ryanong's comments

ryanong | 6 months ago | on: Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32

This post reminds me of the beauty of open source. Well done build and a great project summary!

ryanong | 1 year ago | on: As private equity dominates wheelchair market, users wait months for repairs

The problem isn't regulation, the problem is that the regulation isn't simple or cheap enough for small companies to get regulated.

ryanong | 1 year ago | on: Choosing the Right Audit Trail Approach in Ruby

Oh neat I haven't heard of console1984 or the package that allows for auditing. A lot of my previous companies have been looking for something like this

ryanong | 3 years ago | on: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

This also make sense how one can hijack someones brain into believing something even if they don't understand why it makes sense

ryanong | 4 years ago | on: TC Energy scraps Keystone XL pipeline project after Biden revokes key permit

I would not have been revoked if it wasn’t illegal.

ryanong | 4 years ago | on: Cheerleader’s Snapchat rant leads to ‘momentous’ Supreme Court case on speech

Being harassed/doxed is different than being cancelled

It is important to disambiguate the two

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates

that doesn't sound bad to me if we are dealing with people's life or people's freedoms

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: Ruby 3.0.0 RC1

Love the move to gemify standard library. This is a perfect mix of batteries included but also makes it easy to upgrade bits of the standard library over time between releases. Great way to prevent stagnation.

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: My Life Countdown (2007)

I the past year I have been convinced the desire to get things done is a partial root of my unhappiness. I have been working a lot on learning to just be and perhaps do also.

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

addressing #7, graphql queries are dynamic and not stored on the server

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021

pro audio tends to be a lot more low level to prevent any kind of stuttering or delay, so it may not always be compatible across stacks. It also tends to not get updated very often. You create 1 plugin for ableton, then the creator has moved on to the next project.

ryanong | 5 years ago | on: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down

IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.

There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.

ryanong | 6 years ago | on: KafkaHQ

I used Kafka at my last company. One of the places that it failed us was trying to use it as a queue. Don’t do that.

ryanong | 6 years ago | on: The Real Class War

Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.

ryanong | 6 years ago | on: Caesarean babies have different gut bacteria, microbiome study finds

It can be eating too

ryanong | 6 years ago | on: Tesla has applied for a patent for a new electromagnetic windshield-wiper system

This! A friend actually used to work on those systems. Hilarious amounts of complexity figuring out auto wipers

ryanong | 6 years ago | on: Software was eating the world – now landlords are eating everything

Capitalist dystopian dreams. Nyc has mostly unregulated real estate and it is still horrible. Large development corporations create artificial scarcity that rise the price of rent. Everything just rises in cost including minimum wage and just tracks whatever the developers can extract out of the economy.

If the solution doesn’t including bringing everyone along I don’t want it.

ryanong | 7 years ago | on: On Being a Principal Engineer

I would call it more of a plateau than stagnation. The senior title is a pretty beautiful spot, well paid and always more to learn but the value to the company is limited to the work you get done. You may be able to get it done faster and better than anyone else, but there are diminishing returns on speed and quality of an individual. I miss being a senior sometimes. Being able to go heads down and pair with someone all day on a problem was a great feeling, but I enjoy how much I help my coworkers/friends.

ryanong | 7 years ago | on: On Being a Principal Engineer

This rings true to my experience. I'm a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers.

I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/feature work around the company, process strategy and such. I never expected this to be such a large part of my job, and how much value comes from it.

But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" can be transferred to another company. A lot of the value that I add now is because of the historical knowledge I have. What we have tried as a company, what we haven't, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built.

In the past year, I have seen less than 5 job posting for a staff engineer.

ryanong | 7 years ago | on: Rethinking how we interview in Microsoft’s Developer Division

I feel like these have been standard practices in most of the startups I have worked with over the past 10 years. It is interesting to see that this isn’t the norm already.