Location: Portland, OR
Remote: Remote only
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Svelte + SvelteKit, NodeJS, GraphQL, Go, Docker, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, Scheme
Résumé/CV: https://benaiah.me/assets/resume.pdf
Email: benaiah@mischenko.com
My name is Benaiah Mischenko, and I am a senior/staff level full-stack developer with 13 years of experience as, at different times, an individual contributor, full-time open-source-maintainer, and team lead. I like to work on interesting and difficult data + UI problems that cross the backend/frontend divide. Both team lead and individual contributor opportunities interest me currently, but I do not wish to move into management.
In the past five years I've worked as a full-time maintainer of Netlify CMS, an open-source project with using React and TypeScript; then worked on the backend of the Netlify build service that runs all of the builds on that service using Go, Docker, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, and Kubernetes; and since then led an engineering team to an on-time and well-received delivery of a new open-source website for a major department of the state of Louisiana using TypeScript, Svelte + SvelteKit, GraphQL, Contentful, and Vercel.
I'm passionate about project automation, thorough documentation, relieving pain points for other developers and finding ways to accelerate my team as a whole, and being able to contribute across a large stack of technologies to solve problems that involve a full vertical slice of an application. I strive to always grow as a developer and help those around me do the same, whether that be in a formal role as a team lead or as a peer and collaborator.
I'm happy to field any further questions over email, and am available to start immediately.
I have over a decade of experience working at all levels of the stack. After nearly five years at Netlify, I took some time off to work on authorship projects and I'm now finally ready for another opportunity. I've worked on a very complex entirely front-end application allowing you to do content management for static sites (https://netlifycms.org), build infrastructure powering the sites of hundreds of thousands of users, and many other projects. I'd love to join a team doing socially meaningful work at scale with interesting technologies. Please reach out if you are looking for someone with my experience or know someone who is.
The message of "Slaughterbots" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA) seems both more prescient and more urgent than ever given this news. Our continued reckless development and deployment of autonomous weaponry without thought to the consequences is deplorable, and its consequences could be staggering.
No one is going to stop development for fear the other will have the advantage.
For controls on this to work, there would have to be a treaty governing development among the big nuclear powers —then they with their big sticks dictate the rules to the rest.
In the vacuum of that everyone will feel they have to develop or get left behind.
Additionally something like this (the enabling of political “decapitations”) is only seriously countered by MAD. So nothing would keep Colombia from developing their own and taking out Maduro for example if they were reasonably sure a better alternative would rise in VZ.
Not the big nuclear powers — they should be relatively easy to get onboard, because preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons is comparatively easy compared to preventing proliferation of drones. The ones to watch are the smaller countries who have in effect lost their sovereignty to the nuclear powers: maybe Colombia, but also Taiwan, Canada, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Bangladesh.
More worryingly: Daesh, Baruch Goldstein's fan club, the next Anders Breivik, the janjaweed, Boko Haram, Voluntad Popular, antifa groups, the collectively fired Minneapolis Police Department, the Hells Angels, MS-13, etc.
I agree there, except for the domestic organizations. They could develop crude drones but not the hypersonic loitering kind —I’m not even sure they’d need that. Hypersonics only make sense when you need to penetrate stiff air defenses and get to destination to neutralize the big armament from reaching altitude.
They could be used by the US, Russia, China, India, Pak, Israel to “decapitate” “rouge” regimes incapable of retribution.
Mexican and ukranian drug orgs? maybe crude non hypersonic for whatever political purpose.
Or imagine the ndraghetta having the crude variety during the time they tried offing magistrates quicker than the state was able to convict the perps... or the Italian red brigades...
Agreed, it would be surprising if the Zetas were able to develop hypersonic drones. But I don't think the hypersonic part is vital to their political assassination capacities.
I was thinking of this video, why don’t they just give all the gamers a replaceable robot to control from far away. Or why electronics are all? Literally just use an EMP and level the playing field. Mechanical>Electronic in this instance
There's no such thing as an unbiased source. Having actually read the linked article, it's a detailed, well-cited, and effective piece. Indeed, it seems the bias you complain about is based on the political stances of the publication and not any merits of the piece itself, as if critiques of capitalism are only valid when written by proponents of capitalism.
Further, this kind of vague belly-aching about the supposed "bias" of an article is very much against the spirit of the board. It casts aspersions, intentionally or not, not only on the article that was linked, but on the commenter who linked it. If you'd like to criticize the article, please do that instead.
> which isn't even the same since it returns `false` if something is null
That's not the case AFAIK - checking in both node and FireFox, `true && null` evalutes to `null`, `true && undefined` evaluates to `undefined`, and `true && null && true` again evaluates to `null`. In what scenario does `&&` coerce the returned value to a boolean?
The project I work on, Netlify CMS (https://www.netlifycms.org/), is almost precisely what you described in your last paragraph.I say "only" because it only officially supports GitHub as a backend at the moment, from which you can deploy to a host. (I'm also currently working on supporting more backends, so that will change soon.) The CMS is an open-source (MIT license) CMS built as a static web page which connects to an API for an arbitrary backend from your browser and edits the content stored there - from there, you can build the content with whatever static site generator you want. This lets you build sites that non-technical users can keep up-to-date without tying yourself to a specific tech stack for the actual website.
Please put that description somewhere on the site. I tried to try out Netlify CMS there times because I love Netlify the service but couldn't figure out what it is any of those times.
