Went to a whysecurity meetup at Double Union

Receipt dithering is really cool. (Putting art onto receipts) but it takes a long time to print.

My favorite current startups (from the front page of exchangel): buildscience, omniref, imicrobes

I have a rss reader setup because I made a list of things that my brain claims that “real” devs do and this was a lot easier than setting up a mail server

12:28 My brain has some really weird notions about legitimacy in technical fields
12:28 My current explanation is that my mother is a sysadmin

Thoughts:

  • Pull requests are making me a better developer (or at least better at explaining my choices)
  • “One of the things that improves my confidence and energy tremendously is simply to go to regular meetups… It’s suprising what talking to passionate people can do to your spirits” - webmat
  • “What, if anything, have you ever enjoyed? What makes you lose track of time when you’re doing it?” -neilk
  • (overheard) “Let me talk to the engineers and see if we can get that done.”
  • This sounds like a pretty useful technical concept: no-passsword or email-as-password
  • Resque.redis.namespace = AppConfig.redis.namespace
  • customizing sublime is fun
  • one on ones are valuable

Interview training (for interviewing GRP candidates; I will probably never use this):

  • “fungible hire” events - find some good people, hire them, then figure out what to do with them.
  • Importing talent from Canada, Australia
  • 1:30pm - 4pm
  • There were prepared slides, booklet
  • Still not allowed to interview- gotta shadow an interview first.
  • Over 200 open “reqs” whatever that means

Quotes:

  • “I caused a short outage looking at these redis queues :(“
  • “This is only the code, I will now work on adding tests” sadface
  • “It’s bad that we’re getting a security warning on a pos website”
  • “declining all cards” never something you want to hear
  • “Do you know how to make this thing build?”
  • “I think everyone knows how to do that” “You’d be surprised” YES

Cool things:

"Passion won’t listen to reason. It transforms. It is hellbent.
It alienates you from those who no longer know who you think you are or where the hell you think you’re going.
(Do you know where you’re going?)
It knocks you off the path. (It was the wrong path.)
It makes you start again: the friendless city, the salary cut.
Passion has an edge of war. It points to what we want so much that we’re afraid to want it. The ambiguity of hope. The fear of not getting. The fear of getting."

There is a lot more in my notes that could go into this post.