JacksonBates @JacksonBates@aus.social
Fighting the patriarchy with JavaScript • CTO at Grace Papers • Melbourne, Australia
I mostly wanna connect with Aussie based devs, but also cool people.
Joined Jun 2019
Boss sent everyone an UberEats voucher without warning and the slack channel lit up with lots of suspicious discussion of whether this was a phishing attack.
I have them well trained!
JacksonBates
boosted
When I think about climate change, I think about the Great Stink.
By 1830, London was the largest, richest city in the world. But the city's waste management systems had not changed appreciably since medieval times. Most human waste was handled quite simply: it was just dumped into the River Thames.
The result was a slow-growing crisis that lasted three decades. Cholera outbreaks (from drinking tainted water, though nobody understood that then) periodically wracked the city, killing tens of thousands. The stench from the river gradually grew worse and worse, making life in riverside districts increasingly intolerable. The government was too hesitant to take dramatic action, though; it tried instead to mitigate the problem, by pouring lime into the river to cut the stench.
It all came to a head in the summer of 1858. A dry spell caused the level of the river to drop, leaving the banks coated with mounds of what the newspapers delicately called "impure matter." The stench was so bad that it became known as "the Great Stink." Parliament, whose halls were right on the river, could not conduct business. The smell in the chambers was so strong that all the curtains were soaked in chloride of lime to try and block it. (It didn't work.)
Parliament was now faced with a simple, stark choice: do something to clean up the river, or move itself out of London altogether. Members seriously discussed relocating to Oxford and St. Albans, but in the end, they decided to act. Municipal engineer Joseph Bazalgette was authorized to build a network of new sewers, at the then-staggering cost of £3 million, to be paid for by taxing every London household three pennies for the next 40 years.
Bazalgette's sewers solved the problem. They solved it so well they're still in use today. But democratic government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making them happen. Only when the problem made their own lives intolerable did they finally act.
How all this relates to climate change, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.
There's other variables to consider, such as how long each car takes to warm up to its optimal efficiency...but I reckon any other considerations are only gonna amount to cents per trip, if that.
Did some napkin math to figure out if the bigger more comfortable and more modern car with the more expensive petrol is more or less expensive to drive compared to the smaller less comfortable car that runs on cheaper petrol.
Confortable car wins, despite my intuition that the opposite was gonna be true.
So one of the jobs I applied to that I thought had ghosted me, just called me to set up a first interview - a month after I applied...
JSON Web Space Tokens...just me?
JacksonBates
boosted
Got up in the roof again to lay the loose insulation left up there in open bags.
Wife complained this morning that she was too hot all night - still layered for the pre-insulation nighttimes.
Good news I think!
JacksonBates
boosted
The “Definitely Non Venomous Snake”, named after its discoverers, John Definitely, Harold Non, and Kristen Venomous, is one of the most dangerous animals in the world.”
MySQL question / Possibly AWS question
Ah...looks like she'd thrown an extra 'ORDER BY' on there she didn't tell me about. Seems to be the culprit
MySQL question / Possibly AWS question
A colleague was complaining that a query was taking minutes to run.
She's connecting to an AWS RDS MySQL instance via Workbench on her Mac.
I can connect to the same instance, run the same query via Workbench on Ubuntu and it runs in seconds...
What gives?
Got invited to the 12 year reunion of students I used to teach.
Weird to think they are now older than I was when I taught them.
Hard to square the maths of that one against what feels intuitive...
App developers (or their marketing peeps): stop it, this is just weird.
Got up into the roof space today to check out the insulation.
Whoever installed it just put it in the easy access areas and then just tossed some bags around.
Even some easy spots not insulated at all.
Sort of annoying, but also a reasonably simple fix for our home energy efficiency improvements.
Been trying to find a good Craiyon / dall-e mini mash up taking famous names that overlap:
Bruce Lee Harvey Oswald
Daniel Craig David
Lenny Bruce Willis
John Clare Danes
Etc.
Unfortunately it just focuses on the more famous / more photographed of the pair.
I'll keep trying though. Happy to take suggestions too :)
Boss messed up the pay run in the same fortnight we got hit with an unexpected car maintenance cost and a gas bill...
$1000 short on pay, and $1000 increase in what we'd normally have budgeted for this month 😰
Software estimates
Why can never accurately estimate how long X will take, but always accurately tell whether X can be achieved by a set date and what needs to be cut from the scope to hit that deadline?
"X will take Y weeks" 👎
vs.
"Here's the version of X you can have 3 weeks from now" 👍
JacksonBates
boosted
If you're having computer problems DO NOT turn it off and back on again, IT has been SCAMMING YOU FOR YEARS, the problems will ALWAYS COME BACK, the solution is to simply turn the computer OFF and NEVER turn it back on again
What I learned
LinkedIn jobs and Seek via private advertisers is next to useless, at least with my style of approach.
Recruiters can be your best friends or really sour the experience!
I accepted a role for less money in part because the way the other recruiter represented the higher paying company really brought into question what working for them might be like. Couldn't tell if it was the recruiter or the company at fault.
The recruiter for the role I accepted was excellent, and helped me secure 2 really good offers.
Final lesson - read the careers pages of cool companies, since there are some hidden gems out there :)
Stats for nerds
13 roles applied for.
8 ghosted (no response at all).
1 rejection received based on CV / letter alone.
4 technical projects or varying scope.
11 interviews total (all stages)
About 22 hours work total, not including tailored resumes and cover letters
4 offers with about a 30k spread in the salaries.
Fighting the patriarchy with JavaScript • CTO at Grace Papers • Melbourne, Australia
I mostly wanna connect with Aussie based devs, but also cool people.
Joined Jun 2019
