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llamataboot commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
llamataboot · 5 months ago
Location: US Remote: Preferred Willing to relocate: Possibly

FT?: Open to FTE for right opportunity, but prefer contracts (PT/FT flexible, C2H)

Technologies: Ruby/Rails, Python, Ops (Heroku/AWS/Docker), CI/CD, API Design, System Architecture, thoughtful experimentation. Some: React, IoT, bit o elm, ML, LLM ops and automation.

Email: hello_from_hn@ericstiens.dev Website: https://ericstiens.dev Resume: https://cloud.wonderluxhouse.xyz/f/fd98d4cbdc104e3d8151/

Senior/Staff Engineer with a deep focus on backend, ops, and architecture. Can also get in there and knock out frontend features if nec, but don't prefer architechting there. I build durable, scalable systems and have a knack for mentoring teams and leading projects.

I solve problems at every level of abstraction—from the 10,000-foot view down to the code you don't have to write. My first career as a social worker and policy statistician means I never forget the 'who' and 'why' behind the technology. I've been building for the web since '95 and have worked at every stage of startup, plus solo consulting.

I have a special love for complex system design, wrangling crappy third-party APIs, and hunting down really weird bugs. I can step in as a PM in a pinch, but I'd rather work with your great PMs.

Also open to short-term engagements around a specific issue (performance bottlenecks, test suite optimization, a particular stuck feature, etc) at a weekly rate.

I'm looking for a team that genuinely believes their work is making the world a bit better (or even... a lot!)

llamataboot commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know   prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt
neallindsay · 5 months ago
Unicode support in Ruby has been great since the beginning.
llamataboot · 5 months ago
right it was the python string transition i was talking about
llamataboot commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know   prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt
neallindsay · 5 months ago
Ruby has been extremely slow and deliberate in rolling out frozen string literals. They added a magic comment to opt in to them on a per-file basis all the way back in Ruby 2.3—almost a decade ago.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/12/25/ruby-2-3-0-rele...

Most linting setups I've seen since then have required this line. I don’t expect many libraries to run afoul of this, and this warning setting will make finding them easy and safe. This will be nothing like the headache Python users faced transitioning to 3.

llamataboot · 5 months ago
I hope this is corect - i do agree it has been a long and slow migration path and migrating is fairly easy - migrating python 2 to 3 code was fairly easy as well anyone could do it in their codebase, it remains a big deal and possibly very impactful to make such breaking changes to the behavior of primitives in mature ecosystems. How many gems does the average rails app have, okay they all need to be updated and they sohld be being updated for other reasons, I remain skeptical of how smooth the change is going to be over all ecosystem wise but time will tell.

I agree it has been a well advertised and loudly migration path and timeframe for it

llamataboot commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know   prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt
teddyh · 5 months ago
TIL that Ruby has mutable strings, and (until the announced change) even had them mutable by default (and the change only affects literal strings; non-literal strings are still mutable). Python has always only ever had immutable strings.
llamataboot · 5 months ago
just dont ask about unicode
llamataboot commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know   prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt
llamataboot · 5 months ago
We learned nothing from Python 2->3

An obviously good change, actually massive performance improvements not hard to implement but its still gonna be such a headache and dependency hell

llamataboot commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
llamataboot · 6 months ago
Location: US

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

FT?: Open to FTE, but prefer contracts (PT/FT flexible, C2H)

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Python, Ops (Heroku/AWS/Docker), CI/CD, API Design, System Architecture, thoughtful experimentation. Some: React, IoT, bit o elm, ML, LLM ops and auotmation.

Email: hello_from_hn@ericstiens.dev Website: https://ericstiens.dev Resume: https://cloud.wonderluxhouse.xyz/f/fd98d4cbdc104e3d8151/

Senior/Staff Engineer with a deep focus on backend, ops, and architecture. I build durable, scalable systems and have a knack for mentoring teams and leading projects.

I solve problems at every level of abstraction—from the 10,000-foot view down to the code you don't have to write. My first career as a social worker and policy statistician means I never forget the 'who' and 'why' behind the technology. I've been building for the web since '95 and have worked at every stage of startup, plus solo consulting.

I have a special love for complex system design, wrangling crappy third-party APIs, and hunting down really weird bugs. I can step in as a PM in a pinch, but I'd rather work with your great PMs.

I'm looking for a team that genuinely believes their work is making the world a bit better (or even... a lot!)

llamataboot commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2025)    · Posted by u/whoishiring
llamataboot · 6 months ago
Location: US

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

FT?: Open to FTE for right opportunity, very open to contracts, especially if they can fluctuate between PT/FT, or are contract to hire.

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Ops (heroku/aws/ansible/docker), CI/CD, testing, API design, integrations/plumbing.

Some: Python, Elm, IoT stuff, machine learning Love: architecture, mentoring, useful and absurd experimentation

Email: hello_from_hn@ericstiens.dev

Website: https://ericstiens.dev

Resume: https://cloud.wonderluxhouse.xyz/f/fd98d4cbdc104e3d8151/

--

Senior/Staff full-stack dev (lean more towards devops->backend than backend->frontend, but I can still sling some React components together and reduce your JS payload size). Technical Lead.

I excel at figuring out how to solve problems at all levels of abstraction (including what level of abstraction you should use), getting a solution in place, and then figuring out the feedback loops to iterate on that solution. Sometimes the most impactful code is the code you don't write.

I've been programming on the web since 1995, had a first career as a social worker and policy statistician, and have worked full-time as a coder for almost a decade now at all stages of startup as well as done solo consulting.

Especially enjoy API and system design, integrating with crappy systems, user research, and really weird bugs. Make a decent PM in a pinch, but would prefer you have great PMs. Enjoy mentoring and light mgr/people stuff.

Will give you more looks if you can tell me why what you are doing makes the world better, but you've got to really believe it.

llamataboot commented on LLMs don't hallucinate, only humans do   voidw.ink/... · Posted by u/llamataboot
The_SamminAter · 8 months ago
I’m getting 406 browser not acceptable, apparently Safari on iOS isn’t fit to be served pages anymore? A website should just work. Don’t profile me based on my user-agent and try to serve me different pages or block me, you’re running something that’s meant to be able to be accessed universally, regardless of hardware, OS, etc. The supposed “great universal platform.” I don’t care what fancy latest buzzword framework you’re running, it’s a browser. I assure you it can run bog-standard html, js, css and browse your website - and if it can’t, well, why not?
llamataboot · 8 months ago
eh that's rails 8 by default these days! i actually had a PR to remove that at one point should circle back

u/llamataboot

KarmaCake day7523June 8, 2013
About
llamataboot.at.hn

social researcher and social worker turned coder -- interested in systems science, social justice, heterodox economics, non-hierarchical decision making, game theory, poker, soccer, theories of consciousness, and magic

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