thinnerlizzy's comments

Any comments from folks who actually kinda like Drupal? I can cop to it almost driving me to tears until I got over the quite considerable learning curve, and once past that I could most any CRUD app with minimal, if any, new code. Once I got over that hump it was actually quite amazing for prototyping CRUD apps or selling small apps to clients that they never would have otherwise ordered given the cost and time of rolling your own.

Drupal basically is a headless CMS plus a CMS front end if you expose the web service module.

My work experiences during these years were about following strict orders and getting reamed at / yelled it for deviating, trying to improve things, etc.

I worked for several people like this in high school. In fact all of the people I worked for in high school were like this. One example being having to clean hot outdoor bathrooms in mid July heat with a mean case of mono and a temperature of 103. Never mind being “allowed” to call in sick. It took many, many years to realize that work wasn’t supposed to be this way.

After being what I consider a very talented member of our industry for 15 years and having no career advancement whatsoever, I’ve been asking myself over the past couple years whether these experiences are to blame. Getting reamed out all the time seems to have had a lasting impact on my ability to take ownership, do the kinds of things you need to do to get ahead, etc.

Self taught, but at some point over the last several years the hiring criteria changed and I couldn’t get hired for a programming job without software engineering concepts such as binary search trees.

I liked iTunes back in the Steve Jobs days when, if album art wasn’t available, in its place it would display the album info on the diagonal against a white background, as if it were an old bootleg with stamped info on a white record sleeve. As a collector/listener of bootlegs I appreciated that little bit of skeuomorphism.

Anecdotal of course but I left and don’t plan to return. I also don’t know anyone who still lives there that doesn’t want to leave. That was mostly true pre-pandemic however.

I have this problem myself. I've gotten around it in the past by taking roles where the visibility is already baked into it, but I've never really solved the root problem. Now I'm a mostly anonymous, invisible contractor at a FAANG, and I don't know that there's a way break through that even for those most determined.

A 1960 Fisher X-1000 stereo amplifier that pumps out about 50 wpc, high for a tube amplifier. I found it on the street about 10 years ago, restored it, made a new brass faceplate, and it sounds just amazing.

I too have noticed the cadence, and it occurred to me that non-native English speakers probably benefit from his deliberate cadences. I find it to be a well designed podcast.

I had a rejection from Facebook a few months ago and I got no feedback like that. The feedback I got was that I did extremely well throughout the interview process and demonstrated that I was qualified for that type of position. It was just a no for some reason. Unfortunately it’s a rare position and they haven’t called me back with other opportunities.

Several months ago my AirBnB (2FA enabled) account was compromised. The scammer booked me for a property - the listing populated with blatant stock photos, no ratings - that was stated to be somewhere in England, but the pin on the map was somewhere in the ocean off the west coast of South America.

Once I raised the issue with them, I didn't hear from them for over a week. While I was concerned about the ~$1000 they owed me, I was equally concerned that someone had accessed my account. After about a week had passed I got them on the phone again and applied a little pressure, and a couple days later I had my refund. I did this by explaining that I work in the industry and I'm aware of what a big deal the ability to bypass a large company's 2FA is, that there's no excuse to drag their feet over such an obvious scam, and I vaguely alluded to media being interested in a story like this. I don't know how Average Joe would have fared in my case.

By reading the article and this thread there appears to be a variety of ways to conduct a scam on AirBnb.

I've been using Lipton for this purpose and don't like all the packaging either. What do you use to contain the dust while you brew overnight? I make mine in a pitcher that lasts a few days.

Not in my part of Brooklyn. Don’t even think about getting a package shipped to your home address in my zip code.

Thank you! I appreciate it. I do it as much for the love of bringing things to life as the money.

I created ShutterDeck[1], a system for controlling multi-camera arrays. I designed and built the hardware and the iPhone app, which serves as a remote control for the device. I do basically no advertising or I'd probably sell more. The next batch I order will have the boards pre-assembled for me, which I'm really excited about.

Most of my clients have photo booths, but I do have one researcher using it to try to treat scoliosis in children. I'm actively looking for new markets. It barely brings in enough money to make it worth doing, but the system is essential for some users, and I like doing it.

[1] https://shutterdeck.com

I just had a Google technical phone interview. I won't divulge the question but it was related to a design pattern that JavaScript developers use every day in frameworks like Vue/React, yet probably never had to program from scratch. I identified the pattern, described the API correctly, but then I had to implement the API and that's when I knew I was finished. Evidently my intuition of how it should be implemented was also correct, but I started stumbling on relatively minor things (structure of a JSON object) because I didn't have the time I needed to develop an extremely clear mental image of what the details of the solution looked like and I had to keep coding anyway. I'm certain that 20-30 minutes alone would have been sufficient to develop a working proof of concept.

After the interview I ran the problem by a couple very senior front end devs at fang companies and they wouldn't have gotten it either. Before the rejection I thought I might be ok - it's not about getting it correct, they say, it's about the process - but slow thinking is a very real problem in the context of interviews like this.

I second many of the tips here but also if you just want to make things happen while you’re learning, look at modules on Adafruit and Sparkfun. Like software libraries, they abstract away the complexity, and like software libraries you wire them up, write a little glue code, and focus on the application. This approach can get pricey but you will make things happen and get used to being in the space.

I’m going off memory too, but I think that besides the name and profile photo of your friends (and email address?) this API didn’t return much else. And I also think I remember that the amount of your data that would turn up in a friend list API call was limited in some way by your own privacy settings.

In our circle around that time people were calling out apps that required these permissions and recommending that users not authorize them if it was not obvious why the app would require that kind of data. John Gruber comes to mind as one of those people. These calls for caution were not in the mainstream though.

Edit: I believe this API contained info like favorite tv show or band if those fields were filled out in your profile, but again I’m fairly sure that your own privacy settings could have limited this if you had them set to draconian levels. So in other words, yes this API was limited to publicly available data, more or less.

Perhaps "plant-based" is the term they were looking for.