woo hoo. Fun day at work today. Got to meet with some of my team members at the end of day. Also I was delighted to see that we had pretty good selection of snacks and stuff, which I didn't see the first time around when I was at the onsite. So I'm glad I picked this company.

It's amazing how easily it is to be delighted by snacks. Something that cost maybe $1k at max per year for each employee. We got cereal, yogurt, bananas, apples, bagels and a coffee bar where people are serving coffee. All kinds of drinksss.

Jealous. Today I ate a half eaten sandwich someone left in the fridge.

No, we're using internal staff that have attended training session and gotten certified I believe. But to be fair, we have been doing agile/scrum for the last decade, so its not like its a huge stretch for us to adapt SAFe.

Does anyone else think that Quora sucks? The whole thing is advertising masked as advice, like a spam version of Reddit.

Yes I actively try and avoid clicking Quora links

I think we were spending $500 to $1000 a week for the kitchen at my old place depending on how much boos was in the mix. I know I was expensing $100 a week for snacks at the Denver office which had about 15 people in it. Add in the weekly lunches and occasional cook outs and it probably came close to your estimate.

Good luck! Let us know how the planning meeting goes.

Quora, like any other social media site, is what you make of it. Just don't follow all the spam topics, especially the "high IQ" and "self help" stuff. There are a lot of legit and extremely intelligent people on there, and I've found it to be a valuable resource for learning about many things.

And yeah, it is a good way to generate traffic to your website and build trust with a targeted audience.

I've had a few dozen of my articles show up on Reddit, and 99% of the time, the top comment is from someone who, at most, read the first paragraph and went on a screed that totally missed the entire point or twisted the words into a Frankenstein, which leads to a chain of totally off-topic responses that descend into bashing "the author" (I don't submit my work). On Quora, people tend to stay on topic and respond intelligently, so you win some / lose some.

And also, have to point out the irony that Reddit is really nothing more than a bunch of links to external websites, which all have something to sell, so not sure who Reddit is less "spammy" than anywhere else. Pageviews have value irt to ads, joining mailing lists, affiliate links, products, etc.

I'm saying that if you make a datetime in the first way, with tzinfo=pytz.timezone('US/Central'), it will almost always have an incorrect version of the timezone applied to it. The tzinfo parameter is 100% broken and if you use it, you will cause yourself trouble.

Quora has basically no anonymous viewing and has to be connected to Facebook and/or Google, right?

How is it broken? What timezone would that drop you in ?

Meant to say this a little while ago, but welcome back daveT!

They have that no-anon rule, yes. I hate it just as much as anyone, but I get the point of it.

thx.

Someone sent this out at work and it made me think of this thread, especially in reference to the recent timezone discussion:

Every time zone has multiple versions, that are valid only from date1 to date2. You'll get the *first* one in the list of time zones, which is from forever ago. It will have incorrect offsets from UTC for some dates in it's range. It won't necessarily even be an even hour multiple off!


2017-03-01 05:51:00+00:00
2017-03-01 06:00:00+00:00

Ask me how confused I was when I came across this, and dates that should be "now" were minutes off, but the machine itself had the right time. It took me a while to figure that one out.

Side job fun: We officially are live after like 2 months of infrastructure stuff. However we still don't have flows for 2 of the 3 types of users needed to make the whole app work. Also we have no way to collect money. And we're pivoting away from a consumer-app to something banks would offer their customers. So it's basically an investor show-pony to show how the app works and talk about our fancy encryption. Fine.

Owner (guy who pays everyone's salary) after showing little interest in the core app for months, decides to try to upload a 315GB file. We encrypt files on the client, then break them into 1MB (configurable) chunks and upload. Needless to say 315,000 1MB chunks is going to be a bit of a load for the average web browser to hold in resident memory at once.

The CEO finally jumps in and says - is this really a concern right now? Most documents are nowhere near that size. I point out that dropbox has a 20GB limit and there's no reasonable way a client can encrypt and chunk a 315GB file before uploading.

Owner replies "We should be able to handle any size file." I so want to reply "Yes, and I should be able to **** Jessica Alba". Of course no one else says anything because they're all terrified of the owner.

He basically wants us to build him a 200 story building, but we'll worry about minor details like the elevators and windows later.

Agreeing completely that upload of a 300G file is an absurd thing to focus on at this stage.

But can't you just encrypt on the fly, e.g. create a few hundred chunks in advance and then add more as you successfully upload (and locally delete) them? I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't work with standard encryption algos, but maybe you are doing something fancy.

Maybe - but that would be a redesign of all the encryption code which pre-dates me and the key front-end dev. I would be surprised if other issues don't come up (like network throttling from ISP). It would be absolutely ludicrous to focus on when we're just a show-pony trying to either get investor money or a partner deal with a bank.

For reference - we literally cannot run more than one node instance of each microservice yet, because the back-end guy (who until recently refused to let me work in the framework) doesn't understand clustering. But that is not deemed a major issue to fix at this time.

Also the site only works on Chrome. Getting it to work with other browsers is not deemed important.

There are a dozen other similar issues not deemed important. But dammit we gotta have 300GB file uploads.

Whoa. That is one broken interface -- didn't know that example but it's a great one.

Suzzer,

"We should be able to handle any size file."

Man, I can totally feel his smugness and idiocy.

This is obviously the point where you realize the chance of success has gone from 1% to 0%.

He's actually a reasonably nice guy once you get past the bulldog exterior.

But he's clueless as to how to make good software.

So is this a drop everything and make his file work situation, or ignore it and hope it goes away?

Well funny thing - one of the other leadership guys pointed out that our marketing copy says 100MB of storage free trial. So I think the crisis is averted for now.