Remote: Preferred

Willing to Locate: No

Technologies: 10 years of professional experience, working primarily in full-stack web development. I work daily in Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git. I'm familiar (Use most months) with ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue. As Hobbies, or smaller projects (used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- Miscellaneous tasks as they come up, recently, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some research, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected. Outside of work, I ran https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Email: Femme@Femmeandroid.com

Good luck with whatever you're working on!

I certainly think Deadlocks ui is unfinished, but the gameplay is certainly something that hasn't been done super well.

I don't love deadlock yet but haven't played it much. Plus, my opinion means nothing, I thought Artifact was a great game.

> if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve.

In 2018, valve aquired Campo Santo. They were a 12 person company who made Firewatch and were working on a new game.

Since then, one of the founders worked on writing Half-Life Alyx. The rest have done little to nothing at valve despite being industry veterans who alwys seemed passionate about games. At least half of the employees at the time of the aquisition have left valve. Im too lazy and sick to look up everyone, but the people who wanted to make games left to good companies where they could work on games.

I personally am happy for the Campo Santo team that they hopefully did well financially in the acquisition, but I an sad that a team working on novel narrative games with high production values was disbanded with little to show for it.

If I was into media enough to spend $3,500 to have a great experience, it would be a bummer if I couldn't watch a movie with someone else occasionally.

8 years of professional experience, working primarially in full-stack web development. I work daily in Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git. I'm familiar (Use most months) with ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue. As Hobbies, or smaller projects (used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

I work well with teams but thrive on independent work, and delivering consistent results. As a bit of a heads up, I'm fairly selective about freelance work at the moment.

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- This month, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some reasearch, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected.

Outside of work, I run https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

Contact: Femme@Femmeandroid.com

Good luck with whatever you're working on!

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: Available upon request. I keep the work associated with my online accounts private.

Email: Femme@Femmeandroid.com

- 8 years of professional development experience as a full stack developer.

- Most familiar (use most days): Python, FastAPI, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, MacOS, Docker, AWS (EC2, RDS, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM), Git

- Familiar (Use most months): ElasticSearch, CloudSearch, Tailwind, Vue

- Hobbies (Used on at least one completed project over the past five years): Go, Zig, C, C++, Rust, Phoenix, NoSQL, MongoDB, (probably more, but these were the ones that came to mind.)

My day job has me performing two main functions:

- Building full stack web development systems. I generally lean more towards writing backend code, and documenting our infrastructure. UI is my weakest area. This role has me working in datasets with ~1 billion row tables, and search indexes with ~100 million documents. Since we're a small company (~8 developers), I have been a major part of the architecture of our systems over the past 8 years. We've got five separate core businesses that our dev team supports, and I've been a part of architecting and implementing all of them. I would prefer to focus more on backend development in a future role.

- Creating one-off scripts or processes to assist in business functions. These tend to involve quickly reverse engineering undocumented web APIs we have permission to use, and querying them for our customers. At their simplest, these are a mix of writing some SQL and a few HTTP requests. At their most complicated, they have involved designing and implementing a tree structure to accurately model the business domain, and then pulling data about these structures from relevant public APIs.

- This month, I reduced the cost of a company's AWS CloudSearch spend by 80% (over 10k/month) by reviewing their codebase, doing some reasearch, and improving what they were storing and how they were doing so. This required a one-line code change on the existing codebase, and writing a new, short (~500 line) indexer. Doing a deep dive into the single highest AWS line item was the impetus for the project, and frankly, it turned out far better than expected.

Outside of work, I run https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com, a website I built and maintain. It really will self-destruct, and it reaches ~100k users and handles ~13M requests each month. Building tools and infrastructure to manage its moderation and keep it a positive community has been a huge learning experience.

About 2 years later, he left the company. Very few - if any - customers were generated, but there was a sizable Google Ads spend.

I think the business owners had quite good luck with hiring talented people and letting them get to work, fairly hands-off. The guy spoke well and could quote many marketing gurus. I never found what he said to be particularly useful for the company, but I assumed he was getting results since someone was keeping him around.

I believe many owners of successful businesses have blind spots and need people they can turn to fill them. Sometimes that goes poorly.

Right now I’m fixing a similar snafu where I’m halving a not-insignificant AWS monthly bill for a company due to an ‘expert’ doing something very expensive. Like, 2 weeks of work will cut many developers annual salaries worth of AWS spend a year. Sometimes you get bad advice and you’re growing & making enough money that you can ignore the seemingly huge inefficiencies.

> This makes as much sense as saying that a company spent $1.5 MM on five engineers for a year without a single line of code ever being written.

I mean, if you change this to ‘functional line of code’ or ‘usable line of code’ I have definitely seen that occur with one or two developers over my career.

I don’t think it’s the norm, but I do think it happens.

His review probably made me more excited than anything else to give it a try.

I’ve definitely talked poetry and writing with a therapist, and while I’ve never had my therapist provide code, we’ve definitely talked tech in great detail.

Maybe those therapists were intentionally making me comfortable by engaging with shared interests. And the LLM isn’t being intentional about it, but I’m not convinced that a therapist is ineffective if they fail to stay ‘on topic’ when directed off topic by their patient.

I'd imagine it would be a lot harder to avoid being 'thirsty on main' without these features.

Just checked, and signed up with a random second account. They add the phone number from the previous account you were on by default, and mention copying your other non-public information over from the previous account you were signed in to.

Despite a couple of serious attempts, committing to the process for a few months each time, I've rarely found myself referring back to the stored information. More importantly, the process of adding to and maintaining the knowledge base felt more burdensome than beneficial. I've tried adjusting the content and format of what I'm storing in an attempt to make the experience more manageable, but to no avail.

My main motivation for exploring this further is my growing concern about my recollection ability as I age, and I'd like to fully exploit the available tools to counteract this.

So, for those of you who do have a functioning system that you use regularly - regardless of its simplicity or complexity - how do you employ it to retrieve information or enhance your understanding of topics? Insights into how your system operates would be useful, but are secondary for me at this point. I feel like I've read about all the possible configurations a system could have, yet I'm skeptical about the tangible benefits they can provide. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667634

Points: 39

# Comments: 33

I had an issue where I opened threads before realizing I wanted to create a new Instagram account for it. I had to hard quit the threads app, create the new account on Instagram, sign in with it, then re-launch threads.

> I won't say they are worse at coding, but more that I am more familiar with how dependencies work because I've already done the same thing when I was a junior. Also, knowing who to ask for help also helps a lot.

I might phrase this a bit differently, but I think it’s getting at my thoughts as well.

I work with developers who would destroy me in a race to implement various search algorithms, or whatever discrete metric of coding prowess you want.

What they struggle with is:

- Efficiently getting other teams to answer their blocking questions in a way that makes the other team happy to work with them.

- Understanding the existing features of our fairly complex stack.

- Judging when to ask for help, and who to go to about a particular problem.

- Identifying dead ends quickly, and pivoting to alternative solutions at the first sign of trouble.

- Incorrect assumptions about the company’s priorities, and how the priorities can help shape the request.

I end up in a lot of meetings, but I also occasionally (a couple times a year on average,) take a few weeks and implement a business goal that a team has been stuck at for months/years.

I have ambitions to do this occasionally, and I tracked things and took notes a lot for a while, but I never found myself using it.