Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#81

Post by pnathan » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

eldavido wrote: post #75

pnathan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't care about usage of git/hg. That can be dealt with on the job, and is no worse than hiring someone from another shop. As a matter of fact and recommendation, I don't think atomic commits are a great practice to follow in general anyway.

I agree. I wasn't going to turn this into a general conversation about branching, but since others are going there... I really dislike gitflow for release-to-web projects. Any form of branching creates integration debt to be paid later. Maybe it's worth it, for instance, when discussing a new feature in its own branch. But gitflow's assumption of a heavyweight "release" process just isn't an accurate reflection of ho…

So if you're burping out a singular product with a singular release, rolling off master tends to make more sense. The complexity comes in when you're running multiple features and multiple products and multiple teams and having to do long running support of the older products/projects/teams all together.

Simpler is better; but when your actual code path of support looks like a network, that's the complexity you have to eat - I recommend eating it in your branching system (correspondingly, your versioned artifacts get some really funny version identifiers too. :) ).

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#82

Post by pnathan » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 9:56 PM UTC

gr3yh47 wrote: post #71

pnathan wrote: post #69

Everyone is different in what they look for. I look for curiosity, learning, drive, achievements(professional and at home), and academics (completed degrees in CS/Math are important to me). Grammatical and spelling errors irritate me, a lot . Being cutesy with resumes irritates me. Wasting my time irritates me. I am fine reading resumes that are up to 5 pages in length (but many people aren't). * Suck it up and set u…

I appreciate all of the feedback and will be incorporating a lot of it. what did you mean by a wc replacement? >You're not an expert - if you are, you'd not be looking for entry level positions, and you likely wouldn't be a hobbyist. You'd probably have a history of consulting in your expert field. Seriously, everyone is failing on comprehension on that one sentence. I'm an expert in my field looking to pivot to anot…

> Seriously, everyone is failing on comprehension on that one sentence. I'm an expert in my field looking to pivot to another. Expert SYSTEMS engineer. I'm changing the sentence to prevent future misreads.

If one person calls you a skunk, ignore them. When two people call you a skunk, sniff. When three people call you a skunk? You're probably a skunk. ;-) (edit: you totally miscommunicated. that's why everyone is reading it the way they are).

Also, `wc -l` gives you line count: I've written it half a dozen times in half a dozen ways on half a dozen different systems. it's really easy.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#83

Post by jorgecastillo » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #78

shayanjm wrote: post #46

No, I wouldn't hire you as-is. Probably not a first-choice intern either. Some notes on why not: + Your web-sume looks rough. As pointed out by others, there are a number of typos (i.e: "and provide an opporunity") not to mention the design itself could use work. If you are GREAT at web design/UX you should spruce it up. Otherwise, kill it and move to a traditional resume. Knowing HTML5/CSS3 today is pretty meaningle…

I'm impressed by your comments. Could take the time and make a similar assessment of my github[1] account? It's highly unlikely for me to ever work as a developer but I'd like to know what you think of it, nevertheless :-) [1] https://github.com/atmosx ps. In case you take the time to have a look at my repo... Well thanks for your time :-) (everyone else, feel free to drop a line or two about my repo if you like)

>It's highly unlikely for me to ever work as a developer

Maybe someday you can work as a developer for yourself. The good thing about a software business is that it's more about business than software. If you can code a working solution to fix some problem that exists everything else is irrelevant. The really hard thing is to identify a problem that's business worthy.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#84

Post by eldavido » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:16 PM UTC

shayanjm wrote: post #76

eldavido wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I wasn't going to turn this into a general conversation about branching, but since others are going there... I really dislike gitflow for release-to-web projects. Any form of branching creates integration debt to be paid later. Maybe it's worth it, for instance, when discussing a new feature in its own branch. But gitflow's assumption of a heavyweight "release" process just isn't an accurate reflection of ho…

Not here to say that one style is better than another, although I've used gitflow almost exclusively for a few years and it's served well. Pushed features/hotfixes/etc. out the door in a timely manner, and never felt held back by the 'ceremony' necessary to push to prod. CI handles most of that and with the 'git flow' plugin you can easily do a two command deploy while not compromising good branching/repo maintenance…

How big is your team? I work in a company of about 20 developers with approx. 30 repos (lots of small services, "small program methodology") and trying to keep all of this in sync for a single release gets pretty tough.

Right now, there's a lot of ceremony to create release branches on 20+ repos. At the end of our two-week agile sprint, there's always a ton of confusion about "is the release branch open", "should I commit to develop", people opening PRs for review targeting the wrong branch (e.g. trying to merge into release/ but they open feature/ against develop), then accidentally merging release into develop and vice versa...it's just kind of a mess.

