Call for Coders 2017

[FlyingSkull]

I would love to contribute but don't have much time at the moment.

 

Is it possible to contribute not full time...maybe part time?

For example do a number of tasks per week?

 

It's not much but just in case anyone is curious of my qualifications here's some.

A year experience in Angular, Aurelia frameworks, ASP.NET, SQL.

Enrolled in a software degree course.

Non professionally: Java, Lua, C, PHP and worked on sockets/multithreading.

 

[M@ng]

10 minutes ago, Buetlli16 said:

Is it possible to try the challenge without compete for the job? 

I would like to test my skills about Websockets, but I'm still in apprenticeship.

I'd also like to have a look at the test.

Edited April 21, 2017 by M@ng
typo

[Spanner_]

I would absolutely love to do this, and I meet all the skill requirements

 

except I'm only 12... (I don't think they'll let me in)

[AlfieRivera]

3 minutes ago, keglin said:

I'm a software dev and founding member of 2 separate startups.  I'm gonna put my $0.02 Canadian Rubles in here and say that this is something that probably shouldn't be 100% in Node.  I know it simplifies things to have JS across the board, but hear me out.

 

Node will give you nothing but headaches when it comes to any real heavy lifting.

Video encoding?  Forget about it. 

Performance with huge amounts of concurrent users?  Only if you're willing to pay $$$ to Amazon for your d2.8xlarge instances

 

This is coming from someone who loves Node and JS in general.  I think this is something that will exist to only be re-written when any volume of users climb on.

 

I can hear it now. "Hey, asshole!  This is about iterating quickly, not optimization!".  I get that, and I know that quick iteration is crucial, but I'm going to propose what I think is a way better solution.

 

______________________________________________________________________________

 

You really should hire people to make an API in an appropriate language/framework. Choose Go, choose Django or Flask, hell, even choose Rails.  Don't choose JS.

 

Decoupling your API logic from your views allows for great flexibility in terms of tech used.  Node can be your presenter, while Go is running the business logic since that's what these languages excel at.  Then, when you want a desktop app, your Node project can be incorporated into Electron and still be served by that API.

 

Same with phone apps.  Use React Native as a presenter, use a stable API as your workhorse.

 

If you still need quick iteration, don't use Go and use Rails 5 API mode instead.  This way, you can start very quickly (much quicker than Node), then swap out services for an equivalent service in a better language when concurrency becomes an issue.  Websockets exist in pretty much every language/framework, so those are a non-issue.

 

_______________________________________________________________________________

 

Again, I'm a JS dev who also loves Rails and Go.  I think that Node is a very appealing choice for a lot of websites, but not one that requires real computational work to be done. 

 

 

 

I don't even know where to start here. I'll try to be as polite as possible, even thou is well-known that for some of us (developers) social skills are not very prominent in our skill set.

 

If JS wasn't a work horse, companies like godaddy, staples, even damn symantec wouldn't use it. I beg for you to consider proper system architecture and use the right technologies where you see fit, as well as reading the current situation a little better, Luke stressed quite a few times that being able to work with remote resources, with different schedules is a must, Javascript is an extremely simple language, which makes up for very creative solutions to problems, which in short means that instead of explaining a flow diagram, you can give a developer an idea, a goal for that matter, and be confident that the solution will work as intended.

Javascript is great at serving and processing certain kinds of data, with the right mindset you can achieve a lot of high-level functionality with very little time and resources.

 

Take this example:
Use NodeJS to develop an strong, fast and extremely reliable API. You divide this API into a bunch of little micro services that work on demand (with tools like Docker this is extremely simple nowadays). With an API that works on demand you can lower your costs while maintaining a reliable service; this is key.

 

With such an approach Javascript is not going to be your main issue. Your main issue as is with any well thought-out infrastructure is how your other services (DB, networking, storage) will scale, and for this we have very well known and supported solutions on the market.

 

Video encoding? No problem, just develop an interface for your favorite video encoding software. Use javascript to start and monitor the task, again, use different technologies to their best fit.

 

The fact that you come in bashing JS for it "lack" of performance per computing cycle (Performance with huge amounts of concurrent users?  Only if you're willing to pay $$$ to Amazon for your d2.8xlarge instances) is extremely funny to me as I do understand what you mean, but given the current state of technology nowadays, these issues are very easy to solve, again, with proper planning and tooling.

 

I hope I wasn't too much of an a**hole this time.

[maynardewm]

1 minute ago, AlfieRivera said:

If JS wasn't a work horse, companies like godaddy, staples, even damn symantec wouldn't use it.

And Netflix, Paypal, LinkedIn, NYT...

Your entire post I couldn't have put better myself. Thank you.

[fredfish]

Why not put it on github/open source it?

I would happily contribute to it, and I'm sure many other members of the community will for free. I'm a .NET C# developer, but have worked on previous projects in python, and one in JS but I'm still in education.

I would understand why you wouldn't put it on github though. Good luck with it anyway!

