Willie Abrams willie

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

How to recreate your long-lost Pinterest bookmarklet.

Right-click your bookmarks bar and choose Add Page (Chrome) or New Bookmarklet (Firefox).

In Name, put this:

Pin It

In URL, put this:

Smoked Fried Chicken

It's the best of all worlds. Trust me

Ingredients

Chicken - cut for frying is best
Coarse salt. Sea salt or Kosher salt
Spices for brining - I use parsley, sage, thyme, a dash of cumin and cayenne powder. Experiment!
Panko crumbs
Eggs
French's fried onion strips

What this?

So one of the painful points of using docker on OS X is that you need to run a virtualbox VM, which often suffers from performance issues. With xhyve, a OS X virtualization system, and docker-machine-xhyve you can now have docker use the native OS X hypervisor to run containers.

No more dealing with virtualbox shenanigans!

In this script, I've also set up a way to autoconfigure terminal sessions to load docker's environment vars (dependent on docker-machine) so you do not have to run eval $(docker-machine env whatever) every time you open a new terminal window.

Requirements

Update, September 2016

OK, you can pretty much ignore what I wrote below this update, because it doesn't really apply anymore.

I wrote this over a year ago, and at the time I had spent a couple of weeks trying to get Kafka 0.8 working with .NET and then Node.js with much frustration and very little success. I was rather angry. It keeps getting linked, though, and just popped up on Hacker News, so here's sort of an update, although I haven't used Kafka at all this year so I don't really have any new information.

In the end, we managed to get things working with a Node.js client, although we continued to have problems, both with our code and with managing a Kafka/Zookeeper cluster generally. What made it worse was that I did not then, and do not now, believe that Kafka was the correct solution for that particular problem at that particular company. What they were trying to achieve could have been done more simply with any number of other messaging systems, with a subscriber reading messages off and writing

	func contextWithSigterm(ctx context.Context) context.Context {
	ctxWithCancel, cancel := context.WithCancel(ctx)
	go func() {
	defer cancel()

	signalCh := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
	signal.Notify(signalCh, os.Interrupt, syscall.SIGTERM)

	select {
	case <-signalCh:

	package main

	import (
	"crypto/tls"
	"golang.org/x/crypto/acme/autocert"
	"log"
	"net"
	"net/http"
	)

	# If you use bash, this technique isn't really zsh specific. Adapt as needed.
	source ~/keychain-environment-variables.sh

	# AWS configuration example, after doing:
	# $ set-keychain-environment-variable AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
	# provide: "AKIAYOURACCESSKEY"
	# $ set-keychain-environment-variable AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
	# provide: "j1/yoursupersecret/password"
	export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$(keychain-environment-variable AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID);
	export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$(keychain-environment-variable AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY);

	package main

	import (
	"encoding/json"
	"flag"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"log"
	"net/http"

	#!/bin/bash

	# Don't put duplicate lines in the history
	export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

	# Store a lot history entries in a file for grep-age
	shopt -s histappend
	export HISTFILE=~/long_history
	export HISTFILESIZE=50000