Maybe it's just my team that sucks at gitflow? Or our tooling could be better? It just seems like a lot of complexity to manage for a single person who isn't a full-time build/release engineer.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, how frequently do you deploy? We're at once every two weeks but I'm trying hard to move the org toward once/day or more, it's pretty insane how much organizational resistance I have to fight because deployments = "change" = scary.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#85

Post by eldavido » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #81

eldavido wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I wasn't going to turn this into a general conversation about branching, but since others are going there... I really dislike gitflow for release-to-web projects. Any form of branching creates integration debt to be paid later. Maybe it's worth it, for instance, when discussing a new feature in its own branch. But gitflow's assumption of a heavyweight "release" process just isn't an accurate reflection of ho…

So if you're burping out a singular product with a singular release, rolling off master tends to make more sense. The complexity comes in when you're running multiple features and multiple products and multiple teams and having to do long running support of the older products/projects/teams all together. Simpler is better; but when your actual code path of support looks like a network, that's the complexity you have…

I've never encountered this but agree, that can lead to a real hell of branching. Do you dead-end your releases and then backport certain things from your mainline to previous release branches?

Sounds like a headache but probably the best way in certain domains.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#86

Post by scrapcode » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:35 PM UTC

Justen wrote: post #55

scrapcode wrote: post #7

I've wanted to ask something similar for a long time. I have a government job that has decent pay, but the schedule sucks, and I'm not challenged at all. I have freelance full-stack experience, just nothing black-and-white professional wise other than sysadmin & electronics experience in the military. I recently moved to what could be considered an "up-and-coming" startup city and I've been tossing around the idea of…

I made this jump about a year ago. I was a DoD contractor out of college for 4 years, but I knew after ~2yrs that there weren't going to be any fun challenges. The closest you'd get would be prepping for the demo days to present to the higher-ups. I started working with the MEAN stack to offset the boredom and after about 15 months I switched to a local startup. The pay was about 30% less, but I didn't have any profe…

Would you mind if I shot you an e-mail? It sounds like you took the exact jump that I worry about taking, and it'd be great to ask you a few questions.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#87

Post by scrapcode » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:37 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #38

scrapcode wrote: post #7

I've wanted to ask something similar for a long time. I have a government job that has decent pay, but the schedule sucks, and I'm not challenged at all. I have freelance full-stack experience, just nothing black-and-white professional wise other than sysadmin & electronics experience in the military. I recently moved to what could be considered an "up-and-coming" startup city and I've been tossing around the idea of…

$80k is actually about right for an entry-level developer at a startup since you have some experience. Hell, most places will pay a kid fresh out of college $60-70k. I'd say go for it; what do you have to lose?

A $80k/yr secure government job with a guaranteed retirement. For someone without a formal education (yet), that's not the easiest thing to come across outside of development.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#88

Post by pnathan » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:38 PM UTC

eldavido wrote: post #85

pnathan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you're burping out a singular product with a singular release, rolling off master tends to make more sense. The complexity comes in when you're running multiple features and multiple products and multiple teams and having to do long running support of the older products/projects/teams all together. Simpler is better; but when your actual code path of support looks like a network, that's the complexity you have…

I've never encountered this but agree, that can lead to a real hell of branching. Do you dead-end your releases and then backport certain things from your mainline to previous release branches? Sounds like a headache but probably the best way in certain domains.

Yeah, each release might be, e.g, firmware version x.y.z.patchlevel, and then you backport fixes and release on patchlevel.

Some customers demand the absolute minimum amount of change - their interface is essentially fixed, all they want is fixes, no more improvements.

Besides firmware, I think this also get applicable when doing larger whitelabel software, each major customer might want to have a particular version they are focused on using.

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#89

Post by scrapcode » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 11:39 PM UTC

pcsanwald wrote: post #40

scrapcode wrote: post #7

I've wanted to ask something similar for a long time. I have a government job that has decent pay, but the schedule sucks, and I'm not challenged at all. I have freelance full-stack experience, just nothing black-and-white professional wise other than sysadmin & electronics experience in the military. I recently moved to what could be considered an "up-and-coming" startup city and I've been tossing around the idea of…

it depends on the city. In NYC, this is a reasonable expectation. If you're in baltimore, you should let me know, I might have a job for you.

I'm in Kansas City. Thanks for reaching out!

Re: Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

#90

Post by Justen » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 1:28 AM UTC

scrapcode wrote: post #86

Justen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this jump about a year ago. I was a DoD contractor out of college for 4 years, but I knew after ~2yrs that there weren't going to be any fun challenges. The closest you'd get would be prepping for the demo days to present to the higher-ups. I started working with the MEAN stack to offset the boredom and after about 15 months I switched to a local startup. The pay was about 30% less, but I didn't have any profe…

Would you mind if I shot you an e-mail? It sounds like you took the exact jump that I worry about taking, and it'd be great to ask you a few questions.

Sure, my email is in my profile