Viewing profile — vpfaulkner

Blackbird | Dev Shop | Remote (US) | Contract Blackbird builds web + mobile apps for startups and innovative companies. We work on interesting, greenfield projects, and rely on sma…

Blackbird | Dev Shop | Remote (US or Europe) | Contract Blackbird builds web + mobile apps for startups and innovative companies. We work on interesting, greenfield projects, and r…

I like the analogy that code is like weight to an airplane (“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight” - Bill Gates). …

The labor force participation rate ("percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work") has been declining for 20 years and had a big drop at the be…

I'm all for trying to understand these phenomena and running these experiments. Just trying to get a sense for how much of a grasp we have on these phenomena. Based on the other re…

From a layman’s point of view, it seems like we grasping at straws when it comes to these thorny quantum questions. Is fair to say, for example, that we are about as clueless as ou…

I've had a good experience using AWS SQS. It's fairly straightforward and can be paired with SNS if more complex workflows are necessary. I recently migrated to SQS from Rabbit MQ …

Consider all of the "free with ads or paid without ads" products such as YouTube. It's pretty clear that a substantial number of people understand these tradeoffs and are willing t…

I agree that, with time, I think/hope many people will realize social media actually has a lot of adverse effects. However, to say, "most people will come to the same conclusion I …

I honestly wonder how much the typical user actually shares the concerns brought up here and in other hostile web arguments. Most people I know care much less than the Hacker News …

I agree that using error monitoring service like Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, etc. is better than a naked log for "exceptional" situations. They provide a lot of nice features includi…

I agree that “separating concerns” is generally a good thing. However, the issue is that the traditional division of concerns is more difficult to maintain in today’s web apps. Com…

Sorry, should have clarified: I was suggesting that if the government decides to regulate it should apply to all social media platforms, not just FB. Updated the original comment.

A lot of these issues seem difficult to regulate but one that seems more realistic is usage by minors. What if social media platforms required all minors to have their account asso…

My gripes with traditional CSS styling are: - Styles are global - Styles are targeted via brittle, untyped, and opaque "magic strings” basically. This means mistakes are more likel…

I’ve found Cypress generally better than other alternatives such as Selenium. The screenshot feature is nice and it seems to be a little less flakey, although E2E tests using a bro…

I'd checkout Square 1 Bank: https://www.square1bank.com/ . Like Silicon Valley Bank, they are geared towards startups, and they have an office in NYC. Disclaimer: my brother works …