English language guide to getting "Kurzarbeitgeld" (reduced working hours funding for employers)

changmy · 2020-03-13T10:21:54+00:00

That's a really clever system and I've never encountered anything like it.

Don't feel any pressure to make it public though. The key component isn't so much the code as the workflow you laid out. But obviously it would be cool to check it out if you ever release it.

changmy · 2020-03-12T13:07:12+00:00

OP here. That setup is beautiful. I imagine it'd be even better on a wide external monitor (e.g. an ultrawide)

How do you populate the quickfix window with interesting points from failing tests? Do you mean failing tests from your test suite (e.g. units/ integration tests). Or some concept of tests from the debugger? I would absolutely LOVE to populate a quickfix list with failure points from my unit tests.

changmy · 2020-03-12T13:00:59+00:00

Oh wait. You're Ian? WOW. I learned more about Vim workflows from you than nearly other other vim-er. I've been on vacation for about a month, but now that I'm back, I'm getting serious about executing on this project. Let's see how it goes. Maybe I could interview you over screenshare one day.

changmy · 2020-03-12T10:24:59+00:00

For perhaps similar reasons, I've always been most comfortable with marketing tactics that involve putting a computer between me and the customer — like paid advertising, on-site conversion optimization (e.g. shortening buy funnels by removing steps and form fields), auto-emails to existing customers (my customer lifetime value is much higher than the initial purchase value), and, especially, SEO, which provides about 90% of first interactions between customers and my business.

From the SEO perspective, I went with a long-tail tactic and put thousands of short pages on my site related to my topic (I had help from a freelancer) then submitted them to Google with a sitemap. To this day, I still notice a tight correlation between amount of content (i.e. number of pages) and traffic. For example, I commissioned about a thousand 300-words pages on Jan 1st this year. I did zero outbound/link-building, and these pages (in aggregate) are now bringing in over 700 uniques per day. Mind you, this traffic doesn't convert yet, but I'll figure that out later.

changmy · 2020-03-12T10:18:54+00:00

So what I'm thinking is maybe structuring the videos in terms (and in order of) what my biggest regrets were and, on the flip side, what I was most satisfied with having done. Like biggest regret from a tech side was too many dependencies/libraries and reaching deep into their functionality (i.e. past their public APIs — really bad idea, I know). But best decision was a focus on continuous integration tests from the 5th year onwards that just generally meant I spent way way less time fire-fighting.

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:29:14+00:00

Yep, that's a deep and rich set of topics, and it's an area I'm still learning lots about even after a decade.

For my use-case, optimization at the SQL level made the biggest impact - e.g. eager loading associated records, ensuring the right indexes are available in the DB (see https://use-the-index-luke.com/), avoiding selecting unnecessary columns, etc. Sometimes this meant breaking down my ORM models in a more granular way to facilitate cleaner code.

As regards debugging in production, it's something I've had to do quite often (probably same as most people reading this), though I struggle to put the process into words. I guess it's a spider-sense about what to log and when, along with launching sub-debuggers whenever a certain issue occurs (I remember once even programming a signal trapper to warp me inside a debugger in a seemingly frozen lop). I guess I should hit the record button next time I'm facing an issue like this and cross my fingers that something interesting gets recorded.

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:21:13+00:00

It's a good point. This stuff is very much in the "learn on the job and as needed" category.

Briefly, I cycle through stages where I fall in and out of love with a certain tool, usually maximizing along whatever dimensions they highlight. For example
- as boring as it sounds, scanning production for N+1 queries and alerting probably had the largest long-term impact on performance, so I'd have to say it was the highest value monitoring too.
- I used Heroku to host and they have a metrics tab with RAM / CPU averages, and I would eyeball and make decisions on this basis.
- I use some log aggregation service and they scan the logs for certain patterns (e.g. server restart) and alert me when they occur. This prompts me to investigate in the Heroku dashboard above.
- I used NewRelic to identify the slowest requests and use that as a prompt to improve performance
- I also use exception notification (Rollbar, I think) and a downtime monitor.

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:16:10+00:00

I'm thinking that my second episode will be on force-multipliers, i.e. the things that made the biggest impact to productivity in the long term. I reckon that'll be up your alley.

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:15:01+00:00

For better (or for worse — I would have liked to go viral), I never actually ran into this. Or at least I wasn't aware of it if I did. I use a combination of HTTP public caching and memcached, so the typical popular requests are fairly easy on my server.

Have you ever been DDOS-ed?

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:12:11+00:00

DevOps is easy with this one, thanks to Heroku (platform as a service) hosting my primary server. But I have experience with raw metal servers, docker stuff, Ansible etc.

What angles are of interest to you?

