Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities. Consulting and hands-on.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English and a tiny bit of Chinese. I communicate regularly and precisely and can also talk to clients to refine requirements. Honest and fair.
"We were working on a tight deadline for an accelerator program and he did an excellent job of completing the prototype with enough time to make tweaks and launch before submission. [Leslie] was wonderful to work with: a great listener and understood my vision for the product; he put together exactly what I was looking for despite starting with just a vague idea and several basic sketches. I have a consulting/VC background that lacks in technical experience so I relied on him heavily to make several choices, and he was decisive and worked confidently despite the ambiguity. I would love to work with him again in the future!"
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing about your project.
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English and a little Chinese. I get work done, and can also communicate with clients to refine requirements. I am honest, and I'm striving to be a fair and decent person at all times.
Here's a testimonial from a former client: "We were working on a tight deadline for an accelerator program and he did an excellent job of completing the prototype with enough time to make tweaks and launch before submission. He was wonderful to work with: a great listener and understood my vision for the product; he put together exactly what I was looking for despite starting with just a vague idea and several basic sketches. I have a consulting/VC background that lacks in technical experience so I relied on him heavily to make several choices, and he was decisive and worked confidently despite the ambiguity. I would love to work with him again in the future!"
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages, let's launch your rockets. :-)
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English. I get work done, and can also communicate with clients to refine requirements. I am honest, and I'm trying to be a fair and decent person at all times.
Here's a testimonial from a former client: "We were working on a tight deadline for an accelerator program and he did an excellent job of completing the prototype with enough time to make tweaks and launch before submission. He was wonderful to work with: a great listener and understood my vision for the product; he put together exactly what I was looking for despite starting with just a vague idea and several basic sketches. I have a consulting/VC background that lacks in technical experience so I relied on him heavily to make several choices, and he was decisive and worked confidently despite the ambiguity. I would love to work with him again in the future!"
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages. :-)
Hi Leslie, I have a 100% remote SRE role with a Silicon Valley startup, Lively!
Location: San Francisco
Company Stage: Series A(15.2M)
Company Tech Stack: AWS, Node, PostgreSQL, React, TypeScript
Job Tech Stack: AWS, Chef, Python, Ruby, Salt, Cloudformation, Terraform
Company Size: ~35
Engineering Team Size: ~10
Is email the best way to contact you? I can send over complete details.
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English. I get work done, and can also communicate with clients to refine requirements. I am honest, and I'm trying to be a fair and decent person at all times.
Here's a testimonial from a former client: "We were working on a tight deadline for an accelerator program and he did an excellent job of completing the prototype with enough time to make tweaks and launch before submission. He was wonderful to work with: a great listener and understood my vision for the product; he put together exactly what I was looking for despite starting with just a vague idea and several basic sketches. I have a consulting/VC background that lacks in technical experience so I relied on him heavily to make several choices, and he was decisive and worked confidently despite the ambiguity. I would love to work with him again in the future!"
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages. :-)
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English. I get work done, and can also communicate with clients to refine requirements. I am honest, and I'm trying to be a fair and decent person at all times.
Note: please definitely do not contact me if your vetting process includes "whiteboard" style coding or take-home challenges, or more than one technical discussion round. My preferred hiring process consists of a "getting to know" chat and a quick review of my sample code, taking no longer than a week. Also, no low-ball offers please, I generally charge at or above market average.
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages. :-)
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English. I get work done, and can also communicate with customers to refine requirements. I am honest, and I'm trying to be a fair and decent person at all times.
Note: please definitely do not contact me if your vetting process includes "whiteboard" style coding or take-home challenges, or more than one technical discussion round. My preferred hiring process consists of a "getting to know" chat and a quick review of my sample code, taking no longer than a week. Also, no low-ball offers please, I generally charge above market average.
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to your messages. :-)
It looks good. Of course the real question is whether it's just lip service to look good, or whether the company as a whole really wholeheartedly embodies these values. From what I heard from Google employees online, in a lot of situations political power plays still trump other values like compassion and empathy.
For example, as a society, we are constantly reminding people to not drink and drive. There are still people doing it all the times. That doesn't mean telling people not to drink and drive is a lip service to look good. There can be bad apples anywhere. The fact that they try should be viewed as a positive, not a negative.
I agree focus should be on the positive. At the same time it's important to call out hypocrisy. Big companies oftentimes like to tout guidelines they don't actually follow.
For example, every company nowadays acts like they're big on diversity. Usually they do it to avoid getting sued. But really getting behind empowering women in the workplace does not often factor into any decision-making by HR or management.
One could argue that it is a lip service that was say that as a society yet do not work to improve public transit or take the extreme but reliable step to put breathalyzers in all vehicles.
It's easy to ridicule this, but I wish we would be more open towards "crazy" ideas in general. I believe that every person has something to teach me and contribute to the world, and if I have any strong preconceptions in my interaction with them that severely limits my power to benefit.
On the flip side, being open towards "crazy" ideas opens you to DDoS attacks from legitimate lunatics, in the form of you having to spend mental energy analyzing and responding to them.
