eldavido

99 ms·

841.
by eldavido 12y ago
Sure. And to be clear, I in no way think applications is easier. In fact, applications, as they're closer to end-users, have to deal with all kinds of socially-imposed whimsy like people with four names, tax rules, interest rate calcul
842.
by eldavido 12y ago
I don't agree. If you spend a few years at university (I have two degrees), you learn things like sorts, automata, proofs, and calculus. On the other hand, most of the junk I deal with day-to-day as a working software developer turns m
843.
by eldavido 12y ago
I think the change is purely additive. Great engineering is no less valuable than it once was, but pure "idea guys" can do stuff now that they couldn't do before.
844.
by eldavido 12y ago
This has always been the case. Software people in the 70s and 80s already had the distinction between "systems" and "application" programmers -- the former understood to be concerned with making the pipes and plumbing, v
845.
by eldavido 12y ago
As I sit sipping my coffee in south soma (SF), I'm imagining what the climate must be like over at 640 7th St. I was the ops director at my company for about a year. Even though I've moved to a different role, posts like this trig
846.
by eldavido 12y ago
Try to avoid dealing with these people unless you really must; your time is better spent directly targeting line managers with hiring authority.
847.
by eldavido 12y ago
This is good advice but it really depends on whether the client/company views software as a revenue driver in its own right, or a means to an end. For places that use (not make) software, the best bet is always to focus on solving the
848.
by eldavido 12y ago
This has actually been opposite of my experience. I've seen that bigger cos, owing to being better resourced, can be more patient about the payoffs of long-term bets (including training young/inexperienced employees). Microsoft c
849.
by eldavido 12y ago
At the risk of pedantry, it depends on whether their allocation is centrally coordinated. 4 billion IDs with central coordination isn't too bad, but you need a much, much bigger space to make collision-free, uncoordinated ID assignment
850.
by eldavido 12y ago
You should be very careful with this. Even a relatively low TTL of 300 (5 minutes) can be too long to wait during a major outage. Make sure changing CNAMEs is a very rare thing, and be prepared to tolerate inconsistency. It's also wort
851.
by eldavido 12y ago
We used something very similar to this where I work (Crittercism). I designed most of it. I used five-part DNS CNAMEs exactly how they're specified in the article (a bit shocking, actually) except that mine switch the "group nam
852.
by eldavido 12y ago
I've been working on a project to do building monitoring. I'm building a library in C that talks to an Akka/Scala backend. I initially chose MQTT to connect from the C library (that runs on the device) to the Akka system, via
853.
by eldavido 12y ago
I think it depends a lot on (1) product complexity and (2) who the customers are. Stripe has the luxury of a product with straightforward requirements (note this says nothing of the technical architecture/complexity of the product, jus
854.
by eldavido 12y ago
Agree. College is too expensive and unique to get distracted by taking on a lot of other commitments. I don't know what kind of college the OP attended, but if it's not hard enough to be genuinely challenging and demand your full
855.
by eldavido 12y ago
We use PagerDuty and couldn't be happier with the product. Ops in a modern startup (based on my experience at Crittercism) is about 1/3 automation (deploys, backups, cronjobs, etc.) 1/3 monitoring, and 1/3 vendor/pr
856.
by eldavido 12y ago
+1, (1) (2) and (3) are very real problems in industrial software development. I've been reading a lot how Twitter transitioned from an RoR monolith ("monorail") to SOA when they got big enough, it's a rough journey but
857.
by eldavido 12y ago
Slightly meta, but: has anyone else noticed how much love languages with very strong type disciplines have been getting on HN recently? Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Go, Rust jump out. Maybe language designers/toolmakers are getting better
858.
by eldavido 12y ago
This would be an unmitigated disaster. Everyone would call Comcast, Comcast would tell the story their way, and things would be even worse than they are now. They'd probably get on national nightly news talking about how their "pa
859.
by eldavido 12y ago
Interested in this stuff? Get a computer engineering degree. This is precisely what we studied in my first-year programming classes. I have fond memories of lecture halls with blackboards on every wall, divided into right and left columns,
860.
by eldavido 12y ago
snort, last time I checked, operated on much simpler primitives like regular expressions and static strings. Bro, on the other hand, is less of a product and more of a framework (think RoR) for studying protocol design and parsing. It'
861.
by eldavido 12y ago
Incidentally, a big part of my thesis was studying DNS parsers and how network vulnerabilities can be expressed and tracked. It turns out to be an interesting language design problem. One of our papers, "VESPA", the "vulnerab
862.
by eldavido 12y ago
I did a ton of work with bro in graduate school, including extensive collaboration with Robin Somer, one of the project's architects. Bro is a great product, written primarily in C++, which parses protocols and passes events about thos
863.
by eldavido 12y ago
Clarification: Broadly speaking, I think there are two major classes of software. "Class 1" software is produced under tight budget constraints, often for a cost center. These are the payroll systems, the receivables tracking apps
864.
by eldavido 12y ago
This is a great vignette on why I insist on working in Bay Area-style companies. The kind of places that view software test/dev as labor or "resources" really are missing the point. Owing to work styles, tools, experience, an
865.
by eldavido 12y ago
Would love more elaboration on this. What factors are you talking about, specifically?
866.
by eldavido 12y ago
Update: Emile got back to me and we're working it out. I haven't received anything definite yet, but he's at least trying to make it right.
867.
by eldavido 12y ago
I think it's ridiculous that this comment got downvoted. I read hacker news every day and want to have a conversation about fulfillment, business models, and maybe learn about various marketplaces and how they're dealing with the
868.
by eldavido 12y ago
I'd like it if one of these marketplaces emerged that was more careful about vetting sellers. I've ordered Raspberry Pi-related gear off of two unrelated e-com sites in the past month (one was Tindie) and have yet to receive the g
869.
by eldavido 13y ago
Maybe. I have a roommate in SF. He's freelancing, I'm working at a company. He's making more cash than I am, but I'm working on building a company (as an employee) that's shipped multiple iterations of a category-le
870.
by eldavido 13y ago
A good start would be putting your contact info in your "about" on HN. I know a few people here in SF looking for contractors who'd probably be happy to send some work your way...

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