SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)
Full stack Ruby and Javascript/Typescript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.
I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.
Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a popular Ruby billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS and Digital Ocean as well as writing IaC in Terraform.
I was talking about why companies tend to be disinclined toward staffing part time professionals.
If you are already freelancing, there’s even less of an obvious benefit to a company since it can contract with you without the liabilities that come with employing you.
To me talking to your clients about part time employment seems like a good way to gain relevant information.
Part time professional positions mostly come from personal relationships.
SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)
Full stack Ruby and Javascript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.
I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.
Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS, and Digital Ocean.
Sort of agree though I would argue "joining an exercise group" is a healthy way to create shallow connections with the aim that one or more of them becomes deeper. Finding deep connections is difficult and requires significant effort from at least one party. You have to work at it. And attempts to create shallow connections shouldn't be dismissed because you generally can't try to create deeper connections in isolation and separately from trying to create shallow connections.
The difficulty of growing a shallow connection into a deeper connection is a large part of why so many people are lonely. We can't just ignore shallow connections because it's unrealistic to only ever aim for deep connections. Connections are experiments that grow.
yeah like where do people expect deep connections to form from? are they supposed to spring forth, fully formed from the swipe of an app? no! they take work and time and effort and form from shallower connections.
Technically he could, I believe FIDE has a minimum rating increase of 1 point for the winner of a game with > 400 ELO advantage on their opponent. But if he broke 2900 by playing in minor tournaments against low rated amateur opponents no one would take it seriously that he broke 2900. Realistically many, maybe even all of the top players could push for record ELOs by only playing against players well below their level. But not only are the optics bad and the records would be looked at as illegitimate, it would take a lot of time playing long classical chess games against inferior opponents. Which is a major opportunity cost since their time would normally be spent playing in and studying for professional tournaments.
So.. he has rating 2861 now and 39 points left to 2900.
In theory he plays one 2500 player every month, and wins, for 39 months in a row and we're done? I'd be impressed if he won all of them (he doesn't usually do that.)
His most recent game on 2700chess is a draw vs 2490 rated player Schitco.
The post I was replying to asked if he could play against 1800's and gain rating. Players in the 2500s are much more capable of forcing a draw. It'd be unlikely he'd gain much rating playing against them because wins wouldn't move the needle much and draws would be very costly.
Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.
He's kind of an unusual case. I'd normally think of him as yet another sports star with an opinion, but because of the way the Cold War worked, he has political importance/baggage that somebody like Joe Montana or Fernando Valenzuela doesn't have.
It’s an established, commonly used title, kinda like Doctor. Entrepreneur not a title, only a name of an occupation. Nobody really calls anybody “Entrepreneur Smith”.
It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.
Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.
Like is the wrong word. I think the closest appropriate idea is "appreciate".
You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all, because it should have made you uncomfortable and think things you would rather not.
Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose of some art, not all art.
So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the kinds of words to apply rather than like.
And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective on you whether or not you like it or even have the background or perception to recognize it's quality.
It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.
Ironically, the "white dot" type of art was popularized by CIA who poured money into cultural promotion following remarks by the USSR that the US was a culturally barren wasteland:
The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.
For what it’s worth, Felix Gonzalez Torres’ work pushed me from “I don’t understand this modern stuff” to “oh I get it now.” Maybe it can do that for others?
I think there’s this notion that art has to be technically sophisticated to be of value. But really, all art has to do is communicate something interesting or meaningful. If a white dot does this then who cares how it was made?
Finally, people make a big deal about the price of art. Well, artists (the ones I like anyway…) don’t have much to do with what a piece of art will sell for. Ultimately the piece of art is just some interesting exchange between artist and viewer, the price has nothing to do with any of this exchange.
I’m just a guy that walked into a museum and thought this guy has communicated something profound and beautiful. When someone come up and says “but that must’ve taken 5 minutes to make!!” they look like assholes.
This might be overly reductive, but if you use Twitter or any social platform where people indirectly reference other posts, I think you can maybe understand how a dot on a white canvas can have impact. The "Loss" meme [1] borders on being that exact thing.
I think it’s subjective. I learned Haskell early on in university and I’ve learned Lisps and it still feels like extra work to reason about programs or model domains in functional languages.
I believe functional programming advocates when you guys say it works better. But I only believe it works better for you. In my experience there’s a minority of people who find functional programming to be a powerful paradigm shift but for most developers functional programming either doesn’t resonate or resonates at the level of an academic exercise that helps you think better about writing code but best remains an academic exercise.
It can be extra work to reason about the performance and efficiency of functional programs, such is the case with higher level languages. But modelling the domain is far easier. I can solve difficult problems using Haskell, e.g. writing a specialist DSL compiler targeting a GPU. I'm just not smart or patient enough to solve such problems in C/C++ or Java, although I do concede that many can.
I think that the procedural programming is much more common because of the academic and work experience of many programmers. Functional programming is a transition of the way of thinking that seems not worth it. But after I got my hands dirty, I found myself writing much more clean and consistent code in every language.
I enjoyed particularly Clojure because has a good ecosystem and tools, and also take some design decisions to steer you for a more robust code.
https://clojure.org/about/functional_programming#_immutable_...
I broadly agree. I actually think most people are most at home in the procedural domain, and most just write procedural code in OOP languages. Which is hard to do in an FP.
Erlang is often described as having an imperative core. It was my gateway drug for FP, I certainly found it much easier to grasp and write than any Lisp.
As did I. I went imperative languages -> Haskell (wtf) -> Clojure (wtf) -> Erlang (love it) -> Clojure (love it) -> Elixir (love it).
My two favorite languages these days are Clojure and Elixir. Currently mostly Clojure because my main side project is more amenable to Clojure's methods of concurrency than Elixir.
Full stack Ruby and Javascript/Typescript developer with experience as a lead dev, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user. I'm a big time pragmatist.
I have experience working with startups, big businesses (e.g. New York Times and Cleversafe - $1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM) and small businesses. Other examples of clients I've worked for include a large European travel booking company, a developer tools company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.
Long time Rails dev (since Rails 2), more recently I've worked with Node.js/Express, React and Golang as well. Occasional open source contributor (most recently to DefinitelyTyped and KillBill a popular Ruby billing & payment platform). Not dev-ops per say but I have experience managing deployments with AWS and Digital Ocean as well as writing IaC in Terraform.
Github: https://github.com/ritchiea
Email: ritchiea@gmail.com
CV and references available upon request.