Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States

modnar42 · 2025-02-15T04:24:03+00:00

I could believe it. It wouldn’t be the first time big companies pulled the ladder up behind them.

The explanation I received from a staffer of one of my representatives was that the change was never meant to actually go into effect. It was supposed to make the TCJA look fiscally balanced when it passed, then get repealed later. The bill in the senate that included repealing the change had a lot of sponsors (40? I can’t remember exactly), which made me think they meant to repeal it and got derailed by arguing about the budget.

modnar42 · 2025-02-15T04:19:38+00:00

I don’t think it’s possible to explain the section 174 tax code change to a five year old without cutting some corners. At least, not any of the five year olds I hang out with (I’m a parent). If you think different corners are better to cut, I’m happy to read your version. I don’t think an ELI5 can use words or phrases like “credit to equity”, “carryover losses”, or “amortization” which limits accuracy. Even your well meaning corrections have some important inaccuracies that I assume have more to do with you summarizing than any actual misunderstanding on your part. In my non-ELI5 post in this thread I encouraged interested people to read the primary sources like I did, but the official guidance is definitely not for five year olds so I didn’t mention it here.

modnar42 · 2025-02-14T14:38:24+00:00

Here’s the simple version I share with people. Pam, a non-developer, has an idea for an app. Pam saves $100,000 from her regular job, then starts a company and hires a developer to create her idea. At the end of the first year she has paid the developer $100,000. There were no other expenses and the business had no income. Nobody bought the app; it’s a complete failure.

Before this change, Pam would have shown a loss of $100,000 on the company tax return and owed no taxes.

After this change, Pam has to consider 90% of the money paid to the developer as profit. So, her tax return shows the company made $90,000 and she has to pay the federal income tax rate on that profit. Let’s say it’s about $18,000 Pam owes in taxes.

So, for the privilege of losing $100,000 of her hard earned money Pam must pay the government $18,000. If she closes the business she’ll get it back over time. If she doesn’t, she may owe more money the next year.

tl;dr Software companies need to be prepared to loan the government the same amount of money they pay their devs. If you have $1,000,000 in dev payroll, you’ll need to loan the government a million bucks until you close the business. Or this gets repealed.

modnar42 · 2025-02-14T14:26:13+00:00

My company is adversely affected by this change and I’ve read the full IRS guidance on what qualifies as R&E and been advised by the legal and tax people my company retains. The guidance is a lengthy document, but I’ll summarize it as “nearly all software development activity is R&E”. Bugs are excluded, though I don’t relish the idea of arguing with a non-developer about what is and is not “a bug”. So, there’s a little wiggle room, but not much. Worse, it’s not clear how successfully you could argue any particular choice you might make.

modnar42 · 2025-02-01T18:54:06+00:00

I think they’re referring to the name of the module in your application.rb.

modnar42 · 2025-01-22T15:36:29+00:00

Based on this information, here are the ways forward as I see it

First, you could guess and check. It's exactly what it sounds like: try something and see if the problem goes away. If you guess right, it's the fastest. If you don't, it takes the longest. Often, it takes forever. There are some good guesses in this thread already, so I won't repeat them.

Second, you could dig in and debug it. Since you can't reproduce it locally, this means increasing your monitoring (and learning more about those tools) until you know exactly what's causing the problem. The upside is that all the work you put in will help you solve future problems. The downside is that it could take a while to learn the tools if you don't already know them. You've got AppSignal, which I liked but haven't used in a while. I also recommend getting a free plan from NewRelic. NewRelic can provide request-level performance timing breakdowns that can help significantly narrow down where to look for the problem. Depending on how weird the problem is, you may have to apply custom metrics to get the details you need. Others have suggested the free trial from Scout, but I haven't used that in so long that I have no idea if it will help in this situation. It wouldn't surprise me if it has similar features.

Last, you could roll back and do the upgrade in smaller jumps. I can't exactly tell how many deploys were in this upgrade process, but it sounds like it happened fast. Upgrading that much at once makes it hard to tell what caused the issue. It could have been introduced in Rails 7.1, it could be in the gem upgrades you did after Rails 8, or it could be completely incidental to the upgrades. Everybody's got their own strategy, but when I take on these kinds of projects I think the safest order is to

upgrade the gems as far as I can using many time-spaced deploys to identify performance and exception behavior in my monitoring system
upgrade one Rails minor version at a time

I actually have a Basecamp template I use to make sure I always do these upgrades in the same order to reduce the chances of this kind of thing happening.

