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This story makes me smile. Back in the late-2000's, I worked at CNN on a 12-month contract. While there, I built a predecessor to the current "Breaking News"
by StevePerkins 4y ago
This story makes me smile.
Back in the late-2000's, I worked at CNN on a 12-month contract. While there, I built a predecessor to the current "Breaking News" website banner.
At least at the time, Turner did not allow contractors to extend beyond the 12-month mark. So when my contract came up, they offered to convert me over to perm. I declined, because my interests lay more on the backend side of the tech stack, and my role there had been far more frontend-focused than I wanted for the long term.
Fast-forward 10 to 15 years, and I've had a lot of experiences that I'm very proud of. I've built concurrent systems that scaled to impressive levels of data. I've built event busses that moved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of financial transactions per year. Etc.
STILL, "my son built the Breaking News banner on cnn.com!" is the thing that my mom tells her friends. It's the only thing that my wife ever understood about what I do for a living.
There is such power in the visual, and in the consumer-side. In a very real sense, this silly thing was the crowning achievement of my career... and it was about two days of work and a few hundred lines of HTML and jQuery.
- brightball 4y agoRelated, I've often thought a resume site like LinkedIn should include a "What does your mom tell her friends that you do?" section. :-) It would probably be pretty entertaining.
- jdhawk 4y agothis is an awesome idea. a newer title for an executive summary for less traditional companies.
- Karawebnetwork 4y agoAsk HN: "What does your parent(s) tell their friends that you do?"
- IncRnd 4y agoThread created! I wonder what replies we will get? Ask HN: What does your Mom tell people about your work or employment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601004
- baisq 4y ago"He spends all day on his computer"
- symfoniq 4y agoMy daughter used to think—and tell people—that her father "makes money." Then one day I figured out that she thought I literally created paper currency at my day job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWith the exception of my father I make more money than my entire extended family and partner's family. Doesn't stop them from striking a dismissive and disdainful tone when talking about my work. Oh well. Whaddya gonna do.
- stereoradonc 4y agoExactly what my mom (and sister) says.
- lostphilosopher 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/722/ https://xkcd.com/722/
- txbuck 4y ago"I spend all day getting pissed at my machine for doing exactly what I told it to do."
- gumby 4y agoMy mother, in her 80s, still complains that she can’t tell her friends what I do for a living. This is despite any number of press articles, selling companies and the like. She wants the classic Indian mother straightforward explanation (doctor, engineer, lawyer etc).
- lupire 4y agoYour profile says you are an engineer.
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
- tpmx 4y agoThat's for the web. For TV, something like the software solutions listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/broadcastengineering/comments/s6s7ms/does_anyone_know_what_software_large_news/ https://www.reddit.com/r/broadcastengineering/comments/s6s7m...
- spoils19 4y agoCan anyone help me understand why this comment is being downvoted? As a community I thought we were well against over-use of JavaScript, and we should be calling it out as necessary.
- StevePerkins 4y agoI did not downvote this, but I would speculate that factors might include: 1. Poor reading comprehension (i.e. speaking in the present tense, about an implementation that's clearly described as a "predecessor" from 10-15 years ago?). 2. Unnecessary snark (i.e. one "is not surprised" that a web page used HTML and Javascript?). 3. The bizarre possibility that parent might be mistaking the website and the television broadcast, even though the original comment specifies "website banner". See factor #1 above. 4. You are grossly mistaken about there being an overwhelming consensus against Javascript? Or that snarky parent comment "calls it out" in an effective manner? If I were to downvote, it would have been for #1.
- stevage 4y agoWait, you can dovnvote? The app I use only upvotes
- sofixa 4y agoDepends on your karma too, past certain amounts you can downvote, flag, vouch (anti-flag).
- jedberg 4y agoI feel ya man. When I worked at reddit I did mostly backend, set up the entire AWS cloud deployment and the datacenter before that, ran the databases, etc. But when someone asks what I did at reddit, the thing that gets the most interest is, "I made the thing that puts the link title in the URL".
- greyskull 4y agoI always wondered why reddit decided to make that inextricable link. Any insight on why post titles aren't editable? I thought maybe it's a database optimization, but it could also just be an unfortunate design decision.
- markstos 4y agoBesides technical reaosns, it could be to avoid bait-and-switch schemes, where a lot of engagement is built around one headline, and then it's changed to something with a completely different meaning.
- TwelveNights 4y agoI've always thought that Twitter adopted the same line of thinking, preventing tweets from being editable.
- jedberg 4y agoI think it twitter's case it was architectural. By treating tweets as immutable the could publish them on a pipeline and not worry about duplicate copies around the system being out of sync.
- mattnewton 4y agoThat and early on it used sms as one of the interfaces, which is not editable.
- westoque 4y agoRelated. I also have a similar experience when I worked as a contractor for [big ecommerce] for simply building a JavaScript loader that loaded ads on their ecommerce platform using JSONP. That ad loader got millions of views and pretty much seen everytime you shopped online at the site and surprisingly that's what gets most people excited when I tell them about my experience thinking it's such a crowning achievement as well.
- blahblarblar 4y agoGreat example of how the market doesn’t really care about the how, just the what.
- deckard1 4y ago> There is such power in the visual, and in the consumer-side. This is, unfortunately, true with managers and execs. Do some backend thing, no one notices as long as the site doesn't go down. But do some flashy thing on the front-end, let's give so-and-so a promotion and a big bag of money. This is even true of tech companies where you would assume more tech-oriented managers exist. But sadly, no. They have to pitch your work to higher ups and the higher ups just have their eyes glazed over when they hear about databases and caching and transactions per second.
- xtracto 4y agoI've got a similar proud moment. Back in the Flash days, I built the flash player skin for a starwars.com player that sat in their homepage for a while. Since then, I've built way more complicated things I'm proud of. But nothing beats that during beer time with friends .