2 out of 5 of his clients are blockchain companies/orgs. I feel this path would be quite easy in blockchain, where almost all of the projects are open source
From the number of logos, it's 6 clients, and I would put 4 of them into the blockchain bucket, with smallstep and tailscale being the two non-blockchain exceptions.
Also note that for blockchain projects, it's important that they associate themselves with famous people to give their projects credibility. So they are willing to pay huge amounts of money to get celebrities like him on board.
On the 2nd statement, quite curious if that's true... if so, each of the companies will have at least a blog post, or tweet thread about the affiliation. If not true, you're probably reducing who is an efficient engineer who's worth their salt for their output.
You're thinking of it the wrong way, think of it as a banner ad.
If your open source project has a homepage, a fair amount of visitors, and a public list of sponsors, blockchain companies will pay for the highest tier to be on top of that list instead of going down the usual AdSense route.
From their perspective it's a link from a respectable source that reaches their target audience (those into tech) on a permanent basis that even adblocks don't block. And it only costs them up to a couple of hundreds of bucks per month, way cheaper then traditional banner ads. Doesn't matter if what you're actually building has anything to with cryptocurrencies, but of course having some touching ground works even better.
Whether this has happened for him in particular, I don't know. He at least has made a blog post with the links of the companies in it, but of course this is only indication, not proof. The trend is certainly a thing. Blockchain companies / NFT projects / etc live from attention. They need it for their growth.
That's because they must be open source, what other sense of accountability could you possibly give if you're asking money to a crowd upfront based on a piece of paper?
Plenty of user facing apps do need strong consistency. We use Cassandra at Ripple, for API access to the XRP ledger, and strong consistency is a requirement. Records refer to other records, and not being able to reason about when things are going to show up in the database would lead to a ton of complexity. For instance, I read a transaction, then I want to read the account that sent or received that transaction. I need to know the record for the account is going to be there in the database, and is consistent with the transaction, as opposed to stale. Or, a client might be paging through data over several calls, where we return a marker to allow the client to resume. This wouldn't work if some nodes might not know about the marker.
I mean this is just evolutionary biology. If you're a defenseless woman in the African Savanna, do you go for the skinny, short man who's nice, or the tall, muscular man who will protect you and your children? Hard to rewire millions of years of conditioning.
Humans traded away a lot of strength for other things like precision of movements, cognitive abilities, decreased energy usage and the a huge endurance at walking.
If we evolved to be gorillas we would be gorillas. Instead we are much weaker, but very social animals with peak cognitive abilities.
However, this isn't completely true, given the diversity we find in men and women both; if being jacked was the only factor, then everyone would be jacked and society would be aimed at it.
Instead, we find a balance. As I've heard it explained, and to oversimplify, jacked men get laid, but "softer" men get married and live happily ever after. The number of jacked men who sleep around seems to significantly drop after age 30 as well (I have no concrete numbers to prove this btw).
Since when does it take a pro-Western stance to condemn a war, terrible atrocities and genocides? What, non-Westerners lack a moral compass or compassion?
>Since when does it take a pro-Western stance to condemn a war
It takes a pro-Western stance to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine under false pretense but celebrate America invading Iraq under false pretenses (a war in which literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War).
Except no one is doing that other than you and people who want to change the topic to America even though America has nothing to do with the topic.
Sure if there was an article talking about what a great job the US is doing with foreign policy it's fair game to bring up times when the US had bad foreign policy.
Practicing a ton can reduce anxiety, since you'll have confidence that you can most likely solve the problem. Plus, if you practice enough, you'll see so many problems that you might get the exact same problems in the interview. If you do something everyday, it becomes less of a big deal.
Doing other activities that induce this sort of anxiety can help too. I've been a combat athlete my whole life, and the anxiety you get before a match is like no other. Not being able to sleep the night before is the norm, and I've seen people vomit before matches. Plus, it's not a few engineers watching you, but rather a whole crowd of people watching you, with half of them cheering for you to lose. After this experience, live coding interviews are a cake-walk. I get nervous as well with a pounding heart and nervous sweats, etc. But I tell myself I've been here before, and perform as best as I can in spite of it, like I've done before. I generally don't perform quite as well in the interview or match as I do when no one's watching, but that's just how it goes. Learning to perform under pressure like that is a skill that needs to be cultivated.
