Hacker News: bpowell

New comment by bpowell in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)"

bpowell — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:10:24 +0000

NowSecure | Senior DevOps Engineer | Vienna, VA | Full-time

We are leading in cutting edge mobile security and sponsor a number of open-source tools such as radare (https://github.com/radare/radare2) and Frida (https://github.com/frida/) that are widely used by security researchers. Unfortunately we can’t offer sponsorship at this time and candidates must be located in the continental US. We are looking to fill a senior devops position. When applying please put in you found this on Hacker News!

=========== What we are looking for ===========

- You've done Kubernetes the hard way - or better yet, you know what it is, but you've spent more time working with Kubernetes in production than reading about it.

- You have development experience. We write code on top of the Kubernetes API so being able to dive deep into code is extremely valuable!

https://nowsecure.applytojob.com/apply/M0BWUuayww/Senior-Pla...

New comment by bpowell in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)"

bpowell — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:56:59 +0000

NowSecure | Senior DevOps Engineer | US Remote | Full-time We are leading in cutting edge mobile security and sponsor a number of open-source tools such as radare (https://github.com/radare/radare2) and Frida (https://github.com/frida/) that are widely used by security researchers. Unfortunately we can’t offer sponsorship at this time and candidates must be located in the continental US. We are looking to fill a senior devops position.

When applying please put in you found this on Hacker News!

=========== What we are looking for ===========

- You've done Kubernetes the hard way - or better yet, you know what it is, but you've spent more time working with Kubernetes in production than reading about it.

- You have development experience. We write code on top of the Kubernetes API so being able to dive deep into code is extremely valuable!

https://nowsecure.applytojob.com/apply/oiwPgGyOoR/Senior-Pla...

New comment by bpowell in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)"

bpowell — Thu, 01 May 2025 18:37:54 +0000

NowSecure | Senior DevOps Engineer | US Remote | Full-time

When applying please put in you found this on Hacker News!

=========== What we are looking for ===========

- You've done Kubernetes the hard way - or better yet, you know what it is, but you've spent more time working with Kubernetes in production than reading about it.

- You have development experience. We write code on top of the Kubernetes API so being able to dive deep into code is extremely valuable!

https://nowsecure.applytojob.com/apply/oiwPgGyOoR/Senior-Pla...

New comment by bpowell in "Maybe people do care about performance and reliability"

bpowell — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 02:59:57 +0000

My guess would be something like Docker Desktop for Mac. It's free for personal use, but if you are using it from a company standpoint, it is not free

State of Public Transit in Detroit

bpowell — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 16:35:01 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@coreyjrowe/college-commuter-the-state-of-transit-in-metro-detroit-4f3ae38e4915

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115869

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bpowell in "Japanese Writing After Murakami"

bpowell — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 23:21:53 +0000

I really liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami.

Automate All the Things

bpowell — Mon, 21 May 2018 12:20:06 +0000

Article URL: http://brandonsdevblog.me/post/automate-all-the-things/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17117826

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bpowell in "Ask HN: Strategies for mentoring junior developers?"

bpowell — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:24:55 +0000

One of the best ways I found is to hire in pairs. Don't just hire one junior (or entry level) at a time. Hire two or more at once so they can help each other learn your stack. At the university I work at, this is how we handle it. We hire a lot of students to help develop our application. These students are far from entry level when we hire them. Most have taken maybe one CS class at the university level.

It takes a lot of time to mentor these students, so one of the ways we handle that is have some of the more "seasoned" student developers help train. This works out very well for us, in that we have two seasoned student developers that help train the four fresh students we have. The questions that the newly hired students have can generally be answered by another student, because they probably had the same problem. While these seasoned students help out a lot, I still have to spend time mentoring and training. Be prepared to spend more time than what you think, but the rewards pay off in the end.

Also it helps if you find what the developer is passionate about and maybe find work that aligns well with that. We had a former student that once we found out they wanted to do iOS development, we put them on that task and they really shined. It does take some work to find out what they want to get into, but it has worked well for us.

