orofino's comments

Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here...

1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat.

2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™.

3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office.

4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc.

All of this is what folks in this thread seem to be missing. I've used IRC for a very long time, but have NEVER been successful at getting wide adoption of IRC for communication.

I am well aware that I'm trusting a third party with out information. I'm aware that alternatives exist and you can get them to work. That doesn't matter when I have to try to explain to my CEO how to /join #channel.

There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another.

</rant>

Yes, in my profile.

My wife and I both quit our jobs before we left to travel. We've been together for 13 years at this point, were at about 10 years when we started traveling. Something about the travel just resulted in us bickering way more than we ever have before. We aren't 100% sure what the cause was.

I think traveling even slower 1-2 weeks/city might have helped with this, but then again, some cities just don't warrant that much time.

Since coming home we've since traveled for a 5 week trip together and it was much smoother. Perhaps we just needed to learn how to travel together.

In May 2012 my wife and I did this. It went well, but little went to our initial plan.

The experience was far more stressful than either of us expected. Constantly having to find food, a place to sleep, and figure out where/what is next, was tiresome. However, we really enjoyed the experience and found some places off the beaten path that we really loved. We found out that we love hiking and that we wanted travel more in the future.

I can't remember how we ended up settling on a budget, we targeted $80/day for two people. We saved 60k for the trip which from what I can remember was somewhat arbitrary. We also saved 20k as a 'return fund' to ensure that we had ample runway to find jobs. Returning home was incredibly expensive, we sold everything we owned before we left, make sure you budget accordingly.

Finding work after traveling was simple for me, a bit harder for my wife. I had two job offers, both from people I worked with prior to leaving, before I'd been home for more than a couple weeks. My wife wanted to change where she worked, so it took her a bit longer. None of this was to plan, we had planned to move to the west coast, the sway of a job was too strong.

If we did it again... that is hard to say. Both of us wish it was planned a bit more completely, but I see no way to actually accomplish this. I might say stay in one place a bit longer that we did (maybe a week/city). My wife says she would blog less, and I think I agree, documenting the trip was a lot of work. We did it for ourselves and our family, but it was more work than anticipated.

In the end we finished traveling after only (sorry I know "only" sounds ridiculous) 8 months. We thought we would travel for 1.5 years or more. We spent way more time in South America than initially planned and took a boat to Antarctica which was entirely unplanned. It was really amazing.

If you have questions I'm happy to address them further, I tried to keep this short as I can talk about this for hours.

This is great advice and what I have been doing for the last 3-4 years for our retirement portfolio. Prior to that we were using an 'investment guy' who had us in a bunch of high-cost funds.

I sent the guy and email and ended the relationship and took a couple months to read and learn about this. I recommend the "investor's manifesto" by William Bernstein for anyone interested.

You may need to pay that $10 if you are investing through some other brokerage account. However, do yourself a favor, open an account with Vanguard directly and you can make that purchase without any fees.

Additionally, I'd recommend se percentage be invested in the Vanguard total bond market fund as well. Holding se percentage there will reduce overall portfolio volatility, and can actually increase returns slightly.

Anyone else find the fo us on the article solely on "Alabamians" a bit odd?

I'm reading this while sitting in a restaurant in Nepal. My wife and I are here for around three weeks for hiking to Everest Base Camp. After this, we are headed to China for 11 days. In total, I'm going to be out from work for 5 weeks. Almost three years ago we quit our jobs, sold our house and travelled for 9 months through South America, Antarctica, and Europe.

I work at a startup. I'm the product manager and we are rebuilding the product from the ground up, in December we will have been working on the rebuild for a full year and our first beta customers will be starting on the new platform. The five weeks immediately previous to that, I'm out of the office for an extended period.

This is to say, you have to make the time for yourself. We both work hard, both of our new jobs (which are way better than our pre big trip jobs btw) allowed us to take this five weeks without much hassle. The team will survive and I'll come back refreshed and ready to tackle new problems.

Perhaps some think our startup will fail because someone took time off for this long, I'll tell you that I sure don't.

It is our job to explain to the business what the value is. It is our job to convince them of the value.

I know this can be hard/impossible in some situations. I've lost those battles for things that are much more trivial than replacing large parts of the authentication system. However, if you keep beating that drum and take any opportunity to push that goal, you can sometimes create the time to work on something like this.

Are your customers requesting some kind of compliance (SSAE or something of the like)? Use that as leverage. See the recent news (or not so recent higher profile Sony hack news)? We should really address some of our shortcomings.

The problem then becomes, what is the market pushing towards so that you can help push that forward. Right now there isn't a clear answer, solutions keep dying on the vine.

The question for us, as technologists, is what are we doing about this?

2FA is nice, but not the end all, be all. OAuth has largely failed to gain any reasonable traction. Using Facebook login means Facebook gets to track me as I move around the web.

Our users reuse passwords, primarily due to the proliferation of dozens or often hundreds of online accounts that a single individual has. We can't expect people to use password managers (they're complicated and then centralize everything into a single point of failure). Forcing people to use crazy passwords just results in weaker passwords.

I was hopeful that something like persona from Mozilla would catch on, but that has failed. Where are we with replacing the password? It is flawed technology.

