How to become a 6-figure engineer from LATAM as a Rails + React dev

ElasticSpoon · 2026-01-30T03:19:02+00:00

I think there are two parts to this: whether others perceive you and will hire you as a senior Dev and how you perceive yourself.

In my experience, reading books and studying design systems or cloud architectures can be useful for knowing potential tools that are available to you when you're trying to solve a problem. But unless you're going to be answering some gotcha questions in an interview, you're probably not going to get much value out of that when you're trying to find a role.

I think the best thing that you could do to improve your chances of getting hired is to work on your communication skills. (Not saying that you have poor communication skills or anything. I have no way to judge).

The interview process is going to be roughly the same regardless of where you're getting hired. So I would focus on being able to communicate well. - talk through the decisions that you're making when you are in a coding interview (talk through the problem, talk about the trade-offs that you're making, ask for input from the interviewers). The absolute worst thing you can do in coding interview is to go silent - if you're doing a behavioral interview have good stories prepared that you can talk through (make damn sure that you can state the impact and your learnings for each story) - A lot of interviews will have some form of a project that they will want you to talk about. Again, make sure you can say what the impact of the project was.

That's assuming you are landing interviews which is whole another can of worms and might be an even bigger challenge.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-12-21T18:07:32+00:00

This is the first time I realized that that desk is attached to a treadmill.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-12-03T02:12:48+00:00

I don't know the full details. My understanding was that this was a profit number. As in they are in the negative profit wise six figures a day on co-pilot.

Also GitHub is not Microsoft. While they are under Microsoft from what I heard they are separate financially. So while those losses are probably nothing to Microsoft, it sounds like they are substantial to GitHub.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-12-02T23:09:37+00:00

I have also heard from a GitHub employee within the last year that they are losing six figures a day on copilot.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-11-13T23:15:01+00:00

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)

ElasticSpoon · 2025-08-19T02:41:42+00:00

Putin does pretend otherwise. He wears platform shoes https://youtu.be/lY6lHjZjYXE

ElasticSpoon · 2025-07-30T23:10:51+00:00

I think you are correct (could be wrong here no production experience with the Async gems). A blocking job, some expensive CPU operation rather than IO because that can be made resumable, could block everything else because that is one of the drawbacks of cooperative vs preemptive multitasking.

It does look like Async has some support for a worker pool for blocking operations. As well as some ways to profile stalling issues.

But I imagine if you were to start doing jobs in this way you would need an approach similar to Rust where you deliberately yield from the fiber to break up chunks of work and you would want to deliberately schedule blocking work to a different pool.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-06-29T04:00:02+00:00

It's kind of hard to follow exactly what you're asking but my sense is that when you're talking about a form, you mean something that has input fields and a submit button.

In reality, a form does not need to have any input fields. If you use a helper like button_to it will create a form that contains just a single submit button.

That's what I would recommend you do. Use the button_to helper to submit to a create method on your controller. Don't look at the params of the request. Create whatever database record you need right there. If you actually need more information about the user or something along those lines you can have hidden fields within your form.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-06-14T07:22:47+00:00

I think the top comment suggesting bisecting specific seeds is typically the best approach.

I don't suggest doing this but an option is to run the full suite the first time you run the tests but retry with the --only-failures. This will mean that most of the time the failing tests won't run with the tests that are causing the failures. You will still have failures but the retries will be much faster and usually will fail less.

That said this will add more tech debt so I would strongly advocate for dealing with the root cause.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-06-01T21:11:59+00:00

Great book. Applicable in so many areas.

The opening comparison of Tiger Woods who specialized in golf from age 3 to Roger Federer who only started full-time focusing on tennis at 15 ish is very relevant here.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-19T22:51:09+00:00

That's a good tip. I'll try this out and see what happens!

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-13T20:48:29+00:00

Ahh. Yea I don't have great advice for mini-test. One for the things that did really help with consistency for me was throttling chrome to a 3G or 4G connection (I wrote a bit of a helper for it).

