Interesting to see this as I’ve never heard returning to adolescent interests being common but that’s exactly the path I followed after leaving tech. I tried getting into sound engineering because I loved recording with rented 4 track recorders and early software DAWs in my late teen years. It didn’t stick and I ended up going back further to when I found an old Honda Trail 70 in a barn when I was a kid and rode around absolutely everywhere in my local area just to explore.
I recently found the adventure riding community and built up a Husky 701 for multi-day (hopefully multi-week in the future) on/off road trips. It’s not unlike a small open source project but more physically active. I’m early 40s now and plan to explore on a bike into my 60s.
I also recently bought a ranch in Colorado. This isn’t from my childhood but turned out to hit all the right notes for me. Ranchin’ is almost impossible to make a profit at but I’ve met a bunch of people now who can’t stop doing it and I understand why. It’s a never ending stream of natural projects, big and small, that engage every part of you mentally and physically. Again here, not unlike a (larger) software project.
I went into tech because I thought I liked hacking, turns out I just like work, especially on systems you can iterate on every day and see improvement.
As for tech, I haven’t written a line of code in years and rarely use the internet except for practical things like maps and basic information. I still browse HN occasionally. Not sure why as there’s not a lot of content relevant to my current interests. It still has a little of whatever I loved about tech in the 2000-2015 era, which seems entirely gone from the wider internet now.
I made the jump to a System76 Adder WS laptop and pop!os for development after buying the lemon first gen MBP with the terrible keyboard. It was my seventh and possibly last MBP (including powerbooks before it).
I was considering one of the new 13” MBPs but that seems unlikely if injecting network latency into syscalls is the direction things are going.
If you’re not building Mac/iOS apps, find a Linux laptop you can tolerate for development and an iPad Pro for everything else.
I’ve been thinking about bike vs scooter a lot lately too. Austin is overrun with scooters and I used them for a little while before finding the electric Uber Jump bikes. They seem superior to scooters in every way in Austin, which makes the 20:1 ratio of scooters to bikes a bit baffling.
But I can see your point in SF where I use to walk 5 blocks from my apartment to the muni train and then another five blocks from the train to the office. Scooters would have been ideal there.
The e-bikes have one massive advantage in Austin - you can take them on the Butler Trail that runs the width of the Austin along the river. You can get almost anywhere of interest very quickly on one of the jump bikes.
There’s also no useful bus or train transport in Austin (I thought SF was bad) so you’re not using the small transport to move small distances between larger transport as often.
We have the Jump e-bikes here in Atlanta, and I also prefer them to scooters. There are a lot of old roads and sidewalks with cracks that make riding a scooter can be dangerous. With the small wheels, you really have to pay attention to the road ahead of you.
Unfortunately, I received an email earlier this month that Jump is pulling all the e-bikes from the city. I wonder if operating costs or cost fo replacement make them unrealistic?
Ugh. Build dedicated lanes, then, Atlanta. A scooter-pedestrian collision isn't pleasant, but it has a far, far better outcome for the pedestrian than a car-scooter collision does for the scooter.
I speak as someone who bikes and walks, and is as annoyed as everyone else by scooters -- they still have a right to personal safety.
I bought my own e-bike for use in Atlanta, and commuted exclusively by bike for nearly a year, including the previous winter. I had about a 4 mile commute and it turned it into a leisurely 15-20 minute ride, partially on the beltline. Parking is free, and I could bring my bike into my office. The real advantage of e-bikes is just how easy it is to climb hills with a 500-750 watt motor.
I've moved jobs and am out in the burbs, but plan on moving back pretty soon.
Also in Austin, and agree. Bikes just feel so much safer to me, especially at higher speeds for longer distances. I've already almost died twice on scooters, and have almost no close calls on my bike on a regular basis.
I’ve used a chemex + quality grinder for a long time and haven’t found anything better so not much to add there.
I’ve started experimenting with roasting at home, though, and am surprised at how easy it is. Time since roast seems to be one of the most important variables for taste and beans are by far the largest expense. You can buy a 3lb bag of unroasted green coffee on Amazon for $20:
It takes about 13 minutes to roast a hopper’s worth of beans. I use a normal castiron skillet over medium heat. Just keep the beans moving the whole time.
I've just started dabbling on a small project and would be interested to understand how features overlap and differences in license/distribution model.
Auth0 is top-notch SaaS. I have only good things to say about their product.
Aside from being OSS, one major difference is that Keratin AuthN is purely an API. It's optimized for customization so that it will fit with any bespoke (secure) UX you want to provide. I found Auth0's API to be something of an after-thought, second to their hosted/branded/templatable pages.
Fun fact: a blame-based suggested reviewers UI was included in the original Pull Request design mockups. We shipped with a much weaker list of everyone with write access list and eventually dropped the list altogether due to it not being very useful. I've always wished we would have revisited the blame based approach instead. A seemingly small feature that could dramatically improve communication and reduce noise.
I'm as keen to see memory safe systems languages become commonplace as anyone but some 90% of our stack is C - Linux, MySQL, Git, MRI, nginx, haproxy, memcached, redis, and many other internal components that we'll be talking about on the engineering blog soon. We like C. We're going to need a few more years of research, real production experience, and language/library maturity before betting critical infrastructure on something else by default.
> We like C. We're going to need a few more years of
> research, real production experience, and
> language/library maturity before betting critical
> infrastructure on something else by default.
That's a really bizarre opinion to hold in the year 2015. Don't get me wrong: I love C, too. But certainly not for home-grown infrastructure at a web company — the incentives just don't align. And hiding behind the "we just don't know" bugbear doesn't parse, either. Go, for example, powers gargantuan-scale infrastructure at Google, and has for half a decade. And there's whole fleets of organizations as big or bigger than GitHub that report the same experience.
Google also has a gargantuan-scale dev team that includes the people behind Go. It's ridiculous to compare. If Github does not yet themselves have sufficient people with sufficient experience supporting large services in Go, betting critical infrastructure on it would be irresponsible.
Note that he is not saying they're not open to alternatives, nor that they're not experimenting with alternatives, but that they need more experience first before "betting critical infrastructure on something else by default".
> Google also has a gargantuan-scale dev team that
> includes the people behind Go. It's ridiculous to
> compare.
It's not ridiculous. There are probably reasonable arguments against using Go for things like this, but "insufficient developer capacity" isn't one of them. Becoming a Go expert is a task measured in weeks.
"Unfortunately, your request for a 5% raise was rejected. We're sorry to see you go. Can you help hire a replacement? Just write up a quick job posting w/ your basic work experience and daily routine. Thanks."
I recently found the adventure riding community and built up a Husky 701 for multi-day (hopefully multi-week in the future) on/off road trips. It’s not unlike a small open source project but more physically active. I’m early 40s now and plan to explore on a bike into my 60s.
I also recently bought a ranch in Colorado. This isn’t from my childhood but turned out to hit all the right notes for me. Ranchin’ is almost impossible to make a profit at but I’ve met a bunch of people now who can’t stop doing it and I understand why. It’s a never ending stream of natural projects, big and small, that engage every part of you mentally and physically. Again here, not unlike a (larger) software project.
I went into tech because I thought I liked hacking, turns out I just like work, especially on systems you can iterate on every day and see improvement.
As for tech, I haven’t written a line of code in years and rarely use the internet except for practical things like maps and basic information. I still browse HN occasionally. Not sure why as there’s not a lot of content relevant to my current interests. It still has a little of whatever I loved about tech in the 2000-2015 era, which seems entirely gone from the wider internet now.