Chemex or French press on weekday mornings. On weekends, I like to indulge: sometimes I make a moka pot cubano, at others I'll make the Indian style super strong 'kaapi' in the steel coffee filter.
Are you a foodie and a rockstar developer?
Are you interested in gaining valuable domain knowledge in the Restaurants and Local food industry while solving tough technical problems at scale?
The Restaurants team in Amazon is hiring SDEs! We work on a platform that enables customers to order food from local restaurants with the convenience and selection of Amazon.
We are a close knit group of 4 SDEs, looking for new colleagues to build out new features to our Restaurant Takeout platform.
We are mostly full-stack, but are also open to devs who have specific interests.
Technologies we work on: Java, Rails, DynamoDB, SQS, SWF, Postgres on RDS, PostGIS, Angular.
Please send your resumes to sidjoshi at amazon dot com.
One of my favorite (and a recent one):
People who are right a lot often change their minds. One of the best ways to end a heated debate is to say "Wait a minute.. I think I am wrong!".
Have you ever called customer service for a company and got transferred from this person to that person because they couldn’t figure out what your problem was? This happens for those companies because they don’t have advanced technology to predict how best to solve the customers’ problems. Our team is responsible for building software to enable Amazon to intelligently predict the customers’ pain points to optimally route the customer to the right solution, whether it be a customer service agent or self-help features. You would design and develop software to build and interface with machine learning models from data you gather, and to interface with Amazon’s numerous backend systems to solve the customers problem right the first time.
As a member of our team, you will design, build and deliver technology that directly impacts millions of Amazon customers. You will have the opportunity to provide direction to our businesses and guide the design of our systems based on realistic time lines and resource constraints. Amazon.com has been ranked #1 in customer service experience, and it will be a challenge to continuously improve customer service technologies, and we need many smart people like you to join us in meeting these challenges.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent program with formal training in computer science basics such as data structures, sorting/searching algorithms, order analysis.
- 3+ years of experience in C++ and/or Java
Preferred Qualifications:
- Communication skills for both a technical and business audience
- Willingness to deeply understand the goals and challenges of customer service operations
- Analytical abilities, proven design skills and a track record of delivery
- Strong background in computer science basics (data structures, sorting and searching algorithms, order analysis)
- Experience with designing, building and deploying scalable, highly available systems
- Fluency in Java
- Experience with CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, Perl a plus
- Experience with data analysis and data mining in large scale database environments a plus
Please contact me for more info: sidjoshi (at) amazon (dot) com
Rather surprising to see PHP so high here since I rarely see PHP-related submissions on HN. How do people learn it? I've found that the best thing for me was finding StumbleUpon and reading up as much as I could about best practices in PHP and programming in general. Now I force myself to try a different language for my own projects to get away from PHP as a "comfort zone".
I'm a bit shocked to see any significant popularity here, as it seems to be a language most hackers avoid. I'd like to know why people are interested in the languages they're learning - not just PHP.
The OP asked about what you are currently learning. Many folks may actually be required to learn it for their job, rather than for professional enrichment.
I'm a bookworm, so I sought out well-regarded books on Amazon. I started with 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Welling & Thomson, and could not have been happier. It's hefty (nearly 1,000 pages for the latest edition), but was well worth the time. Next up was 'PHP in Action', which is similar to the later chapters in Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python (one hell of a book, btw) and was coauthored by Chris Shiflett.
I've since read two of Ullman's books (PHP for the WWW and PHP 5 Advanced), the Powers books (PHP Solutions and PHP Object-Oriented Solutions), and Shiflett's 'Essential PHP Security' (the PHPSec guide is required reading also).
The two Apress Pro books ('PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice' and 'Pro PHP'), 'Essential PHP Tools', 'PHP5 Power Programming' (Andi Gutmans is a coauthor) and 'Advanced PHP Programming' by Schlossnagle are up next, although I'm currently working through SICP.
(Note: I switched to Postgres since reading Welling & Thomson; there are basically 10x as many MySQL books as PostgreSQL ones, unfortunately)
Did you know OmniTI (employers of Shiflett and Welling, former employer of Thomson, and sister company to MessageSystems (Wez Furlong & George Schlossnagle) have an office in Brooklyn? I believe the main contributor to CakePHP works there too. If you're that interested in PHP, it might be something to consider being relatively close by.
I'm bookish in how I approach programming too, and among your list have read "PHP & MySQL Web Development," Shiflett's "Essential PHP Security," and "Advanced PHP Programming" when I was first starting out (I started out as a PHP programmer). If you're anything like me, the books get less exciting as the knowledge they contain gets more familiar, which is inevitable among a certain class of books. I now read more language agnostic books on algorithms, math, and some broader concepts. We'll see how that goes.
Sara Goleman has a book on writing extensions for PHP that you might like if you want to 'cross the threshold.' These sorts of things can be useful to know how it all works internally, even if you aren't writing a ton of extensions yourself. The Schlossnagle book has a chapter on that. I'm not sure how much movement PHP internals have (I'm out of that world now).
I didn't know OmniTI had an office up here. I definitely have noticed diminishing returns from all the PHP reading; I still find it satisfying, but I'm not sure how long that'll last. Thanks for the 'Extending and Embedding PHP' recommendation. Any other recommendations (especially non-PHP ones) are welcome. 'me' at the first domain in my profile.
