Hacker News: ritchiea

New comment by ritchiea in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2023)"

ritchiea — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 19:21:18 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript/Typescript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a popular Ruby billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS and Digital Ocean as well as writing IaC in Terraform.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: ritchiea@gmail.com

CV and references available upon request.

New comment by ritchiea in "Ask HN: Are there any companies friendly to developers seeking part time work?"

ritchiea — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:56:04 +0000

I'm already a freelancer and posted in the most recent monthly freelance thread.

Ask HN: Are there any companies friendly to developers seeking part time work?

ritchiea — Wed, 03 May 2023 13:45:35 +0000

I asked this once here before and had some positive responses, it's now been 7 years so I hope it's ok to ask once again as things have changed a lot since then.

I'm a developer and also a writer. I'm trying to consistently carve out more time in my weeks for writing (which unfortunately is not very high revenue!) by looking for part time development work. Are there any companies openly friendly to part time development work? Specifically I'm looking for 80-100ish hours a month as a fullstack or frontend developer but welcome any topical replies so that this can be a useful resource to others as well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35802319

Points: 11

# Comments: 19

New comment by ritchiea in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2023)"

ritchiea — Mon, 01 May 2023 23:59:07 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Ruby and Javascript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.

Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS, and Digital Ocean.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Email: ritchiea@gmail.com

CV and references available upon request.

New comment by ritchiea in "No cure for loneliness"

ritchiea — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 07:02:37 +0000

Sort of agree though I would argue "joining an exercise group" is a healthy way to create shallow connections with the aim that one or more of them becomes deeper. Finding deep connections is difficult and requires significant effort from at least one party. You have to work at it. And attempts to create shallow connections shouldn't be dismissed because you generally can't try to create deeper connections in isolation and separately from trying to create shallow connections.

The difficulty of growing a shallow connection into a deeper connection is a large part of why so many people are lonely. We can't just ignore shallow connections because it's unrealistic to only ever aim for deep connections. Connections are experiments that grow.

New comment by ritchiea in "What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?"

ritchiea — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 12:12:47 +0000

The post I was replying to asked if he could play against 1800's and gain rating. Players in the 2500s are much more capable of forcing a draw. It'd be unlikely he'd gain much rating playing against them because wins wouldn't move the needle much and draws would be very costly.

New comment by ritchiea in "What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?"

ritchiea — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 09:37:46 +0000

Technically he could, I believe FIDE has a minimum rating increase of 1 point for the winner of a game with > 400 ELO advantage on their opponent. But if he broke 2900 by playing in minor tournaments against low rated amateur opponents no one would take it seriously that he broke 2900. Realistically many, maybe even all of the top players could push for record ELOs by only playing against players well below their level. But not only are the optics bad and the records would be looked at as illegitimate, it would take a lot of time playing long classical chess games against inferior opponents. Which is a major opportunity cost since their time would normally be spent playing in and studying for professional tournaments.

New comment by ritchiea in "Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)"

ritchiea — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:20:17 +0000

Secret Hitler is a board game the writer is referring to. They're not actually talking about Hitler.

New comment by ritchiea in "Brussels Airlines makes 3,000 unnecessary flights to maintain airport slots"

ritchiea — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 05:15:08 +0000

Actually right now in Europe most (maybe all?) flights can be rescheduled for free in response to the pandemic. Is that not the case elsewhere?

New comment by ritchiea in "Chess Grandmaster Kasparov on Mob Mentality and Groupthink"

ritchiea — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 23:53:20 +0000

"World champion" is also a bit of a title.

New comment by ritchiea in "Chess Grandmaster Kasparov on Mob Mentality and Groupthink"

ritchiea — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 21:03:24 +0000

Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.

New comment by ritchiea in "Is there such a thing as good taste?"

ritchiea — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 15:17:36 +0000

The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.

New comment by ritchiea in "Is there such a thing as good taste?"

ritchiea — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 13:49:39 +0000

It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.

New comment by ritchiea in "Is there such a thing as good taste?"

ritchiea — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 13:10:36 +0000

It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.

Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.

New comment by ritchiea in "Why Co–Star Uses Haskell"

ritchiea — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 17:19:23 +0000

I think it’s subjective. I learned Haskell early on in university and I’ve learned Lisps and it still feels like extra work to reason about programs or model domains in functional languages.

I believe functional programming advocates when you guys say it works better. But I only believe it works better for you. In my experience there’s a minority of people who find functional programming to be a powerful paradigm shift but for most developers functional programming either doesn’t resonate or resonates at the level of an academic exercise that helps you think better about writing code but best remains an academic exercise.

New comment by ritchiea in "Facebook Renames to Meta"

ritchiea — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 19:19:02 +0000

He's lived a different life than nearly anyone else. Certainly so caught up in his responsibilities to Facebook that he's been unable to grow and change and branch out and fail, and be rejected and forced to reinvent or repurpose himself the way most people do. It's impossible to imagine what my life would be like or how my perspective would be different if I was caught in a bubble of a project I started in my late teens turning into a near trillion dollar success that only grew and grew from the moment I started on it.

New comment by ritchiea in "Facebook Renames to Meta"

ritchiea — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 18:44:28 +0000

He’s certainly determined whatever his true self is, it’s not good for business.

New comment by ritchiea in "Willingness to look stupid"

ritchiea — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:03:54 +0000

Why does the reader need to read this blog post?

We don’t but we think we might learn something or be entertained. Withholding a piece of information that lots of readers are naturally curious about is odd. I like the post & Dan Luu’s writing in general but I’m dying to know the why behind the computer in the smallest box request.

New comment by ritchiea in "Show HN: ChessCoach – A neural chess engine that comments on each player's moves"

ritchiea — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 10:26:25 +0000

You estimate it’s rated 3400-ish and it loses games????

New comment by ritchiea in "That time I told my wife I wanted to quit my job"

ritchiea — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:50:28 +0000

Agree it’s not a great or neutral look for all audiences.

Why not set it to private?