all-encompassing programming screencasts, I started a YouTube channel with my own twist on the theme: Screencasts situated inside a decade-old, profitable, production web app, ones that emphasize actual workflow.

I've been an indie-hacker for 10 years so have seen the effects of my programming decisions over the same period. I've seen how fads come and go, sometimes wreaking havoc. I've also seen how coding decisions affect business (such as strategies to transform data into seo at scales of 10k+ items). I've seen how to keep something running day-and-night as if your livelihood depended on it - since it very much does.

That's the game plan anyway. I'm five episodes in: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

For fun I took up the tenor ukulele. Compared to any other instrument I've tried, it's got a much kinder learning curve. You can sound alright playing four-chord rock and pop songs in easier keys like C major after a month.

jackkinsella | 6 years ago | on: Become a Better Developer by Reading Source Code

As with any good habit, it's important to reduce resistance. If you want to eat healthy, have juicy apples at hand in the fridge.

I made a conscious decision to start installing all my dependencies into a folder within my project source-code so that I can painlessly jump to the dependency's source and read it. (E.g. in the Ruby world, this means installing to "./vendor" in your project).

The effect of doing this is that it's easier for me to read the source code of a library than it is for me to leave Vim and look up the docs online. Voilà, now I'm reading more source.

jackkinsella | 6 years ago | on: How to play the guitar by ear, for mathematicians and physicists (2000) [pdf]

This is something I struggled with for longer than I should have. For me, the turning point was just diving in and practicing playing along with real songs every day until the patterns became clearer. No matter who uncomfortable and hopeless it felt at first.

I recommend going to HookTheory and working your way through every song you're familiar with in the "beginner" section. These songs tend to stick to the big four chords (I IV V vi) and once you nail them, you're half-way there for most pop and rock. https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/difficulties/beginner

You'll make more progress doing that for an hour a day over a month than you will in five years of theory.

jackkinsella | 6 years ago | on: Improving my productivity as a working programmer (2017)

I found your idea of recording the screen during work very clever and I plan to replicate.

Some things that have worked for me:

— learning to type programming symbols accurately and with confidence. I realized when pair-programming that I lose a ton of time to backtracking due to typos. This is particularly bad when working in interactive code consoles where the poor editing capabilities mean typos are more costly. There are web applications out there like typing.io that help with this.

— keeping a "dumb mistake log" where I write up any silly errors that cost me too much time so I'll know to double check these things next time (e.g. "space instead of tab in Makefile > make tabs appear differently", "wrong file but with same name > keep an eye on the folder in the editor when switching files")

jackkinsella | 6 years ago | on: Too much to learn. Overwhelmed, incompetent, and behind

You'll never learn it all—none of us do. But there are employers out there who are willing to give you a chance to learn on the job, so long as you've nailed the core ideas. I consult in web development, mainly using Ruby and JS, but some clients are happy to hire me in PHP despite my having no experience here. Their assumption—and I think it's a reasonable one—is that my 10yr's experience with web patterns will largely carry over.
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