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Justin and Jason discuss the prerequisite viewer that Jason’s building for Math Academy, Rob Walling’s Tiny Seed, Chamath Palihapitiya’s advice to grow slow and to grow real, why Jason’s latest hire on Upwork didn’t work out, Justin’s Nugget webinar and why he’s no longer going to employ squeeze marketing, how Jason is back writing code again and loving it, Math Academy’s high-school curriculum and overall program, late bloomers, and nature vs. nurture as it relates to mathematics and mathematical talent.
Hi guys, very interesting conversation about Jason’s experience hiring the dev from upwork – I’ve been through the same kind of thing before and can definitely relate, actually a few of the details were almost identical, including the ‘they seem legit so I won’t press too much on hard tech questions’ being a definite mistake!
Anyway I realise this was the least of the problems but just wanted to pick up on the whole inline CSS topic – actually to be fair, inline CSS, either literally inline on elements or just colocated with markup, is really in vogue in the React world and is generally considered the better way of doing things, vs a completely external stylesheet with classes referenced by elements.
I’ve done things both ways (i.e. huge stylesheets and server templates with schemes like BEM for organisation, now with React for a few years) and have been completely sold on the benefits of inline CSS now. It turns out that the whole ‘don’t mix concerns’ thing is actually, in a lot of ways, misguided and embedding inline CSS is way simpler and easier to maintain if you are building your app in a componentised way, which I guess is implicit in most apps of any kind of complexity.
Anyway yeah, just wanted to point out that inline CSS does not necessarily a bad developer make (or bad person!). Especially if they’ve spent any time in React.
Hey Jason, so are we going to get to see this DAG visualisation? High expectations, no pressure 😃
“including the ‘they seem legit so I won’t press too much on hard tech questions’ being a definite mistake!”
Even when there’s a solid record, you come to realise after some experiences like this (a) public reviews for both sides (providers and contractors) are waaaay inflated and there’s very likely a huge disparity with private reviews (as was mentioned in this episode) (b) many providers just aren’t technical and would be oblivious to anything like inline CSS going on.
Point taken about inline CSS and React, but it comes down to professional communication. The contractor had 2 valid options – follow instructions or push back with a solid argument, but chose plan C – ignore the instructions and do something contrary without acknowledging it. Red flag when that keeps happening after pointing it out.
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About code secrecy, the biggest risk is leaving credentials in the code base. Or even if they’re not, ensuring any credentials provided are invalidated after a contract. That’s probably a lot more of a security issue especially as many developers don’t do a great job of isolating production config.
@Dave Williams – Interesting points about the inline CSS. Hmm. I think that would be worth a blog post if you’d be up for writing it. It could be entitled something like “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of CSS Classes”, or maybe, “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Inline Styling”.
Also, your points notwithstanding, you can’t let Justin off the hook that easily. Work with me here! 😉
@Michael Mahemoff – Here’s a 30-second screencast of the prerequisite graph viewer if you’d like to check it out: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sa492uWRhGawWuCc6IeFHLl-sfoWdWaH. It still needs some tweaking, but I think it looks kinda cool. 😉
Also, those are really good points about the contractors and code secrecy.
This was a good show, it started out interesting and ended inspirational. Nice work.
@Michael, I worked at a company in the past where someone checked in AWS keys to a repo. There are bots that troll github looking for those. Someone used $30k in ec2 instances for crypto mining before security caught it.
Thanks for the show. I really enjoyed it.
I wanted to mention that full hard drive encryption has been required by many of the companies I’ve worked with over my career. You don’t necessarily have it turned on by default but it can be enabled on both Windows and OS X (and I’m sure linux too, but I’ve not had the need).
On Windows you can use Windows Device Encryption or if you have professional the more advanced Bit Locker. See this how to geek article if you’re interested.
On OS X the feature is called FileVault and you can see details on enabling it here.
Thanks for the reminder to get my flu shot!
My cousin was telling me to get one last year as it was going to be a particularly virulent strain. She has a phd in maths and works (as well as I understand it!) for pharmaceutical companies creating models to help them decide if some vaccine or other is worth developing, based on whether they could actually stop the spread of something with what they know about the illness and the vaccine they could create. If you are looking for someone who knows their stuff to tell you to get it or not, she is as close as I can get to that!
Anyway, last year I didn’t get it because I didn’t have time. Me and my wife then both got flu back to back (with 2 young kids to look after) and I ended up losing about 3 weeks of work. It’s not worth it to me to risk that again for sure 🙂
@Jason great idea, I bashed out a quick post here that articulates my thoughts on it a bit better – or maybe not, sort of trails off a bit towards the end 😉
https://medium.com/@davnicwil/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-inline-css-74d152abedf5
Thanks for posting the screencast Jason … very cool you could come up with an algo like that. I think “DAGs with a tree-like tendency” are fairly common in real world domains, e.g. in an OO architecture, there’s usually a straightforward inheritance hierarchy tree, but also with some occasional multiple inheritance or mixins.
Hi Guys,
Looks like this episode has vanished from the internets. Trying to download gets me this:
Warning: file_get_contents(http://api.soundcloud.com/resolve?url=https://soundcloud.com/techzing/techzing-316&client_id=4949f9f85ff88c4a4d644266e3037754): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
in /home1/jvincent/public_html/techzinglive.com/_mp3-redirect.php on line 5
Could not get the track because Soundcloud is down, or somethign welse weird is happening.
@Paul – I think it was a temporary glitch.Seems to be working now.