I've handled several high stress situations on the job. E.g. servers are down, customers are pinging support. Everyone doesn't know what to do.
I've solved problems several times in that environment. I have the battle scars and I'm used to doing that.
I am much more comfortable in a giant legacy codebase that I've never used before, trying to fix a critical bug that is losing the company thousands of dollars per minute than I am during these live coding sessions.
I realize tons of it has to do with practice so I plan to do that.
It's just confusing to have an entire decade of high performance (with references to prove it) to be judged on how well I can dance with a funny hat on.
I'm not whining, I'll do the work. I just don't have time right at this moment, if that makes sense.
Yeah I mean I totally agree that live coding in an interview is some contrived thing that doesn't reflect the actual value that you would bring. No one builds anything great in 45 minutes. It's like the industry doesn't know how else to assess skill.
I am not spending Christmas alone, but sometimes I wish I was. The holidays are the toughest time of year for me, because they bring up bad memories from my childhood, and the darkness of winter amplifies it and makes me feel dead inside. Every year around the holidays I have at least one really bad breakdown, and I'm just way more vulnerable emotionally, so everything hurts so much more and for longer. The pain generally has to do with relationships with other people though, so being alone helps. I don't know if it would be better to be totally alone, as OP is, but spending extensive amounts of time with family or a romantic partner is just terrible for me. Cheers OP, buy yourself a gift.
Hey I have bipolar and borderline too! But I just want to say, life isn't about achieving things; it's just about being happy. And a little secret: achieving things doesn't actually make you happy. Maybe temporarily, but anyone who achieves great things is never satisfied. Otherwise, they never would have put in the work to achieve what they did in the first place. It's sort of a prerequisite.
I was really good at a sport through high school and college. And one thing I noticed very early is that how good I was didn't make me happy. Sure, in the instant I won, I was happy. But then I went back to practice the next day, and was just focused on the next opponent. And then when I lost, I was crushed. I didn't become any happier as a person or enjoy my life more or anything as I got better at the sport. I cared a lot about getting better. What actually made me happy was just doing the sport itself, especially in the moments where I let go of the outcome. It's the old, appreciate the journey, not the destination. It's really true!
I also know a lot of people who are really good at things. They are no happier than anyone else. It's not something to be jealous of, or feel bad that you are not like them.
I also will say that I started to focus on achievement a lot less when I had a kid. It became obvious to me that what I did for my kid was infinitely more important than what I achieved for myself, and pursuing success for myself was really just a kind of game.
I don't know, if you hear about the accounts of the parents of children killed in Sandy Hook, I don't think inner peace was available. Many had to move or go into hiding. Imagine, after losing a child in such a horrific way, that you also need to somehow start an entirely new life in a strange place because strangers think you're a crisis actor and threaten your life.
I think it's extremely hard to come to terms with what happened and be happy, if what happened (or rather, what is happening) is "I'm currently being chased out of my own home because people online want me dead because my child was gunned down in a domestic terrorist attack".
You should 100% talk to the original author before rewriting though. Not doing so communicates that you think you know better than them, so much better than them that you don't even need to talk to them to understand why they wrote it the way they did, and the tradeoffs. This is very arrogant and would most likely bother the original developer, which is bad for team dynamics.
I disagree. Most of the time I'm intrigued by the changes someone makes to my code. It's like a musician getting their song covered. There's a creative interpretation, often something I didn't see.
This one was a bad example. But past 5 or so years of experience, when someone has experience with other languages and coding styles, it's more interesting and I often learn a lot from them.
Maybe we're envisioning different scenarios here. If someone just committed code
yesterday and is still working on it, absolutely discuss with them first. I'm imagining a scenario where someone comes across duplicated code months or years later. What if the original author is gone? Code needs to be clear enough to understand after the original author is gone.
Change for change's sake may be bad for team dynamics. But if the change is one that everyone agrees is for the better, no one should be offended by the improvement.
I mostly agree with you but I've found that in certain (smaller) teams with a high level of trust and experience it can be fine to do this without a heads up.