That said, it didn't help that you don't support Gitlab, which is where all my sites are, and which is the more important reason why I couldn't get it to work.
Yup, improving backend support (and refactoring the backend API to make developing custom backend support easier) is currently my top priority. Initial GitLab support (without the editorial workflow) is very close to being complete - I hope to be releasing an initial PR this coming week if all goes as planned. My latest update in that thread is here: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/pull/517#issuecomment...
I'm a huge fan of Netlify, everything you guys do is great.
We (Graphia) took a similar approach for our document management system. Essentially it looks and acts like a regular CMS but it sits on top of a git repo instead of a database; and publishes via Hugo.
It's not intended to be a fully-fledged CMS but the API would support it without much work; the UI is definitely the time consuming portion.
http://www.graphia.co.uk for anyone who is interested, not quite ready for prime time just yet. Soon.
That sounds really similar to Netlify CMS, especially the use of Git for content storage+version history and the focus on a decoupled UI for editing content. It's really cool to hear from somebody exploring the same space! Git as a backend for content is a really interesting concept that's worked very well for us so far, and I'd be interested to hear how you're implementing that and what issues you've run into. The internationalization approach you describe on the features page is pretty intriguing as well - that's a feature that we should improve our support for in Netlify CMS.
Feel free to ping me using the contact info in my profile or at @benaiah in our Gitter room (https://gitter.im/netlify/NetlifyCMS) if you're interested in discussing this elsewhere.
This is a bit aside from your main point, but stopping on a road in a whiteout snow storm is _incredibly_ dangerous due to the cars behind you being unable to see you until it is much too late to stop. I grew up driving two-lane highways in Alaska with frequent semi traffic, several times in blizzard conditions (to the point where the only way to follow the road was to drive on the flat part of the just-fallen snow). You could pull over to the side of the road, but you may not be able to get back on the road depending on your vehicle and the snow level (and in remote, cold areas this may be deadly itself).
You could say "just don't drive in blizzards", but on a long drive you may often end up in a blizzard when you started in clear weather. Frequently this happens in areas where there are no safe places to stop for miles.
I'm not an expert on self-driving car sensors, but it's not hard to imagine that they could be made much less weather-dependent than the human eye. Driving through blizzard conditions is incredibly disorienting and terrifying, so the potential of better-than-vision detection of roads and traffic is IMO the most promising way for self-driving cars to handle snowy conditions.
Potentially, a self-driving car (or even Google Maps nav and a regular driver) would not have this problem - it would simply not drive itself into a situation where it's both in heavy snow and a place that's not safe to stop. I've had a few times in California where I started a long drive in sun and warm weather and ended up stuck in a snow-storm mid-drive (hello Sierra passes)... it would have been nice if either my car or my map software warned me this was likely before we set off.
Autonomous cars would be coming from a variety of vendors each with its own algorithms. It's not even guaranteed that they would communicate with each other to arbitrate strategy under adverse conditions.
It's not as if human drivers do, either. The closest we've come is Waze, which would a trivial data set for an autonomous car to both utilize and supplement.
Netlify supports running a build script automatically whenever you push to one of our supported Git providers (we also have a CLI tool for those who prefer to do that manually). This includes creating deploy previews for branches other than your main deploy branch (such as PRs).
This is actually how the project I work on, Netlify CMS[0] works - the CMS is a completely open source, front-end application that pushes to GitHub using their REST API. If you’re using Netlify‘s continuous deployment, GitHub’s webhook system notifies Netlify of the push and Netlify’s buildbot builds and deploys the update to your site automatically.
Since you're here, I would like to take this opportunity to ask a quick question. My Jekyll site is already running on Netlify, but instead of manually creating files, I used Google Sheets and a simple NodeJS script to sync everything. Would it be possible to run this NodeJS script on Netlify CD and push to git and then let Netlify build my Jekyll site? (The script basically pulls a Google Sheet, creates markdown files and download and resizes some images)
Netlify continuous deployment is triggered by a Git commit, but you can run arbitrary Node scripts (though not _just_ Node scripts, of course) as part of your build process. I don't know of a way you could trigger deploys based on changes to the Google Sheets app without some code on your end (maybe IFTTT could work?), but everything else should be feasible if I'm understanding you correctly.
That's what I thought, I'll probably need another step somewhere that triggers the syncing and then pushes to git. After that Netlify CD would do the rest. Thanks.
I've setup that flow by adding a custom script in the google doc that triggers a Netlify build hook. You can tie custom scripts to an image (so you can make it a publish button).
In the past five years I've worked as a full-time maintainer of Netlify CMS, an open-source project with using React and TypeScript; then worked on the backend of the Netlify build service that runs all of the builds on that service using Go, Docker, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, and Kubernetes; and since then led an engineering team to an on-time and well-received delivery of a new open-source website for a major department of the state of Louisiana using TypeScript, Svelte + SvelteKit, GraphQL, Contentful, and Vercel.
I'm passionate about project automation, thorough documentation, relieving pain points for other developers and finding ways to accelerate my team as a whole, and being able to contribute across a large stack of technologies to solve problems that involve a full vertical slice of an application. I strive to always grow as a developer and help those around me do the same, whether that be in a formal role as a team lead or as a peer and collaborator.
I'm happy to field any further questions over email, and am available to start immediately.
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