[Benjamin Misell]

1 hour ago, nicklmg said:

Submit your application: https://goo.gl/forms/7DkgeTvCRxKbTnPM2

 

We're building something awesome, and you could be a part of it. Let's take over the galaxy together.

 

 

Can this be a remote job opportunity? 

[iNyx]

As a Full Stack developer I'd like to join the team (specially LTT), however, I'm not a native english speaker so that always ends up bad for me, even more when there's a phone number field... my english is so bad I feel stupid speaking it on the phone. Ironically I did something similar for a news local station but not public facing, where there is some basic video transcoding, the entire site is developed in NodeJS (in addition to MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Redis) and the mobile APP (hybrid) has a chat that uses Socket.io (a websocket library).

 

Also, I'd like to see Floatplane as a PWA (Progressive Web Apps) using Service Workers as I did with this site, it's just awesome to load stuff instantly and send push notification to browsers.

 

About NodeJS not being a workhorse, the news site I've been working usually have from 200 to 1500 concurrent users and the API being hit with 200 to 800 req/s.

Thanks to clever caching and NGINX lovely load balancing, I can't say NodeJS is slow.

[keglin]

22 minutes ago, maynardewm said:

Why is JS a mess? That just sounds like a personal preference. I write in JS, Swift, Obj-C, Java, Rails, PHP, Python... JS is still my favorite.

How is JS slow? Yes it will never be as fast as Java or something , but the V8 engine is amazing, and well proven.

It's not day 1 for them, I doubt they are going to go back on NodeJS at this point. Most "mission ciritical" apps are built with many different technologies and languages, but there's no problem going with NodeJS for right now, and refactoring later when things begin to scale.

> Why is JS a mess

Because it's so internally inconsistent that you can't always trust your code to do what it says on the tin in every instance.  That is beyond unacceptable in an API  See http://jswtf.tumblr.com/ and http://devangst.com/the-problem-with-nodejs/

 

> I doubt they are going to go back on NodeJS

I know they probably won't, but they should.  Node is hot, not good.  It lets you iterate quickly, but it doesn't let you create a good app from the start.  It's not the best at any one thing that LMG needs.  It's not even good at them.

 

Node is great for SPAs.  Node is great for minimal-logic frontends.

 

With all your experience in statically-typed langs, you should be the first to say that using a dynamically typed lang in a large project is a disaster waiting to happen

 

[prof_nerdarian]

Okay I admit I just made an account for this, I know I am not qualified for the job, and this is a pretty cool idea. HOWEVER, I am currently a business student and I felt confused and concerned about this in general. 

 

So, your idea I get from the video (and it is possible that I interpreted something wrong here) is that you want to build a platform that creators will be able to create the content they love and appeal to their core audience without any restriction, because some major platforms (YouWhatever for example) nowadays suck and screwed someone's life. But how could you make sure that the creators will be able to make a life on your platform, if he or she is already under restriction or has been denied to claim any ad revenue by advertisers at a major platform? Will advertiser at this platform be more tolerant to the content? Will this platform have advertisers as revenue source in the first place? How would this platform generate revenue so that it can stay sustainable and profitable for LMG and other content creators?

 

I am just concerned about this "business" idea in general, about how this idea can stay financially feasible in the future. You don't necessarily need to answer all my questions above, but it will be nice if you could give us some sort of idea. Also, I am sure any content creators who are considering partner with LMG on this platform will have similar concerns, and they should be addressed sometimes in the near future before you invite other content creators on board. 

[Od0_]

I know Python, PHP, and a tiny bit of JS. I'm sure I can learn it!

[tylerbourque]

57 minutes ago, bartios said:

They said something about microservices which is the architecture that ao netflix uses. NodeJS is a pretty good fit for that kind of approach.

Can't say I agree more Netflix is one of the largest video streaming platforms(streaming 100 million hrs/day as of 2015). I am sure that many software engineers through trial and error found what was the best technology and methodology to use. IMO Node is a powerful language because it is common on both client and server side. This allows the developer to become very proficient at JavaScript and easily switch back and forth between back end and front end development.

 

This video explains a lot about why they moved to Node.js.

 

[AlfieRivera]

2 minutes ago, keglin said:

> Why is JS a mess

Because it's so internally inconsistent that you can't always trust your code to do what it says on the tin in every instance.  That is beyond unacceptable in an API  See http://jswtf.tumblr.com/ and http://devangst.com/the-problem-with-nodejs/

 

> I doubt they are going to go back on NodeJS

I know they probably won't, but they should.  Node is hot, not good.  It lets you iterate quickly, but it doesn't let you create a good app from the start.  It's not the best at any one thing that LMG needs.  It's not even good at them.

 

Node is great for SPAs.  Node is great for minimal-logic frontends.

