AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?

Top comment by davedx

IME what works best getting new projects kick started is hiring a very small team of senior freelancers, making one of them lead, and letting them loose. I worked on such a team once and it was really excellent. The advantage of this strategy is if the experiment doesn't work out, terminating freelancers is much easier than permanent (I noted you're based in Europe).

Contrary to what other people said, I wouldn't try find a CTO straightaway. It's a hard role to hire for, especially at the start. I think you're better off unleashing a small, excellent team of builders then hire management later to help build out the team if the initial effort succeeds.

Happy to chat more about my experiences with this strategy, davedx@gmail.com (I'm in Europe too)

2. Ask HN: Resources about math behind A/B testing

Top comment by kqr

I don't think the mathematics is what gets most people into trouble. You can get by with relatively primitive maths, and the advanced stuff is really just a small-order-of-magnitude cost optimisation.

What gets people are incorrect procedures. To get a sense of all the ways in which an experiment can go wrong, I'd recommend reading more traditional texts on experimental design, survey research, etc.

- Donald Wheeler's Understanding Variation should be mandatory reading for almost everyone working professionally.

- Deming's Some Theory of Sampling is really good and covers more ground than the title lets on.

- Deming's Sample Design in Business Research I remember being formative for me also, although it was a while since I read it.

- Efron and Tibshirani's Introduction to the Bootstrap gives an intuitive sense of some experimental errors from a different perspective.

I know there's one book covering survey design I really liked but I forget which one it was. Sorry!

3. Ask HN: How to build site with payment, subscriptions, user login, registration

Top comment by giancarlostoro

I recommend learning a full-stack back-end web framework that is known like Django, ASP .NET, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, to name a few.

There's lots of tutorials on how to get started with them, it will be a lot of information to start.

If you really want to learn about the core themes each of these has:

* User authentication - Login / Registration

* User authorization - Is this user allowed to do x, y or z?

* Database connectivity and query management (usually done via ORM) which handles where your data goes to, and comes from.

* Template engine (which you can replace if you rather an API, but I recommend for starting out, to just make a boring web app)

* User management

As for payment / subscriptions, these are not included OOTB, but if you can get through the basics of any of these frameworks, I don't think you'll struggle too much to work out third party libraries that add what you need to these frameworks.

I started out my first web project with a micro web framework, but I had some experience in programming in general and used it and it worked out, I started with CherryPy. Basic "Hello" page, and gradually added pieces as I needed to add them, like database, template engine and so on. I now just use Django or ASP .NET depending on what I'm doing.

Django is regarded as the framework for people with deadlines, but it might not be for you, maybe Rails or ASP are more for you.

My recommendation is pull up a list of web frameworks that meet most of your needs, and go from there.

You could also look into ecommerce frameworks as well. Though I cannot personally speak to these. Laravel I'm sure has a few options for Ecommerce. You might want to go with Laravel if you want to host with PHP.

4. Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?

Top comment by sshine

As part of learning Perl in 1999.

I only used the bare minimum for years.

I also hung out on a #regex IRC channel, so I got exposed to questions and answers by many people.

Later I read up on https://www.regular-expressions.info/ which has a lot of very good explanations.

The #regex IRC channel had an IRC bot with a quiz with 28 levels.

All sensibility ended after level 14 or so. At that point it was just "how deep does the PCRE rabbit-hole go?"

But there was a lot of useful, non-trivial stuff, too. Most specifically, look-aheads/lookbehinds, non-greedy matching, back-references, named capture-groups, character classes, anchors,

When I learned jq, I went much the same way: Started hanging out on #jq IRC channels and started trying to answer jq questions on StackOverflow. Sadly, I got outperformed the first six months, until it finally clicked.

5. Ask HN: Front-end bait and switch?

Top comment by matrix_overload

It's not you, it's the industry. For every non-trivial task there is a long line of people within the company willing to do it for some visibility. But in order to get promoted to the position where they can do it, they need an army of button-moving monkeys working underneath them. So, they will say whatever they need to say in order to get you to sign up. Because that increases the head count and gives them more internal weight.

If you want to play the corporate game, you need to get used to having 5 meetings to move 1 button. And it's not about the button either. It's about asking Alice how her daughter is doing, and asking Bob on how he feels after that surgery, and casually hinting to Carol that you really like her choice of coding style for that new project. You play that game for a few years and you'll be allowed to have some monkeys of your own.

Or if you find the game soul-draining, you need to beef up your sales skills and connections, and become a consultant. One of those guys that gets invited to unwind a particular clusterfuck, gets paid $500/hour and quickly moves on to the next gig. This means less stability, more control, and a totally different skill set. Ultimately, your call.

6. Ask HN: How different is AWS/GCP/Azure in everyday work

Top comment by devoutsalsa

If you say "I barely know AWS, we mostly used GCP", that will be a turn off for anyone screening for heavy AWS experience. If you say "we use the cloud extensively & 100% of our infrastructure the made extensive use of AWS and GCP using a multi-cloud solution", you'll be fine.

A recruiter won't know the difference unless they really ask, and I seriously doubt they will.

If an engineer or engineering manager asks, ask them what problem they are trying to solve using AWS and then tell them how to solve it. If your answer is good enough, you won't have any problems.

7. Ask HN: Changing my mind about JavaScript

Top comment by rauschma

I have used many languages in my nearly 40 years as a programmer (Scheme, C++, Java, Python, Haskell, OCaml, Rust, etc.) and still enjoy JavaScript: It’s decent as a language and there is so much you can do with it.

Tips:

• If you like static typing, you’ll want to use TypeScript. It’s more work to set up, but it catches many bugs, especially subtle ones where JavaScript’s semantics are not intuitive.

• I learned a lot about JavaScript (and Node.js) by writing shell scripts in Node.js.

My books on JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js shell scripting are free to read online and target people who already know how to program: https://exploringjs.com

8. Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

Top comment by harryquach

Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The most incredible, mind bending adventure I have taken, in a book.

(The Netflix show although generally true to story does not do the books justice)

9. Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?

Top comment by punk-coder

I think if you look at some companies that have been around for a long time you’ll find quite a few older people that are still doing development. I just celebrated my 20th year being at the media company I work for. There are still a few developers here from back when I started.

I’m 52, been a professional developer close to 30 years. Quite a few developers I started off with back in the day are still doing development, but quite a few ended up going the management path. My old department head had me try out the managing architect role for a bit, but I hated it, so I went back to the technical side.

I’m in Atlanta, and can think of companies like Georgia Pacific, Synovous, Home Depot, Delta, Chic-fil-a, Coca Cola, UPS, and quite a few others having developers older than me or near my age still working there.

10. Ask HN: How to shift mindset from goal-oriented to progress-oriented?

Top comment by he11ow

I'll say something that sounds really unhelpful until one day it makes sense. You don't really choose the process, the process chooses you. You can't make yourself 'enjoy the process' for something that doesn't resonate, because it will always feel a chore. So the one and only trick is to really pay attention to the thing you keep going back to, and in a way accept that this is a path.

Some people might say "But I only enjoy video games!" and if that's the case, I don't really know what to say to that. All the people I know who have found great alignment with a path of progress are ones where the effort tickles an itch they would have regardless, so might as well scratch that itch.

And there are still goals, that doesn't change.