What does “proper” mean? Because it’s certainly the only practical way to validate most hypotheses. Sure, I could spend a couple of decades independently evaluating the effectiveness and safety of the flu vaccine, but in the meantime I’m going to have to decide whether to wear my seat belt and whether these apples I bought are safe to eat and how often to water my plants and so many more things. Appeal to authority is necessarily the way most people validate most hypotheses they depend on.
"Dr Chi believes that there are four types of aliens: small; tall and bold; aliens with scales and snake eyes; and finally, insect-like aliens. The latter of these seems to be the highest in the hierarchy, he said, and gives orders to the lower ranks."
Honestly, if someone were to look at at all the science and evidence objectively it would be scientifically unsound to conclude that intelligent life doesn't exist elsewhere in our own universe or even outside it.
Humans have historically had an inherent bias in thinking that we as a species and everything around us is somehow special, only to later discover that it was never true all along. For example, for a long time we've thought that we are the only species that have intelligence, language, emotions, morality, culture, ability to use tools, etc. Also see tribalism, racism, nationalism, geocentrism, or the fact that a significant number of people until a few years ago (when we finally were able to get evidence) didn't think that there were many planets in the universe (i.e. our solar system was special). Or perhaps they thought that our planet was particularly unique in the universe due to having its orbit in the habitable zone. I'm sure most people thought that our sun was special too (they didn't think think that stars were suns), until a few centuries ago. I wonder if there is a name for this bias (I bet there is but I can't recall ATM).
>The only justifications for life elsewhere to exist that I am aware of are statistical, not evidential
Everything you just said pretty much sums up to "we were wrong before!", which still isn't empirical evidence. Besides, just because there's probably alien life somewhere in the universe doesn't mean there's alien life on earth right now, given how vast space is.
We know there is life in the universe (on our planet), there is empirical proof of that.
So the question now is whether there is also life on other planets. If you don't think there is life on other planets then you must think our planet is somehow special / extraordinary among all others. However, given the cosmological principle, then the more planets there is, the harder it must be to justify that our planet is special. The fact that there is an unthinkably huge number of planets in the universe seems to make that extremely unlikely.
The GP dismisses statistical arguments in favor of empirical evidence, but much of what we accept about physics or the universe is the result of statistical processes. Since our universe is stochastic, strictly speaking we never really know anything for certain, we just deem something is accepted as true when it reaches an arbitrary statistical threshold.
Also, just because you don't sense something directly it doesn't mean that you can't infer that it exists based on statistical arguments alone.
For example, when estimating the number of species on Earth, there is no evidence that there are more species than the ones we already discovered, but we infer there are because we are discovering new species all the time, which means it's extremely unlikely we have discovered them all already.
The cosmological principle itself is a statistical argument more than anything... there is no proof that Earth isn't at the center of the (entire) universe, but almost nobody thinks that nowadays.
Note that in this thread we are only discussing whether there is life somewhere else in the universe, not whether there's alien life on earth right now, which obviously is harder to justify.
I see the fallacy in the parent comment just a little differently. It suffers from the "can't prove a negative" problem.
The comment never argued in favor of life elsewhere, and certainly not in any concrete form. It only said that we can't conclude that it doesn't exist. There is only an emotional suggestion that it does exist.
So it just boils down to an unhelpfully weak statement. Virtually all scientific minded people agree with the statement. The suspiciousness (like with religion) is placing such a weak statement about the general proposition in the middle of a discussion about a specific proposition (reptiles, interbreeding, etc.), and that doesn't make much sense on closer inspection. Why bring the straw-man up THEN if not suggesting a stronger form of belief?
> n the middle of a discussion about a specific proposition (reptiles, interbreeding, etc.)
Reptiles? Who said anything about that? If we're just refuting David Icke here, than yes, he's a crackpot and should just be ignored. Seriously, that guy is a lunatic at best and a scam artist at worst. Probably some combination of the two.
I agree and think it is better to have some crazy and unconventional ideas than to restrain free research.
While this is probably some misapplied statistical analysis, I hope the worst consequence is a harsh rejection based on methodology. Free research will and should probably also lead to crazy ideas once in a while.
The status system in academia is pretty strong. This guy will face judgement among his peers.
Technologies: Go, Python, Linux, AWS/Cloud. Everything web. Interested in Rust and Terraform.
Feats: Former Amazon. 10+ years of industry experience. Self-starter.
Brief Résumé/CV: http://lpolzer.com/ -- contact me for my detailed CV.
Email: polzer@fastmail.com
Looking for remote contract or freelance work, but generally open to other opportunities. Consulting and hands-on.
I specialize in backend and scripting work, and have worked on a wide variety of projects over a span of more than 15 years. I can ramp up to new tech and environments quickly. My last gig was as a software engineer at Amazon Vancouver for 20 months. I speak German and English and a tiny bit of Chinese. I communicate regularly and precisely and can also talk to clients to refine requirements. Honest and fair.
"We were working on a tight deadline for an accelerator program and he did an excellent job of completing the prototype with enough time to make tweaks and launch before submission. [Leslie] was wonderful to work with: a great listener and understood my vision for the product; he put together exactly what I was looking for despite starting with just a vague idea and several basic sketches. I have a consulting/VC background that lacks in technical experience so I relied on him heavily to make several choices, and he was decisive and worked confidently despite the ambiguity. I would love to work with him again in the future!"
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing about your project.