He had this action... I never really seen it before, but it was a deep sniff like he was smelling farts.

I wasn't drinking, lol.

He also said I shouldn't use Python because Amazon doesn't use Python. I asked him what languages they use. His answer: "I don't know."

I spoke with this particular company before and I almost begged off talking to this guy based off my prior experience. The last person was pretty disrespectful as well, but not so... abrasive.

He probably don't get into bar fights.

I seriously just had a half hour meeting with 5 back end guys where I explained, over and over, that it is never appropriate to have tabular data be unlimitedly sent to the client/browser. Like they couldn't see that an 8mb ajax call is a bad thing in 30 seconds of explaining. Kept getting "what is the use case for us to spend x amount of time implementing server side pagination" really?? And this is after the client has been complaining for 3 months.

4 hour interview somewhere else next week yay..

How did it last longer than page load time has to be less than x?

So our product's load time BEFORE data ajax calls are made is 30 seconds on prod and almost 200 requests so does that answer your question?

I would enjoy such an interview immensely and carry it on as long as possible. I get satisfaction from the strangest things.
Usually those people are pretty bad at what they do especially programming (pretty self evident).

dave, you are definitely not a terrible programmer, but some of your reactions are... odd...

i was just trying to sympathize with you and get more details of a bizarre story... why did you fixate on my assumption that were having a beer too? why is it "lol" to assume you were having a beer when you said the person across from you was drinking a beer?

honestly, i'm curious...

Yeah I too would like to hear more details - what did he say exactly, in what context (what's an impromptu interview?) and how did this come about?

I think he meant "lol" as in "yes that dude really said that, but I wasn't having a drink"

I wasn't trying to make hay over that.

"wait, the guy sharing a beer with you..." implies I was having a lovely chat with someone. Also, the "lol" was more poking at myself, being the dried out presence in any situation, so I bombed on my sense of humor. eh.

If it matters, I've dealt with the company the guy works for. I didn't like them the first few times, but wow, he really cemented my opinion of them.

I decided to finally try out this thing called "networking" and I put it out that I'm looking for work. The meetup leader introduced me to this other guy and he came by and gave me a chat.

what was the lead up to him calling you a terrible programmer to your face? i mean, that's what's so bizarre.... it's hard to imagine even an ******* doing that, unless they had been insulted first, which i'm sure is not what happened.

This person works at Amazon?

Not sure. Probably had something to do with me not using whatever tech stack he thinks Amazon uses. Python doesn't scale was his theory. He just felt that I'm wasting my time using languages, frameworks, and stupid projects no one ever heard of. He really hit me with a lot of insults and I don't have the mind to remember how it all went down.

I was also called low quality by some founder, who uh... only employs people that are willing to work for free and is running a failing startup. I don't know, **** them.

I will say that, overall, Austinites are nicest, most open and friendly people I've ever met, which makes these situations even more bizarre. It is little wonder that people who lived here a long time use abrasive adjectives to describe tech people, Californians, and people from Dallas.

I wish he did, so I could have laughed at him for not knowing what they use.

Tech bros are the worst. In some circles it's some weird version of PUA techniques on your co-workers or potential employees. I've literally seen some of the same techniques applied.

Oh okay. Well that was a weird thing for him to say, then.

And yeah, don't listen to a word this moron says. Mainly because he's a moron, but also because he's a moron who has no idea what he's talking about. We use Python (and a bunch of other languages) all the time at Amazon.

I'm about to turn 51. When I was a younger, hard core assembler programmer hitting the metal on engine controllers, I thought I'd always want to cut code for a living.

I still love to program, but I spend more of my professional time on the non-programming side these days. Project Management, Business Analysis, Requirements etc. etc.

Particularly on the Project Management side I think there will plenty of gigs around as I age. At least that is what recruiters tell me. I'm also thinking of expanding my Security skills as that seems to be a market that isn't going to disappear anytime soon.

What has changed over the years is that I now really enjoy the management side of things. Those years of coding experience give me some level of understanding and credibility when I'm dealing with development teams and when I'm dealing with senior level execs.

Yep, that's pretty much the graceful transition path for me. I'm just not quite ready to do it yet if I don't have to. I get too much charge out of coding and too little charge out of cat-herding.

What I really like right now is writing frameworks. I think that requires a pretty good blend of programming skill + experience.

I need a tool for downloading a bunch of JSON files. They're numerically named so I just need it to download all of them incrementing by 1 within a given number range. The files are secured with cookie authentication, I can copy request cookies out of Chrome's devtools.

Yeah, I could write it myself, but I'm lazy. Anyone know a tool that can do this?

I used to use WinHTTrack to scrape sites. Not sure if you could program it to do that - but if you create a webpage with the links to all the JSON files (with Javascript), then it would just follow that and download all the files.

wget would probably work: http://www.labnol.org/software/wget-...xamples/28750/

I'd use cURL because cookies, and easy copy/paste of cURL command line (including cookie!) through Firefox Inspect Element tool.

After putting some money on PredictIt (like Intrade, but for US customers with crappier fees) to gambooool on the election, I thought it would be a good situation to put my ****ty Javascript knowledge to use and learn some Angular basics in the process:



Server updates from PredictIt once a minute and pushes updates to clients. While I don't see auto-trading in the future, there are some fun directions I can take this in terms of identifying movement/setting price alerts/etc.

Related: Visual Studio is surprisingly awesome for JS development.

Thanks for suggestions. Turned out a friend had a custom scraping toolset he built for sportsbetting stuff and used that for me.

Why would [].isArray() be a thing? Wouldn't this error on anything that's not an array? How could this ever return not true? js.