Zheng Hao Tan tzhenghao

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.

Effective Engineer - Notes

By Edmond Lau
Highly Recommended 👍
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

What's an Effective Engineer?

Principles of Adult Behavior

Be patient. No matter what.
Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
Expand your sense of the possible.
Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
Tolerate ambiguity.
Laugh at yourself frequently.

System Design Cheatsheet

Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs

Basic Steps

Clarify and agree on the scope of the system

User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
- Who is going to use it?
- How are they going to use it?

Git Cheat Sheet

Commands

Getting Started

git init

or

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.
Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

Latency numbers every programmer should know

L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns
L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns             
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns = 250 µs

	package main
	import (
	"net/http"
	"log"
	)

	func redirect(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
	// remove/add not default ports from req.Host
	target := "https://" + req.Host + req.URL.Path
	if len(req.URL.RawQuery) > 0 {

	#########################
	# .gitignore file for Xcode4 and Xcode5 Source projects
	#
	# Apple bugs, waiting for Apple to fix/respond:
	#
	# 15564624 - what does the xccheckout file in Xcode5 do? Where's the documentation?
	#
	# Version 2.6
	# For latest version, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49478/git-ignore-file-for-xcode-projects
	#

	# Assuming an Ubuntu Docker image
	$ docker run -it <image> /bin/bash