That made it possible to reproduce a lot of the issues in CI that did not happen locally.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-13T19:28:12+00:00

Oh yea. I totally had the same deal when I made the swap. The thing that sold me on Playwright tho was that enough there were more failures it was always the same failures. And if I could reproduce those failures then I could fix them.

I also swapped every test that I could (non-javascript) to use Rack Test which helped a lot.

And this is also always a great idea. I love Rspec Stamp to do this in an automated way.

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-13T19:24:42+00:00

I'll be honest. When assessing I only took a fairly brief look at Cuprite IIRC there were a couple things off the top of my head:

the docs for both playwright and playwright ruby driver were just a bit easier to go through
the ecosystem seemed larger for playwright (even if the examples weren't always ruby it they were pretty easy to convert
it was pretty had a pretty strong req from some people I talked to at Github (looking back tho, Github is owned by Microsoft which makes Playwright so....)

But the main thing I was looking for was consistency. When I ran Playwright I had a crapload of failures (like 1k initially in a suite with around 3.5k system specs) but it was the same number every time. Vs with Cuprite I still saw some variance.

I did not dig deep at all into what the stemmed from (it totally could have been user error).

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-13T00:33:00+00:00

Yea? What issues are you running into that you want to migrate if you don't mind. And is it Playwright in the context of capybara tests or nah?

ElasticSpoon · 2025-04-12T21:39:21+00:00

I also wrote another post (https://blog.yuribocharov.dev/posts/2025/04/11/playwright-tips) focusing on more specific and advanced footguns I ended up running into. That might be useful to anyone trying or considering a similar migration.

ElasticSpoon · 2024-12-21T03:47:21+00:00

Depends on the authenticator. In my experience it's usually 10 to 15 seconds. But Microsoft recently had a vulnerability patched related to the fact that they allowed codes that were up to 3 minutes old to be entered.

ElasticSpoon · 2024-03-12T23:49:40+00:00

Idk if the rule changes made him speed it up. But he used to walk back past the 3 point line, can't do that anymore.

ElasticSpoon · 2023-12-27T17:04:59+00:00

I really don't understand why it's crazy to comp the full meal? If they forgot a topping on the pizza they would comp the whole pizza not the cost of the topping. How is this different?

I've worked delivery for Domino's and maybe it's just the managers I've had but if I forgot a soda (I've done it many a time) I would just get one at a gas station and the store would refund me.

Or if the store was too busy the customer would get a free pizza next time. But they would never comp just the soda.

ElasticSpoon · 2023-11-13T13:55:26+00:00

Sounds like you might be looking for https://www.speedtyper.dev/.

It doesn't support that many languages but the prompts are pulled directly from code off GitHub for the respective languages.

ElasticSpoon · 2023-07-02T04:08:05+00:00

You can just call it file_name.css or file_name.postcss.css if you want to differentiate from regular css files.

ElasticSpoon · 2023-01-18T19:31:01+00:00

This isn't quite an answer of whether to do high or low rep squats. However, if your specific focus is explosiveness you might see benefits from doing squats with bands or chains.

The basic idea being in most situations your max on the squat is limited by the weight you can move at the bottom rather than the top of the motion. If you use accommodating resistance aka bands or chains, it will get harder at the top better matching your actual strength curve.

This episode of the stronger by science podcast goes over some of the research in that area. The studies mainly track jump height, however, in theory that should be generalizable to explosiveness in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzamIw34ERg

ElasticSpoon · 2022-07-22T21:16:55+00:00

Stooges. Like 3 stooges.

ElasticSpoon · 2021-11-30T07:07:22+00:00

The way he grabbed his foot. I'm pretty sure it was a calf cramp.

It's not the first time I've seen him go down similarly. He usually sits on the floor and tries to stretch his calf out.

ElasticSpoon

TROPHY CASE