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Issue #66 - June 7, 2020
If you are looking for work, check out this month's Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired? threads.
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
Top comment by pxsant
I am 80 years old and still working full time in IT. Although I evolved from pure programming to project management and business analysis the past few years. Originally started out working at Cape Canaveral as a radar and telemetry engineer and moved into programming after I left there. Whenever I interview, I completely ignore the age issue. If the interviewer is to dumb to recognize the value of my knowledge and experience, that is on them. Finally completed my PhD in Computer science when I was in my 60's.
2. Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
Top comment by 3pt14159
What I've seen that has worked in the past is this:
Pick an open source project that is in a language that is respectable and commit to contributing to it for three or four months. Full time. Try to make sure that your written English is clear and professional in things like PRs.
Try to keep your code as clean and as well tested and linted as possible. Once the core team gets to know you a bit you'll be able to reach out for introductions to people hiring for remote jobs that you just wouldn't have had access to before.
I've seen people make $500k a year doing this. Just make sure that you choose wisely on the language and project. If you want to do frontend then it's probably going to be a project in TypeScript or JavaScript, but if you want to do backend then there are a lot of projects in tougher languages like Rust. Python isn't a bad choice either, even though it is easy to learn. Google has a Python style guide that is pretty good so look it up.
If I knew you were good at Python and you were asking for $1.5k a month I would hire you and laugh all the way to the bank. Set your aim hirer than what you need to survive.
3. Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?
Top comment by thieving_magpie
Someone at my company generated the keys. They then put them on a network share without any security restrictions. They've been there for 5 years with no rotation. At least 2 are checked into source control.
4. Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
Top comment by afarrell
A Philosophy of Software Design.
Very well-written. At 190 pages, quite likely finish-able in a weekend. But if you get 70% of the way through it, that is still very valuable. It makes sense as an underlying set of principles that explain why you would use design patterns.
5. Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
Top comment by awillen
I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment.
Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.
https://coopersdogtreats.com/
6. Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
Top comment by ransom1538
Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?"
Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process."
Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now."
Young dev from large corp: "Sigh, ok, just saying in 2 years from now we wont be in a good spot". [Then proceeds to blow 2 hours complaining on hacker news.]
7. Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?
Top comment by alexbanks
CS is less about coding and more about thinking analytically about coding. I started coding at 11, but some of my college classes were still pretty difficult. I wouldn't assume your classes will be a cakewalk - definitely put the time into studying your material even if you think it's easy.
With respect to getting a job - I would think about programming as a tool. What industry do you want to use that tool on? I would think long and hard about that and consider double majoring/minoring in that new thing. Physics, math, business, whatever. Computer Science + some area of study where you can use CS for the betterment of an industry (outside of CS) will leave you in the best position to do well.
I would also suggest really focusing on Data Structures/Algorithms. Worst case, you'll be good at whiteboard interviews and can get a job at a FAANG company.
Network, hard. Your professors probably know lots of people, and your classmates (in your major) will go on to get jobs you might be interested in. Develop connections with the people around you, and become a person they want to work with in the future.
Above all, don't waste your college time. Actually give a shit about what you're learning. Try new things, make mistakes, have fun, but also work hard on your degree.
8. Ask HN: How do you organise your files and folders?
Top comment by jaquers
Save files to my desktop. When it gets too messy, I throw everything in a folder called "Cleanup". Repeat. When it gets messy again, I rename the Cleanup folder to Cleanup_
I'm about 7 deep at the moment.
9. Ask HN: Have you ever gone without a computer or phone for an extended period?
Top comment by Vivtek
When Hurricane Maria hit us in 2017, we lost power for two weeks (we were extremely lucky in that - we were among the first 4% of the island to regain power due to our proximity to a hospital).
During those two weeks, my entire lifestyle changed, obviously, so it's difficult to know what changed because of that, and what was just the fact that e.g. I went from sedentary tech work to nailing salvaged roof scrap on top of the house on our farm.
But - my blood pressure dropped. I lost weight. I did a lot of reading of books. My notes are more interesting for those two weeks because they were ink on paper and I could insert drawings and diagrams wherever I wanted. They were more thoughtful and less reactive.
I fixed a mosquito zapper by sheer force of will (the capacitor was shorting across a resistor - poor design, but once I figured it out I could fix it. I'm still using that zapper today, and only shorted the capacitor out across my finger three times. Ow.) That day, I was become death, destroyer of mosquitoes.
I guess I quasi-fixed the roof on the farm house by sheer force of will, too. Had to dig the nails out of the scrap - no hardware stores open. My son considers it a formative experience.
So I didn't choose to go cold turkey, and it was only a short time, and its lifechanging nature is impossible to tease away from concurrent events, but still - anecdotally, it's probably worthwhile to try it voluntarily.
10. Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?
Top comment by phreack
Coming from Latin America I would have never imagined before this thread that so many large countries would not teach CS in their own languages, and would have to speak in English amongst themselves!
It's fascinating, over here we incorporate thousands of English words into the Spanish IT lingo, but while they can could roughly communicate in English, most people I know wouldn't be able to have a discussion entirely in English. As others have said, there's several literal translations for some concepts, but it feels a bit condescending/academic to use those instead of the English words in casual environments.
A fun quirk of this is that we turn many English verbs into Spanish versions of them (where verbs must end in -ar -er -or). Some examples:
- to commit -> committear
- to pull -> pullear
- to deploy -> deployar
That last one is particularly fun because it turns the 'y' at the end into a consonant (sort of like if you said 'deployate'). And we do all this instinctively, for some reason it's what feels most natural!
A sad quirk is that we've also adopted the frustrating English tendency to turn _everything_ into acronyms, which always irks me.
Amazing thread!