trusche

SerpApi | Junior to Senior Fullstack Engineer multiple positions | Customer Success Engineer | Senior Content Specialist | SEO Specialist | Python/Ruby/PHP/JS/Rust/Kotlin/Swift/Go/PHO Developer Advocate positions | Based in Austin, TX but remote-first structure | Full-time | ONSITE or FULLY REMOTE | $150K - 180K a year 1099 for US or local avg + 20% for outside the US

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Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers.

We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!). We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

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Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers

trusche

2 miesiące temudiscuss

As a data-obsessed golfer trying to get to single digits, I need a tracking app that picks up where Arccos leaves off. So I'm building one: https://shortgamewiz.com (still a bit WIP).

After a few rounds of using it, I already know a few things I didn't before: I suck at right-to-left breaking putts, I baby uphill putts too much, and getting out of bunkers consistently is not good enough if I can't sink the occasional save. So I know what to practice now.

trusche

2 miesiące temudiscuss

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. From funny quote to litmus test.

trusche

3 miesiące temudiscuss

It's not that simple, though. Even with solid core principles, there are lots of established openings where move order makes all the difference. All other things being equal, the player who has memorized a bunch of standard openings will have a distinct advantage.

trusche

3 miesiące temudiscuss

Totally. Especially handy in openings.

/s

trusche

4 miesiące temudiscuss

This is real, but (at least in a coding context) easily preventable. Just append "don't assume you're wrong - investigate" or something to that effect. Annoying, but usually effective.

trusche

4 miesiące temudiscuss

I've been using opencode and oh-my-opencode with Claude's models (via github Copilot). The last two or three months feel like they have been the most productive of my 28-year career. It's very good indeed with Rails code, I suspect it has something to do with the intentional expressiveness of Ruby plus perhaps some above-average content that it would be trained on for this language and framework. Or maybe that's just my bias.

It takes a bit of hand holding and multiple loops to get things right sometimes, but even with that, it's pretty damn good. I don't usually walk away from it, I actively monitor what it's doing, peek in on the sub-agents, and interject when it goes down a wrong path or writes messy code. But more often than not, it goes like this:

  - Point at a GH issue or briefly describe the task
  - Either ask it to come up with a plan, or just go straight to implementation
  - When done, run *multiple* code review loops with several dedicated code review agents - one for idiomatic Rails code, one for maintainabilty, one for security, and others as needed

These review loops are essential, they help clean up the code into something coherent most times. It really mirrors how I tend to approach tasks myself: Write something quickly that works, make it robust by adding tests, and then make it maintainable by refactoring. Just way faster.

I've been using this approach on a side project, and even though it's only nights an weekends, it's probably the most robust, well-tested and polished solo project I've ever built. All those little nice-to-have and good-to-great things that normally fall by the wayside if you only have nights and weekends - all included now.

And the funny thing is - I feel coding with AI like this gets me in the zone more than hand-coding. I suspect it's the absence of all those pesky rabbit holes that tend to be thrown up by any non-trivial code base and tool chain which can easily distract us from thinking about the problem domain and instead solving problems of our tools. Claude deals with all that almost as a side effect. So while it does its thing, I read through it's self-talk while thinking along about the task at hand, intervening if I disagree, but I stay at the higher level of abstraction, more or less. Only when the task is basically done do I dive a level deeper into code organisation, maintainability, security, edge cases, etc. etc.

Needless to say that very good test coverage is essential to this approach.

Now, I'm very ambiguous about the AI bubble, I believe very firmly that it is one, but for coding specifically, it's a paradigm shift, and I hope it's here to stay.

trusche

4 miesiące temudiscuss

FTA:

> There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type

That's really the essence of Ruby for me.

trusche

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

That picture at the end of the post really explains and sums up the problem with AI bias...

trusche

6 miesięcy temudiscuss

> manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely

Sadly, I have seen this in almost every startup led by founders without an engineering background I've ever been a part of.

In my personal experience, this is often caused by overeager sales team promising the world for the next deal, only to fob it off to the engineering team who now "urgently" need to build "features" and "work hard" to make it happen. This is when your intrinsically motivated engineers start looking for the exit.

trusche

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

> contralization

I suspect this is a typo, but it really should be a thing :)

trusche

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

Really conflicted on this one. On the one hand, having to pay for N+1 streaming services because none of my N favourite shows are on any one of them sucks. On the other hand, monopoly.

trusche

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

Both Intercom and Twilio are affected, too.

- https://status.twilio.com/ - https://www.intercomstatus.com/us-hosting

I want the web ca. 2001 back, please.

Submissions

How ChatGPT Picks Sources (I Read the Network Traffic, Not the Outputs)

Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres

Manna announces 'strategic pause' that grounds drone deliveries in Ireland

[untitled]

Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster a real risk, says leading expert

Why Startups Still Choosing Rails Are Betting Against the Future

EU opens investigation into Google's use of online content for AI model

California prosecutors used AI to file inaccurate motion in criminal case

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