As for getting up to the "senior developer" skill level, that is not something that we have baked into our student program. Once a student graduates, they can no longer work with us. It takes more than the typical 4-5 years to graduate university to hit that level.

Git Workflow

bpowell — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 13:45:23 +0000

Article URL: http://brandonsdevblog.me/post/git-workflow/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465172

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bpowell in "Stanford University data glitch exposes truth about scholarships"

bpowell — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 19:10:02 +0000

I work in the central IT department at a university that has around 20,000 students. You are a 100% correct that we are very underfunded and understaffed. I'm the lead and only full time programmer for the entire portal system. We make due by hiring students to help off load the work for us full timers.

Our security team is relatively new. When I first started back in 2013 we didn't really have one. So if you had a few programmers that didn't understand security, many things got through. We do a much better job now, but I can see how other universities can really struggle.

New comment by bpowell in "Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?"

bpowell — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 16:51:57 +0000

https://github.com/bpowell/brocker

The place I work at is not ready to use something like docker, so I made a cloneish of docker for us to use. We are still in the early stages of it right now. Brocker is a combination of docker and kubernetes. Sorry for the bad documentation, I'm slowly adding more.

New comment by bpowell in "Open Salaries: Outcomes"

bpowell — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 02:32:38 +0000

I work at a public university in Michigan as a Java developer. All of our salaries are open to the public. It has actually caused more friction that what I expected. Maybe it is just the people I work with, but once raises were announced people got very upset. It was mostly why is person A paid THAT much, they don't do anything.

New comment by bpowell in "Where's the Generic Insulin?"

bpowell — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 22:30:41 +0000

I'm also a type 1 and highly recommend the Walmart Reli-On test strips. Cost savings on those is amazing. I do have the Reli-On meter and they work great together.

New comment by bpowell in "An NES emulator written in Go"

bpowell — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:41:36 +0000

I plan on blogging about it once I get more into it. I have just started doing some basic programming and reading up on how the GameBoy works.

I never grew up! I still play my old GameBoy Color when I go on long trips. I know there are many emulators out there for these old systems, but I want to know how they work and figured if I'm still playing with one, let's make one!

New comment by bpowell in "An NES emulator written in Go"

bpowell — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:36:42 +0000

I have been reading through the emulator in Javascript walkthrough. It does a good job at explaining the basics. I'm not very far into development, still trying to understand the basics of the CPU. The manual and opcode chart you posted will help out a lot with that.

Thanks for the tip about the CPU instructions. I did notice that, but when looking through the Javascript code there was a one to one relationship with opcodes to instructions. Wasn't sure why the person went that way, maybe because it was easier? Either way I will keep that in mind and try to do code reuse!

Test ROMs are amazing! I have been playing around with a few ROMs I have and they all seem very complicated. This should make it easier to determine if I'm on the right track or not.

With the little code I have written, 90% of it is Printf to the screen to see what is going on :).

I do want to share with you this other tutorial that I found [1]. It is similar to the Javascript one, but it goes into way more detail on some parts.

Thanks very much for all the help! I have a lot of reading to do this weekend!

[1]: https://realboyemulator.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/the-nintend...

New comment by bpowell in "An NES emulator written in Go"

bpowell — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 15:51:38 +0000

I'm in the process of doing the same thing. Instead of using Rust I'm going to try to use Go. Would you mind sharing any resources that you found to help write the emulator?

New comment by bpowell in "Ten years of Ubuntu"

bpowell — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:16:23 +0000

I have the 13" XPS. The size and weight of it are really good for traveling. The battery life is not very good. I get maybe 3 hours on it in Linux. There might be some settings that need to be tweaked to get more life out of it. Also the WiFi on the device, even in Windows 8, sucks. The connection drops quite frequently and some AP it will not connect to. The computer is only a year old, so the new ones might be better now.

New comment by bpowell in "Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics Of Open Source"

bpowell — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 23:59:32 +0000

Unicon Inc, http://www.unicon.net/, partly does this. They cater to higher education with software like uPortal, CAS, and uMobile. All of these software products are open source, but they make money off of a support model like this. Universities that pay them for support can vote on features that they want worked on. I do not work for them, but my employer does use them for our student portal.