Peter Cai

WARNING: we've deprecated the way we deprecate things Sometimes I just love programming because of the unexpected little things that make me laugh, and I'm not being sarcastic

@ShameVincent @JeremiahDJohns Doesn't seem that hard to understand?: You don't want to compare a cohort with "mostly families" to a cohort with "mostly single adults living alone" because then the relative incomes would be pretty meaningless

@JeremiahDJohns "Congrats you "earn" more! Because you don't have kids" Eh? How is that a fair adjustment.

Matt is, without exaggeration, a hero for how patiently he answers dozens of questions in his replies. Many of the questions are economically illiterate or conspiratorial, but he answers them calmly over and over, like the Sisyphus of "is this controlling for inflation?"

@ClaudiuDP @ThePrimeagen Why say this about Tobi? It's not exactly a secret he wrote code for the shopify platform, and was one of the early members of the ruby on rails core team

@ThePrimeagen I have a severe allergy to the phrase “open heart surgery” in context of software. It screams boomer manager in tech with near zero tech skills.

shopify changes from 100 variants to 2048 variants 2048, 2^11, makes me think there is some funny memory constraint / bit packing going on! i have to know the reasons why

@patio11 this is obviously a troll post? nobody writes a rejection email summarizing each step they put the candidate through

"So great to know my code has been accepted into your codebase. I charge very reasonable rates for IP assignment. You'll receive an invoice shortly."

2016 & 2025 with @yukihiro_matz (@hsbt thanks for the picture!)

@_st0012 @yukihiro_matz @hsbt congrats!

@ZachariahSchwab @besttrousers He literally opened by explaining the problem - it's *not* a similar picture - it goes *down* during unemployment spikes It's just measuring ratios about how old the bathwater is, it tells you nothing you wouldn't already know by measuring stocks and flows directly

@besttrousers Wouldn’t you want to compare it to unemployment durations shorter than 27 weeks? There’s going to be a similar picture but it eliminates the autocorrelation problem.

"% of unemployed people who have been unemployed for 27+ weeks" is a pretty weird metric to use as a gauge of labor market health. In part, because it's a metric that goes *down* when the unemployment level spikes!

So excited and honored to be speaking at SF Ruby conf in November! I’ll be talking Realtime with Rails, Anycable and Yjs! Hope to see you there!

Pretty good showing from Boston at #railsconf so @APIguy insisted we all get a photo together

It’s kind of petty but if a candidate sends me a resume titled resume.pdf… I just know its not gonna be a fit

@jeremysmithco Have you seen aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…

If you had a Rails app deployed on Heroku with Sidekiq running on one worker Dyno, and you needed to generate 2,000 PDFs (taking ~1 sec each) and combine them all into a single ZIP file, how would you do it?

@JasonSwett Have you read sapiens? I’m sure you have thoughts

I think there's hardly anything more important than understanding human behavior, and I'm quite certain that human behavior can't be adequately understood without understanding how evolution works and why the human species evolved the way it did. Yet most people have no clue.

@JasonSwett Eh. I’d argue it’s more like a kitchen staff. A film crew doesn’t get to iterate on feedback. A good restaurant staff is continuously tweaking the menu and way it works in response to customer feedback.

I'm tired of software teams being compared to sports teams. Building software is nothing like playing a sport. A software team is more analogous to, say, a film crew, where the job of the team is to create an original piece of art.

@JasonSwett Counter point - I’ve been at companies with very well defined job levels where people could be SWE I for a decade, and this was just accepted as a possibility

Some people will never achieve what others will achieve. Things like levels force you to either a) tell the person they'll never have what it takes, b) promote them undeservingly, or c) don't promote them and lie about the reason.

I've finally put my finger on why I've been so uncomfortable with the idea of engineering levels for so long: Levels depends on believing in blank slatism, the idea that everyone has more or less equal capacities for learning and achievement---which is super duper not true.

@APIguy @bostonjsmeetup @flexcar Meetups are so back

Great turnout tonight at @bostonjsmeetup at @flexcar

@thedayisntgray Signed up too, thx for posting

Many US engineers want full remote jobs and are also anti offshoring but what’s the argument? What’s the game plan when all the jobs that can be done remote are offshored? :(

I bought a bunch of books on eng management. They were written by devs. Sadly, but not surprisingly, they all sucked. Then I bought The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Astonishingly great! IME often the best programming wisdom is found outside the software industry.

Let's talk if you're ready to make this the hardest, most impactful (and most rewarding) work of your career.

for enterprise HR, retail, and now law enforcement & more. We're going to succeed no matter what, but it'll go easier with some help: we're hiring across multiple departments including engineering in Cambridge - but know that this won't be a leisurely walk in the park.

Reposting some news: I'm starting at Sigma Squared as VP of Engineering. I'm especially excited to help the company enter a new vertical in law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies everywhere have been inundated with nonsense statistics that confuse disparity with bias.