On top of this we have the compounding factor that our systems are more complicated than ever and it appears that they're simply impossible to secure. Too many layers exist with too much code. Many sites just don't both with even hashing password, meaning those of us that care, are just kind of throwing our hands up and saying "well it wasn't my site that was compromised, so it isn't my fault". All the while, bad guys walk in the front door because we've decided to ignore the reality of the situation.

I know I'm not providing a constructive alternative here, but I'm a bit ashamed that we've even let it get this far. We're failing those that rely on our systems. I don't have the answer, but would love to hear some ideas about what can be done.

There are advantages, but this poses a high bar for adoption. The current approach of keeping the entire suite of sensors on the car means that infrastructure won't need immediate upgrades to support autonomous vehicles.

I have no doubt that smarter roads are in our future, but they pose too high of a price for wide spread adoption of autonomous vehicles at the outset.

More than anything, what this makes me want to do is lay out some cash to have an actual designer work on a resume for me. I like nice looking resumes, I kind of want a nicer looking resume, I wouldn't mind paying for a nicer looking resume, I don't really want one that looks like those that hundreds of other people are using.

Perhaps a nice direction for a project such as this is to become more of a marketplace, similar to what you have with WordPress templates. This would mean more template diversity with the ease of use that you probably already provide with your CMS.

  Connect literally five other services for a broader view

This copy seems quite strange. Using literally in this context would traditionally precede an impressive number. "We have literally thousands of service intergrations"... or something.

Alright, well I suppose I'll play the role of contrarian.

Performance reviews should be given in the context of preset goals. Without defined goals, a review is pointless. You might as well be commenting on the weather for all it is worth.

I break my goals up into three general categories when I give them: tactical, strategic, and developmental. Tactical items are boring shit, do your job, close your tickets, answer the phone, etc. Strategic goals push the business forward, assist on a project, visit a customer, or implement a new thing. Developmental goals are all about you: attend some training, mentor a peer, or learn a new thing.

Goals should evolve with the employee. Have you just started? I'm giving you goals to familiarize yourself with the business. Sit with the CS team, the sales team, or some of the product meetings. Have you been here forever? I'm giving you responsibility to mentor peers, do some lunch and learns, or take on a new project. Craft goals for your team to fill gaps in the team's capabilities and to shape key employees for advancement.

Performance reviews aren't inherently bad, they provide a really clear milestone or report on how you're meeting these goals. We'll talk about them weekly during our one on ones, but this codifies what we've been discussing into something more tangible. They're where the rubber meets the road and seeing yourself rated on your goals really calls attention to performance.

Reviews and goals may sound like corporate bullshit to you, but that's just because your manager sucks. I've had several excellent managers who leverage goals to push me towards new opportunities. My reviews are largely a formality, I know where I stand with my manager, but I don't think that's the case with most employees. Perhaps I just haven't been burned badly enough by bad managers in the past.

Sigh, this picture: http://www.lifestyleupdated.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/j...

The quintessential picture of a couple, lifestyle designing the shit out of their coffee after what was most assuredly an extreme bike ride.

As someone who spent significant time and effort to travel abroad for an extended period, this bothers me. This is how you spend a Saturday, it isn't what 99.5% of the population will be able to achieve (or should try to achieve) for their day to day. Once you begin living without obligation or schedules, you'll find that it is interesting for only so long.

What people should strive for is a balanced life, that affords them flexibility to do the things they want, but also includes the obligations that most of us have. Not everyone can live like Tim Ferris, at least not until machines do all the work for us.

I actually agree with the article's main premiss, work for work's sake is pointless, but to hold up the 4HWW as the pinnacle of this, won't work for most people. So here is my attempt at a list of what will:

   - Live close to work (under 30 minutes)
   - Save as much as possible
   - Do your absolute best at work, then go home
   - Embrace things you like to do
   - Make time to do them

As an example I asked my boss if I'd be able to take 1-1.5 months off at some point in the future to travel. He seems cool with it, so now my wife an I are saving. This allows us to maintain some normalcy when after traveling so we have a job and home to return to.

Yea, this response is expected. You can see below I'm grappling with myself, am I just nitpicking as an excuse or do I have actual concerns. It can be hard to tell sometimes.

It isn't. I think based on the giant bar saying X out of Y pledged that it represented the largest chuck of what had been pledged.

I'd seen the paypal links, I just assumed that it would be a drop in the bucket compared to what is visible at rally.org, not 2 times what you see there.

Perhaps I'm just nitpicking. I agree the cause is worth supporting.

Absolutely agree. All I'm trying to say is that I find the lack of transparency about the real 'goal' for rally.org and real total (which now we have transparency about) doesn't make me feel great about donating.

Interestingly, the letter states he's received over 150k in support. The rally.org campaign now states over 50k has been pledged. I'm not finding the campaign for support to be terribly transparent.

When receiving the link to the rally.org campaign yesterday (through pinbord on twitter or gruber) I thought it represented the entire universe of assistance Lavar had received. On top of that, the upper limit of the rally campaign keeps changing. Originally I saw 40k, then last nigth 50k, now this morning 96k.

I'm not saying that they're trying to be misleading, but as someone who is interested in this and is considering a donation, I was disquieted by the moving target at rally.org and the lack of transparency until this morning about how much had truly been raised.