Maybe in some industries there is no liability, but I’m in biotech and there is certainly a large amount of software issues that would qualify for litigation
I feel like the truncation is fine, but too short at the moment. On mobile at least, it’s 25 characters, which isn’t enough space for me to figure out what the episode is about half the time
If you mean something on the biological side of things like CRISPR, the answer is pretty simple: you don’t. Biology weighs formal education, especially when hiring, very very heavily, and the odds of getting into the field without any are pretty much nil.
If, however, you want to work on the engineering side of companies that works with genetics like that, you’re much more in luck. I work as a swe at a genetic diagnostic company, and while my background is in biology, the vast majority of devs do not share that background - it’s too difficult a niche to fill. Instead, mostly what we look for in hiring is an interest in the field. We have plenty of PhDs that worry about the nuances of biological complexity, and enough devs that understand enough to bridge the gap between them and people that have zero biological background. We trust that we hire devs that have the ability to - at the very least - get up to speed enough to be effective, so that’s what we look for.
I try to script everything that I have to do on a regular basis, or that I have to do repeatedly and have to look up how to perform each time. For me, this is a random assortment that I can remember off the top of my head:
* creating a json for meeting notes from a template based on the type of meeting (1on1, mentorship, some project, etc), that includes action items and other relevant metadata from the last meeting of that type with that person/group
* creating a todoist item for a particular project
* killing any running processes that match a particular string
* various git hooks for linting or mirroring changes between GitHub and bitbucket
* scraping the AKC website to see if there are any new puppy litters listed for the particular kind of dog I’m looking for, and emailing the results to myself and my girlfriend
* loading a particular subset of deidentified prod data into my local db for dev work
* adding/enabling openssh to a docker container to be able to use a remote ssh interpreter
But in general, something I heard a while ago in reference to finding niche work when contracting as a dev in an industry that you might be unfamiliar with is “find what people are using excel for, and automate it”.
Nice, always good to provide more avenues for people to enter the field, IMO. Is there a way to apply as a mentor? Or are you pretty set in that department? I can’t find anything to facilitate that at the moment, but on mobile right now.
Very interesting! I will share it with my DS friends.
One thing I have struggled with optimizing is visualization and coordinate calculation of network graphs with 10s of millions of edges + nodes using networkX and most visualization tools. Have you looked into this utility for Vaex? Reading your article it sounds like it would be well-suited for it.
The bigger question is what you want to achieve by visualizing so many nodes. If you want a map that can be zoomed in to view individual nodes, you mainly need to compute coordinates for every node. Finding the arrangement of the node is probably what gets you in trouble, so you probably need a custom algorithm which scales better (and does poorer, probably).
More interesting may be to identify clusters and either group them together or visualize these clusters as nodes themselves.
I have not looked into it, maybe datashader can do this, which is a package purely focussing on viz, while vaex is more allround (although there is overlap).
If you think vaex can be useful here, feel free to ask question/open issues https://github.com/vaexio/vaex
I just started my 100% remote dev job last week. It’s been pretty interesting.
My laptop and some earbuds were shipped to me. They arrived my first day. I had emailed my manager beforehand to let her know that I would probably be missing any morning meetings I might be scheduled for, as I didn’t know when in the day it would arrive. The expectation was just that I had a functional computer the first day, so that made the process pretty relaxing. I really only verbally talked to one person (my buddy) for ~30 mins on my first day.
As far as setup goes, there was a stack of stapled paper (~6 large print pages) indicating how to log in (I was verbally provided a password, but that’s as far as the verbal walkthrough went) and perform basic setup - installation and authentication to VPN (globalprotect), security/management software (DUO), video software (Vidyo), Slack, and urls for further references/setup (confluence, extended setup documentation via Google Docs, HR sites, benefits sites, etc). The setup was pretty straightforward, so in reality I spent most of the day configuring alacritty, tmux, vscode and documenting that for my own personal use next time I have to do this. However, this was mostly done while waiting for various people/teams to provide me access to the resources I’d need to do dev work specifically, like source control, and CI/CD, and all the associated necessary environments.
My company starts new devs on 2 6-week rotations to begin with, so I asked my current team’s tech lead for arch diagrams, and _up to date_ docs on general things like story lifecycle, responsibilities of various people within the team, their git process, the team’s definition of done, valid contract definitions, and relationships/interactions with other teams. Once I got access to the codebase, I went through the local env setup, and my first PR was changes to the README based on that process. I generally try to take as best notes as I can to improve the process for the next person (also selfishly to save me time troubleshooting in the future).
On my 2nd or 3rd day, I scheduled 4 meetings:
* one with a tenured backend dev in a room with a whiteboard to go over architecture review
* one with a sr frontend dev to go over inconsistencies within the codebase and where to look for the current best practices
* one with a stakeholder to go over how they communicate requirements for the app, both initially and throughout the dev cycle, and any follow up stuff for after dev work is done
* one with QA to go through their process (also revealed some more things I needed to request access to) what the interaction is with devs, and where their responsibilities lie within the story lifecycle
Also it’s perhaps worth mentioning that I also prioritized asking the devs about how to test the codebase thoroughly. Not only is it how I like to explore a codebase initially, it also provides a good framework for what level of test coverage is expected, and what is required to be able to run them (ie. VPN, docker/AWS login, various states of local and remote servers running, any local config changes that make dev’s life easier that might not be explicit in any docs).
It’s been very DIY tbh, and it’s been really nice. The documentation is 98% accurate and up to date, which has been amazing. My only real complaint is that here have been quite a few coincidental business-wise meetings in my first week, and I don’t have context for anything at all. Being in a video call with 200+ other people doesn’t lend itself well to asking questions, and it gets aggravating to ask “what is X?” “What is Y?” continuously. It’s something that’s much better done in person.