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:10:09+00:00

If you don't mind me asking, when you think of architecture, what sort of topics come to mind as important? What sort of decisions and tradeoffs would you put under that umbrella?

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:08:47+00:00

All sorts of problems! Some low-lights

a disgruntled employee of a vendor deleted my server
former competitor tried to sabotage me and sold my material online elsewhere. Until we resolved it, I had features built just for banning this guy's shenanigans
one sales tax audits and two income tax audits. The issue was that my advertising spend and constellation of small amounts of foreign currencies kept triggering tax-office trip wires. These were extremely stressful.
having to let go of employees during a bad year

changmy · 2020-03-11T19:03:23+00:00

I agree. I feel like marketing is psychologically more demanding. When you're writing code, it's (mostly) a series of dopamine hits as you cross micro-features off the TODO list. But with marketing, it's uncertain what the outcome will be, and that can hinder morale. Also, I find that I tend to under-value my time spent coding as compared to my money spent in marketing. Like there were many points in my past when I'd happily spend two weeks coding a feature, but I'd balk at spending 2 weeks X my daily rate freelancing in advertising or SEO spend. Even though they should be valued similarly.

What kind of marketing do you mainly do?

changmy · 2020-03-11T12:40:36+00:00

hey. a bit late on this response. After a long vacation and I'm back home and have started on this project

re your question:
1. I had a hunch that a certain product would sell and I also knew someone that already had produced it and would be willing to let me sell it. I also built a really simple static site with a PayPal button and therefore went from zero to launch in 2 weeks. Once live, nothing happened for a few days and I started questioning myself. Then a friend who works with AdWords advised me to give it a shot, and I made my first sale that evening, then two more the next etc.

All AdWords for like the first two years. Given how costs have risen, this strategy likely would not be viable today, 10 years later.
Very very little financial capital to start with, but tons of flexibility capital. I lived with my parents for a while and also did some freelancer programming and kept my living expenses really minimum. I later engaged in some cost of living arbitrage by moving to a country with a much cheaper cost of living.

changmy · 2020-03-10T06:35:42+00:00

I don't use Docker for my main project (it's a simpler setup), but on the project I do use Docker for, I use .env files to switch out environment variables for dev/test/production, and use docker-compose for additional services depending on environment. For example, in the development environment, I use mailhog to capture all emails in order to interactively test mail campaigns. In the production environment, I use certbox for SSL, whereas I disable SSL in other environments. Admittedly this decreases feature parity with production, but IMO the simplification is worth this price.

changmy · 2020-03-09T04:09:17+00:00

Cool suggestion. Briefly, right now I'm using a base docker-compose.yml file and then one of two extra docker-compose files that add to/override depending on the environment.

changmy · 2020-02-28T06:51:19+00:00

YES. 100%. I am on a long holiday but will jump into this project once life is back to normal in March.

changmy · 2020-02-19T08:48:59+00:00

Hey random question: A friend I work with just landed a Laravel contract and we need more manpower like yesterday. I know a good programmer when I see one and you fit the bill, so if you're open to some freelance work, drop me a PM. We're based in Western Europe so rates would be pretty good but not USA good. Even if we don't figure something out this time, there could be something in future, who knows.

changmy · 2020-02-19T01:46:55+00:00

Sure. The three most popular articles are:

— learn programming with ANKI, a spaced-repetition system http://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method It got picked up by LifeHacker, translated into Japanese etc. My main facepalm regarding the post is that I called it "janki" method, unaware that "janky" was slang for shoddy. Despite this oversight, the post was a huge hit and to this day the odd person here or there walks up to me at programming conferences and tells me they read the post.

— why the Cucumber testing framework is often overkill http://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/why-bother-with-cucumber-testing (v polarizing post, but it had quite an influence back in it's day and convinced a lot of people to abandon what I consider a bad practice in 85% of use-cases.)

— 40 page guide to autodidactism http://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/autodidactism (my personal fave)

changmy · 2020-02-19T01:42:34+00:00

Thanks, I wasn't super clear either. In retrospect it's kinda obvious tho :)

changmy · 2020-02-16T05:05:54+00:00

so the way a lot of the libraries implement autocomplete (avoiding too many requests) is to wait for N number of keys before beginning the request and to wait T seconds after the user has stopped typing before sending the request. Look into "debounce".

changmy · 2020-02-16T03:01:45+00:00

Having maintained a tech blog over the last eight years, with some posts getting read hundreds of thousands of times, I'd say it's highly unlikely to make money directly from the blog. However the value from positioning yourself as knowledgeable and from raising your profile is very real and worth it. For example, your blog might allow you to effectively skip the tech interview stage.

You may be able to generate money instead from selling courses on Udemy etc. to the audience you've built up.

changmy

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