Will Prater wprater

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

Minimum Viable Async with Node 6

With the release of Node 6.0.0, the surface of code that needs transpilation to use ES6 features has been reduced very dramatically.

This is what my current workflow looks like to set up a minimalistic and fast microservice using micro and async + await.

The promise

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

This requires the latest version of apktool.

apktool d $APK_PATH -o $OUTPUT_FOLDER

# Open the apktool.yml text file
# Alter the versionCode and versionName entries

# now rebuild!
apktool build $OUTPUT_FOLDER

	import UIKit
	import Foundation

	infix operator ~ : RangeFormationPrecedence

	public enum AnchorOption: Hashable {
	case priority(UILayoutPriority)
	case multiplier(CGFloat)
	case constant(CGFloat)

	import React from 'react';

	const someProp = 'We want to pass this as a prop';

	// hip and short notation
	export const wrapComponent = (UncomposedComponent) => (props) => <UncomposedComponent {...props} someProp={someProp} />;

	// Or broken down:

	// a factory which wraps a component

	{
	"AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
	"Image": {
	"Name": "<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<NAME>:<TAG>",
	"Update": "true"
	},
	"Ports": [
	{
	"ContainerPort": "443"
	}

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	# A basic Self Signed SSL Certificate utility
	# by Andrea Giammarchi @WebReflection

	# https://www.webreflection.co.uk/blog/2015/08/08/bringing-ssl-to-your-private-network

	# # to make it executable and use it
	# $ chmod +x certificate
	# $ ./certificate # to read the how-to

	'use strict';

	module.exports = function CustomError(message, extra) {
	Error.captureStackTrace(this, this.constructor);
	this.name = this.constructor.name;
	this.message = message;
	this.extra = extra;
	};

	require('util').inherits(module.exports, Error);

	// array utils
	// =================================================================================================

	const combine = (...arrays) => [].concat(...arrays);

	const compact = arr => arr.filter(Boolean);

	const contains = (() => Array.prototype.includes
	? (arr, value) => arr.includes(value)
	: (arr, value) => arr.some(el => el === value)