Same here. Not using anything now, but when I needed it, they were a good value, and easy to use. They sponsored a PHP conference I went to, which is where I heard of them, and became a customer. LPT: conference sponsoring does work ;)
You'd want to start with the United States Digital Service (USDS). They're basically a consultancy inside the executive branch to build tech solutions for the various 3 letter agencies. You basically do a "tour of duty" for a year or so (however long you want), tackling one of these solutions. And they go out of their way to hire folks like you, from FAANG and other tech companies, so you work with good people.
I interviewed with them. The recruiter, I could barely understand. I got the 3rd interview after 5 months. They told me to click on a link where they would ask me to code live. They could see what I was doing. I wrote a simple Python algorithm to a problem they gave me to solve. Complete irrelevant to what I had applied for. I thought it was a joke at first, then I visited their website. I cannot recommend anyone this service. So unorganized. I too wanted to contribute in the tech areas since we all know how much they lack in that department.
I think I would enjoy working for a 3 letter agency but the USDS website makes it look like you'll be working on very different types of things. Although I suppose they wouldn't be advertising that work.
I had a product to help political campaigns canvas neighborhoods door to door. In the early days there was a "smart walk sheet" feature, which would magically pick the optimal doors to knock given how much time you had (e.g. 2 hours after work).
While I was building out this feature, I'd stay up late in the night manually selecting clusters of houses and setting them for the customer, so the next morning they'd be greeted with what looked like our backend systems auto-magically picking the perfect cluster of houses.
The bonus of doing it manually for a while is that I found a lot of edge cases I would have missed otherwise. The initial release of the finished feature was rock solid thanks to what I learned.
> The bonus of doing it manually for a while is that I found a lot of edge cases I would have missed otherwise. The initial release of the finished feature was rock solid thanks to what I learned.
This is one of the great benefits of doing things that don't scale. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, so to write code for a process you need to be an expert at that process. How do you become an expert at anything? You have to do it for yourself.
I feel like this is a fantastic example, as it’s one of those things a computer should be able to do perfect toy at scale, but for a quick and dirty solution on a smaller subset it’s something humans are really good at.
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Co-founder of a funded startup that's winding down due to lack of traction. Looking for a new home in the DC area or remote. I've previously written software for The Washington Post, Truth Initiative (anti-smoking campaign), and ADP (among others). Happy doing full-stack, or working exclusively in the front-end or back-end.
An app I worked on had a similar feature to Snapstreaks, but it was used to help people quit smoking. This bill would have killed this feature that helped many people lead healthier lives.
No, it's still being worked on. To quote their latest blog post:
We're working on a large-scale rearchitecture of React Native to make the framework more flexible and integrate better with native infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps.