 

With all your experience in strongly-typed langs, you should be the first to say that using a dynamically typed lang in a large project is a disaster waiting to happen

 

Extracted from http://devangst.com/the-problem-with-nodejs/

"

UPDATE: 25th August 2016

So it's been nearly a year on and this blog post is easily the most popular (and controversial) blog post on this site, accounting for nearly a 3rd of the traffic (staggering!). On balance and reflection I still agree with a lot of the sentiments I expressed a year ago in this post. Largely around my frustrations at the javascript community more than anything else.

I can't stress enough that if there's anything to take away from this blog post I would say it would be around the increased importance of monitoring and logging when building applications in Node.js

I would still advocate the use of Node in certain circumstances. It's excellent for example as a backbone for applications that require a lot of short-running threads. So if your application design leverages and makes best use of that, then by all means Node is a great solution.

However, it doesn't suit monolithic architectures.

If you're going to use Node make sure the purpose of it is well-defined and you're designing for scalability with lots of async processing. So don't go doing something stupid like trying to use a single-threaded non-blocking framework like Node for long running calculations or data analytics. Leave that to Java, Scala, Go or some other more heavyweight multi-threaded language.

"

[maynardewm]

2 minutes ago, keglin said:

> Why is JS a mess

Because it's so internally inconsistent that you can't always trust your code to do what it says on the tin in every instance.  That is beyond unacceptable in an API  See http://jswtf.tumblr.com/ and http://devangst.com/the-problem-with-nodejs/

 

> I doubt they are going to go back on NodeJS

I know they probably won't, but they should.  Node is hot, not good.  It lets you iterate quickly, but it doesn't let you create a good app from the start.  It's not the best at any one thing that LMG needs.  It's not even good at them.

 

Node is great for SPAs.  Node is great for minimal-logic frontends.

 

With all your experience in strongly-typed langs, you should be the first to say that using a dynamically typed lang in a large project is a disaster waiting to happen

 

You're mixing dynamically and strongly typed incorrectly... I'm not which one you mean to use. It's dynamic vs. static and strong vs weak.

[Freeman]

Kind of funny that even the darn form is on google platform. Really shows our dependence on those guys.

[keglin]

10 minutes ago, AlfieRivera said:

If JS wasn't a work horse, companies like godaddy, staples, even damn symantec wouldn't use it.

Hard disagree.  Facebook started with PHP, just because a company uses a language doesn't mean it's right for this application.

 

People are citing Netflix and I don't know why.  Their backend is mainly Java and Python, it's their frontend that's Node.

 

[keglin]

*deleted*

[maynardewm]

4 minutes ago, keglin said:

Hard disagree.  Facebook started with PHP, just because a company uses a language doesn't mean it's right for this application.

 

People are citing Netflix and I don't know why.  Their backend is mainly Java and Python, it's their frontend that's Node.

 

Um... Node is not a front end...

Netflix switched to NodeJS for scaling issues:
https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/netflixandchill-how-netflix-scales-with-node-js-and-containers-cf63c0b92e57

[AlfieRivera]

2 minutes ago, keglin said:

Hard disagree.  Facebook started with PHP, just because a company uses a language doesn't mean it's right for this application.

 

People are citing Netflix and I don't know why.  Their backend is mainly Java and Python, it's their frontend that's Node.

 

Most of these companies didn't start using JS either, they moved to JS; and again, you are not seeing the bigger picture within the current situation. I've managed teams for 4 years now, technology aside; there is always the human factor.

[maynardewm]

3 minutes ago, AlfieRivera said:

Most of these companies didn't start using JS either, they moved to JS; and again, you are not seeing the bigger picture within the current situation. I've managed teams for 4 years now, technology aside; there is always the human factor.

Exactly.

There's always a reason not to use a language. Each one you can talk for hours about pros and cons... It doesn't really matter as long as you have a team that knows how to handle the shortcomings.

[riv991]

Dynamically typed languages aren't the best options for backend, too many places for errors to occur

[keglin]

6 minutes ago, maynardewm said:

Um... Node is not a front end...

Netflix switched to NodeJS for scaling issues:
https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/netflixandchill-how-netflix-scales-with-node-js-and-containers-cf63c0b92e57

Don't be pedantic.  Node powers the front-end services that consumes data from their API.  That article even said they're mostly on a JVM monolith, but moving things like routing to JS

[Zacm101]

Can we send our resumes? The only requirement I don't meet is I live in the US and not Canada but I have no problem changing that. I see what you guys are doing though. I definitely want to be a part of it

[maynardewm]

1 minute ago, keglin said:

Don't be pedantic.  Node powers the front-end services that consumes data from their API.  That article even said they're mostly on a JVM monolith, but moving things like routing to JS

I'm a programmer, I get paid to be specific

[AlfieRivera]

2 minutes ago, keglin said:

Don't be pedantic.  Node powers the front-end services that consumes data from their API.  That article even said they're mostly on a JVM monolith, but moving things like routing to JS

Oh well, let the big words come out. Again, not seeing the bigger picture. Can't say I blame you.