Are you a Senior Developer & struggling to switch your job?

Here's a thread on how you should prepare before sending out job applications:

🧵👇🏻

First of all know that there's a lot of demand for good software developers.

It's hard for companies to hire good mid level developers. Some of the interviewers I've talked to recently have mentioned this!

So, if you're good, you can always get into a high paying job.

I have 6.5 years of experience mainly as a Backend Developer. Although I do work a bit of front-end tasks as well as part of my current job.

In this thread I'm going to talk about how I would prepare if I was going to apply for a job interview.

As a mid level developer having 4 - 8 years of experience, you will be expected to have certain skills to be hired by companies. Skills like:

- Problem Solving
- HLD
- LLD
- Mentoring / Code reviews
- Taking responsibility
- Leading end-end development & release of projects etc

Problem Solving:

Even though we mostly never write a lot of game changing Algorithms and use data structures, you're still expected to know the most common ones and how to use them to solve problems:

- Tree
- Linked List
- Heap
- Hash Map
- Array etc

0/ I’m tired of hearing about observability replacing monitoring. It’s not going to, and that’s because it shouldn’t.

Observability will not _replace_ monitoring, it will _augment_ monitoring.

Here’s a thread about observability, and how monitoring can evolve to fit in: 👇

1/ Let’s start with the diagram (above) illustrating the anatomy of observability. There are three layers:

I. (Open)Telemetry: acquire high-quality data with minimal effort
II. Storage: “Stats over time” and “Transactions over time”
III. Benefits: *solve actual problems*

2/ The direction for “Telemetry” is simple: @opentelemetry.

(This is the (only) place where the so-called "three pillars” come in, by the way. If you think you’ve solved the observability problem by collecting traces, metrics, and logs, you’re about to be disappointed. :-/ )

3/ The answer for “Storage” depends on your workload, but we’ve learned that it’s glib to expect a data platform to support observability with *just* a TSDB or *just* a transaction/trace/logging DB. And also that “cost profiling and control” is a core platform feature.

4/ But what about “Benefits”? There’s all of that business about Control Theory (too academic) and “unknown unknowns” (too abstract). And “three pillars” which is complete BS, per the above (it’s just “the three pillars of telemetry,” at best).

For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵

1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.

2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)

3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”

4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
◻️"Customers who viewed also viewed"

Have been replaced w/ ads:

◻️ "Sponsored products related to"
◻️ "Brands related to this category"

maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with

when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay

I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets

that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM

huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?

#UX and #design friends, we need to talk about estimating. I'd like to share some advice that's come up 3 times this week, in hopes it's useful. And it's echoed, by the way, in the BUSINESS OF UX course @EliNatoli and I are teaching at my UX 365 Academy (link at the end).

(1/12)

Avoiding wars with clients is a matter of how you structure your engagements, along with how you spell out what you're doing in your proposals/contracts. That starts with estimating.

The biggest 2 rules I follow are these:

(2/12)

1. I do not EVER estimate a project in full from start-to-finish.

2. Once we're past initial Discovery (see below), I estimate in small chunks, e.g. "here's what will take us to the next iteration/review."

(3/12)

NEVER estimate past the point where you may get new information based on a build/test cycle.

Believe me when I say that you'll be wrong every time. Ask me how I know ;-)

(4/12)

So instead, first, I estimate a Consult/Discovery part that details what I think we need to do to get a handle on what's actually wrong here, and how long that will take.

For example...

(5/12)

I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"

it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices

BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.

Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
But it loses the context if you use the "open link in incognito window" option.

Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.

1/

2/

The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.

To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.

3/

Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.

These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).

4/

There's an interesting detail in one of the frames: glimpse of a facility worker observing an industrial robot moving a rack.

5/

What is interesting is that:

✅ Cell production facilities are Class 7 clean rooms, while the worker doesn't wear the usual "bunny suit" protective gear.
✅ There's a barrier between the worker and the robot: likely separating clean-room air from unprotected air.

Thread: Here's the most fun & frivolous tech news today: Railway Operation Depot in the Chinese city Dalian just published an article on their harrowing journey racing to restore the old version of Flash after Adobe's ban, which collapsed their system and paralyzed the railway /1

The article was written a bureaucratic, propaganda, war diary style, with a detailed timeline down to minutes. "Jan 12, 8:16, Depot received malfunction report. The computer system stopped displaying pages...within 30 mins, computers in the entire depot had the same prob" /2

"After calls and online searches, we identified the source of the issue is American company Adobe's comprehensive ban of Flash content" /3

"8:41, IT department held an emergency meeting & took on four urgent measures: 1. informed supervisors and higher-ups 2. immediately started searching for alternatives to solve page inaccessible issue 3. founded a software task force 4. founded a hardware task force" /4

..."12:10 we temporarily maintained the stability of the depot"
..."13:00 a second crisis meeting was held to address three deeply rooted issues"
..."14:11 another crisis erupted. We are no longer able to print pages, again" /5

11 short programming problems to stretch your imagination and make sure you are staying on your toes.

(Starting with the simple ones, they get more fun as you move towards the end.)

🧵👇

1. Write a function that reverses an array in place.

In other words, the function should not use an auxiliary array to do the work.

2. Write a function that finds the missing number in an unsorted array containing every one of the other 99 numbers ranging from 1 to 100.

