Life Laid Bare

[elfs]

I had a face-to-face interview today. That was interesting. It's one of those super-secret startups, and unlike the last one, it seems to be in a quest for a monetization strategy. The amount of detail the interviewer had searched for on me was quiet extensive, almost alarmingly so; I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I was. It's one of those "your life laid bare" moments, and although my life now is sedate and ordinary, once upon a time it was not so, and extensive searching will show up all kinds of bad habits once upon a time. And I've had longer than most of y'all to accrete a record of bad habits. I might be interested in them, they seem to have a cool product, but I'm not sure, with the girls at the age they're at now, if I'm ready to be putting in 12 hours days once more. I did that at Spry, and for a brief while at Isilon, but Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan are not quite self-maintaining yet. Besides, I like hanging out with my family.

One of the two I had earlier this week was very weird. The recruiter had a lot of questions about HTTP headers, especially those concerned with caching. To my thinking, that's not something you know, that's something you know where to look up, and then you segment your application server appropriately so that dynamic material is not cached, and static material is (a) cached and (b) served out a lightweight media server like NGINX or THTTPD. If you need your developers thinking about caching as they develop, it's either something you need right now (in which case, as a "long-established internet service" you're way behind) or something is exceptionally wrong about your architecture and you need help.

Still, that's the third interview this week. I got a callback on one of them; they want to do a face-to-face next Thursday, so that's good news. Also, tomorrow I have a phone conference with an ad agency, one of those places that has a lot of brilliant graphic designers and flash developers, but now needs more back-end work for their social-media aware clients. I think that would be a great fit for me: different clients every once in awhile, high pressure but with a financial backstop to alleviate the fear of collapse, and a variety of projects I can put my mind toward.

Also found one more resume' to send out today. That makes five resumes and four interviews. Well, good. I qualify for Unemployment Insurance for another week.

And curse Omaha for finishing Plants Vs. Zombies. Now that she's done, I've installed it on my desktop and that's got to be one of the most addictive little games I've ever seen. "Casual" gaming my left bollock.

Comments

[edichka2.livejournal.com]

I'd be curious to know whether any of your, um, youthful indiscretions come around to bite you in the ass. Not that I ever had any youthful indiscretions.

Cheers,
- E

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

I may have missed this, but why startups? To misquote: "Nobody was ever fired for working at IBM". :-)

I've done the agency thing and really enjoy working with, and learning from, the creative artists, writers, etc. The long hours, tight deadlines, scope creep, etc. you can still get from a tech company too. Agency work also expanded my insight into the culture we live in.

Good that you're having luck finding interviews and what-not...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...but Plants vs. Zombies still annoys me... well, most Turret-Defense games do after I played Defense Grid just like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time spoiled a lot of platform/adventure games for me. Mid-level auto-saved every 10-15 minutes on DG, and the ability to freely roll back through them incrementally all the way up to starting the level over if you want is a really... friendly and powerful mechanic in a turret-defense game.

Though in a way it's even more addictive too, since it makes it so bleedin' EASY to fight for perfection on the very first go-through. Very easy to pick pu and set down in tiny bite-sized bits though. Sadly, it doesn't quite work right under Wine still, unless you get one of the actual 'commercial' version. It's playable, but all the audio and a lot of the graphical wiz-bang is gone (you literally end up playing with turret-coverage rings with distinct glows and bobbing shadows of the enemies marching through the 3D level).

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

Isn't that basically a description of his (tamer) youthful indiscretions?

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

To my thinking, that's not something you know, that's something you know where to look up, and then you segment your application server appropriately so that dynamic material is not cached...

This is a recipe for disaster in any sufficiently sizable application. Once you scale out sufficiently, you will need to start caching dynamically generated data and/or content. There is no way around this, unless you're either incredibly big and can afford the infrastructure (i.e, you're Google), or you're incredibly small and will never grow.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

… or incredibly stupid and think that your software doesn't need to cache anything.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

And, hence, will never grow. At least, not for long.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

All of this is true, but it wasn't my original point. If your application programmers need to worry about what headers the application is sending out in its response object, your application is poorly segmented and your information architecture isn't worth the money you've spent on it. Your application should be designed in such a way that a programmer's awareness of caching is embodied in the framework, not in ad-hoc HTTP Cache headers he needs to look up for each segment and its potential cache status.

When someone says, "Tell me about HTTP Cache headers that help the browser cache things correctly," my response is that that's a configure-and-forget feature of your application architecture, and if you're forcing programmers to worry about it, you're throwing money down the drain.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I totally agree with your original point!


^_^