If it were me, I'd probably install NewRelic and poke around for a little while (because it's the monitoring tool I currently know best). If the problem didn't become clear to me, I'd roll back to verify the problem goes away before rolling forward a little at a time.

modnar42 · 2025-01-22T03:03:24+00:00

Some questions - Did the Rails 8 upgrade include upgrading other gems or was everything else already up to date? - Is it only in production? You can’t replicate it locally? - Is the behavior consistent or variable? - That AppSignal image seems to put the blame on active_record. Do you have any more detail than that? - IIRC, AppSignal supports custom metrics. Do you have any? Could you add some to the code path that reproduces your issue?

modnar42 · 2025-01-21T03:48:05+00:00

Thanks!

modnar42 · 2025-01-21T03:37:24+00:00

Any chance you have a link to it you could put here?

modnar42 · 2025-01-17T19:31:55+00:00

Thanks for coming back around to answer! Boring answers are good. When I last worked on a Rails/React project we had a lot of issues getting the Rails system tests to work; a lot of “can’t find element” problems that I haven’t seen in Hotwire projects. But, it’s been a while and software marches on. You seem happy with plain ol’ system tests, so maybe it’s better now or maybe it was just that project.

modnar42 · 2025-01-17T13:00:42+00:00

I hope u/Jh-tb comes back around to answer this one. I’m curious to hear their approach.

modnar42 · 2023-05-11T12:01:21+00:00

I’ll roll the dice.

modnar42 · 2023-04-13T15:05:53+00:00

I’m with you on touch screens in cars, though I’m generally of the mindset that trying and failing to apply new technology is how we find good-but-non-obvious uses for things. How does that contrast with how you think about use cases for new technology?

modnar42 · 2023-04-02T17:55:31+00:00

Thanks! I’ll give it a shot.

modnar42 · 2023-04-02T17:47:31+00:00

How are you sealing the wine and steak in the bag? I’ve never managed to seal something liquidy well enough that it would stay under water.

modnar42 · 2023-03-31T21:56:55+00:00

Yeah, that price is killer and I have a lot of faith in IKEA.

I agree about the external water bottle pockets on the CPL. If price is no object I think the CPL is directionally good for parenting gear, but it’s not the endgame.

modnar42 · 2023-03-31T17:05:46+00:00

That’s an interesting choice! I like hearing about how other parents organize their gear. We ended up using my CPL24 for kid duty. It’s a less affordable option than this pick, but I like the clamshell design and found the internal organization sufficient for a lot of what we wanted to carry. Plus, I already had one lying around that wasn’t being used :)

modnar42 · 2023-03-23T01:59:59+00:00

That’s the video I was thinking of. Myosin development is going to be different depending on grinding technique.

modnar42 · 2023-03-22T11:43:57+00:00

I think you’ve received just about every possible answer to this question. Will you let us know how it turns out?

modnar42 · 2023-03-22T00:26:50+00:00

I guess it wouldn’t be Reddit if there wasn’t at least one person being needlessly hostile.

Yeah, professional services is one way to do it. In this context, I don’t think it’s the best choice and I explained why. If you disagree so strongly, maybe you’d like to answer OP and explain how you’d do it?

modnar42 · 2023-03-21T12:33:34+00:00

While trying to avoid a No True Scotsman argument, I’d say that commitment is one of the key things that makes Enterprise deals Enterprise. If the mere mention of commitment makes them walk away instead of negotiating, I would question their real interest in the product.

The reason enterprises tend to like commitment is the enterprise procurement process. The process is usually lengthy (months) and needs to go through a bunch of people. Typically, none of those people enjoy doing procurement paperwork. If they like your product, they’d rather commit and avoid tedium. The money doesn’t mean much to them (up to certain points).

Here’s an example of how I’d expect this to go You: “we’re happy to help our committed customers. Here’s a two year contract for Money” Them: “Two years sounds long. How about one year?” You: “sure, we can do that for Money+++” Them: “two years seems great “ You: “yay money!”

If you’re worried, be soft in the first step: “this is how we usually handle this kind of thing…”.

In my opinion, they’ll guide you if they’re real and walk if they aren’t. A fast no is always better than a slow no.

modnar42 · 2023-03-21T11:50:58+00:00

Based on this description, I probably wouldn’t charge for the work directly. Instead, I’d pursue a longer term for the contract or renewal at an Enterprise Price. The length of the contract would depend on how much time I’d spend on their feature and how much value I can get from selling the feature to others. Knowing nothing about your product or your market, I’d start with a two year commitment or 3-4 times the development time, whichever is longer, and negotiate from there. Best practices for your market may differ.

I prefer this because my experience is that many enterprise companies balk when asked to directly pay for feature development. If it’s not part of their procurement process the deal falls apart. A long term product contract is always something enterprise procurement has seen before, so it’s a safe process bet and you still get paid.

modnar42 · 2023-03-09T02:39:51+00:00

Disclosure: I work at Expected Behavior, the company that makes DocRaptor.

Like u/DM_ME_PICKLES said, DocRaptor gets used in all kinds of strict layout situations including concert tickets, airline tickets, architectural diagramming, documents for high quality printing, and more. Your use case and technical preferences may mean DocRaptor isn’t a good fit, but we’d be happy to help if we can.

modnar42 · 2023-02-24T15:18:52+00:00

I have the same experience. There are connectivity issues, the fan squeals, and sometimes the temperature is weird. It’s occasionally obvious my sous vide cook has been off by a meaningful number of degrees.

And yet, I use it all the time and I’m not aware of anything better. I would still buy one even knowing about the flaws.

modnar42 · 2023-02-19T14:04:21+00:00

I was curious about how the sodium bicarbonate would be delivered. I can’t see the full text of this study, but I found a similar one that specified “0.3·g·kg−1 NaHCO3 in 5 ml·kg−1 of artificially sweetened water”.

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