3. Write a function that finds the duplicate number in an unsorted array containing every number from 1 to 100.

Only one of the numbers will appear twice.

4. Write a function that removes every duplicate value in an array.

There could be more than one value duplicated. You should remove all of them leaving a single copy of the value.

Does artificial anthropocentric intelligence lead to superintelligence?

When I use the term Artificial General Intelligence, my meaning of 'General' comes from the psychology definition of the G-factor that is tested in general intelligence tests.

It is an anthropocentric measure. The question that hasn't been explored in depth is whether a "human-complete" synthetic intelligence leads to a superintelligence. The prevailing assumption is that this expected.

I am going to argue that this assumption may not be true.

The assumption that goes into AGI automatically exploding into a superintelligence is driven by the bias that human intelligence is perceived at the pinnacle of all intelligence.

Hmm... something interesting I learned from my buddy @RomeenSheth about McKinsey.

I thought they are just a stale boring consulting co

But he told me they've acquired a ton of software co's & now have a $100M ARR tech portfolio now (!)

I'll let him explain - guest thread!

If you don’t know, McKinsey is a gigantic consulting company:

- $10B+ in revenue
- 80%+ of the F500 as clients
- Hard to get a job there. (<1% of applicants get hired)

Their bread and butter (70% of revenue) used to be “pure strategy” work. That’s now down to just 10% - why?

Clients are demanding “value based” billing. Meaning less "guys in suits talking" and more "show me something tangible"

For example -lets say a client hires McKinsey because they think they are spending too much money on procurement.

So McKinsey acquired Orpheus - a software co that does analytics for procurement.

Instead of advice, they give them a tool (a real solution)

Now Orpheus has been around for 15 years. McKinsey can buy it at a fair price, knowing that it can inject steroids into the business.

Why?

LIVE: ❄️ City of Austin leadership including @AustinEnergyGM will address the unprecedented severe weather.
💻 Due to tech limitations, it will only be available via Facebook Live here: https://t.co/PchiwUgP0M
We will be live-tweeting in this thread.

Mayor Steve Adler: This will require us all to come together and help one another.
City Manager Spencer Cronk: As a City, we are doing our best to help those in need.

Cronk: Stay off the roads and conserve energy. Every little bit helps.

COA Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Juan Ortiz: Currently we have a warming center at the Palmer Events Center. You can show up at any time. As of this morning, cold weather shelters remain active. 282 were sheltered overnight.

Ortiz: Urge residents to conserve much power as possible to help with the emergency issues. We are working with critical facilities to ensure that access to those facilities remain open, so ambulances can get in.

The other day we shared a thread on the 5 types of work a Hotspot can perform to mine $HNT. Today we take a look at the work of a Challenger in Proof-of-Coverage (PoC).

Challenges are used by PoC to validate wireless coverage. As a Challenger, your Hotspot is chosen by the network to create a challenge, or encrypted multi-layer packet, over the Internet.

The challenge process begins with the Challenger selecting an initial target Hotspot, followed by a group of Hotspots known by the @helium blockchain to be within range of each other as a result of RF witnessing.

These Hotspots are given a multi-layer packet (think an “envelope of envelopes”) that only they can decrypt to prove they are providing legitimate wireless coverage.

The Challenger could be anywhere in the world and does not need to be co-located near other Hotspots. Challenge requests occur every 120 blocks, and if the consensus group accepts the challenge transaction as being valid, the challenge proceeds.

The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be

Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.

But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.

And that would be big(!)...if it were at all true. It is not. Indeed, if you go to the hyperlink, you'll find that SSC's purported "alignment" has nothing to do with Murray's "Bell Curve."

What SSC & Murray agree about is that poverty is partly hereditable and thus very sticky, so much so that the proposition job retraining programs will meaningfully address mass economic disruption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

A trend I'm excited for this year: DataOps & the Analytical Engineer

~10 years ago DevOps was born. The role of system admins and developers merged. Infrastructure became self-serve

Today the role of data engineers and business analysts are merging. Data is becoming self-serve

Data infrastructure is becoming so powerful that the tools today allow non-technical folks to carry out the once complicated / custom code/ huge backlog jobs of data engineers.

Before getting into what this means, let's first discuss how we got here

Before 2012 the data world was dominated by transactional (OLTP) databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc and analytical (OLAP) databases like Oracle, Netezza

Tools like Informatica / Talend were used to batch load (ETL) data into these databases, Tableau used to visualize

As you can imagine, there was heavy engineering work to manage the environment...

Then in 2013 AWS released their cloud data warehouse Redshift, and it was a game changer. Snowflake was founded in 2012, but didn't really pick up steam until a few years later (around 2016)

So why was Redshift a big deal?

1. It was the first cloud-native OLAP warehouse. It reduced the TCO of an OLAP database by orders of magnitude.

2. Speed of processing analytical queries increased dramatically

Have you gotten tired of mechanical keyboards with all their physical feedback?

Have you considered... A completely flat keyboard?

It's very flat

my favorite part is that since all buttons are the same shape and size, the spacebar is just 8 space buttons in a row

So why is it flat? Just because they hate good keyboards? Nope! it's for a reason...

Surprise! the plastic cover can be lifted up. The keyboard layout is on a piece of paper.

And it comes with a blank one so you can make your own.