Mode is a modern analytics and BI solution that combines SQL, Python, R and visual analysis to answer questions faster.
Used by Segment, Shopify, Twitch, Lyft, Doordash, NYTimes. Learn more about customers. https://mode.com/customers/
Open roles:
- Senior Back-End Engineer - Experience with production engineering, mostly Java, some Go and Python
- Senior DevOps Engineer - Terraform, Go, AWS ECS
Plastics are petrochemicals, meaning they’re made by combining fossil fuels (usually fracked gas) with chemicals. Petrochemical plants are among the most polluting industries in terms of harmful air and water pollution, and greenhouse gases. In the US, most petrochemical plants are clustered in a low-income, largely Black area of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley.” So from fracking, to chemical production, to petrochemical manufacturing, people and the environment are harmed—that’s not even counting the end of the plastics lifecycle, like ocean pollution and incineration.
This is an old video of a tabletop model. It runs at 1Kw/hr and takes ~3-4 hours to convert 1 kg of plastic into ~800ml of fuel.
The machine is really just a demonstration unit for their bigger models. I always wondered why don't we just use these machines in a scaled up manner with renewable sources to recover the fuel to be turned back into plastics. I'm assuming its just a cost issue.
You can power the process using a feedback loop where a small amount of the output gas (prior to condensing into liquid form) is used to heat the plastic. There's videos on YouTube of folks rigging up a system in the back yard with basic pipes and drums, and obtaining usable output liquid fuel. You just need enough initial energy input to reach the target temperature, after which it can self sustain.
The issue with plastic pyrolysis is it's turning fossil fuels sequestered in plastic form back into burnable fuels that end up in the atmosphere, further contributing to climate change. A better option is to sequester that plastic permanently back in the ground again. Even landfill, using this lens, is a better option.
Thats why I talked about using renewable energy. If we could have a closed loop system where the plastic is turned into oil and then turned back into plastic, we could minimize excess plastic waste + not use any more oil from the ground.
Solving the wrong problem IMO - Even if you reach 100% efficient reprocessing a portion of plastic enters the environment on each usage cycle, and this is the problem we urgently need to solve.
Switching out to materials which decompose harmlessly is a better option all round, even if the energy costs are higher.
Nava is a public benefit corporation working to radically improve how government serves people. Formed as a team of designers and engineers in the effort to fix HealthCare.gov in 2013, Nava now works with Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs. With a strong research practice and a depth of experience scaling digital services, Nava helps more than sixty million people access critical government services. We’re thinkers and designers of civic technology.
While mostly true, let’s put this into perspective: A GS-15 in a metro area like New York, DC, and San Francisco, with experience, can get over $170. Throw in performance bonus and matching contributions, and total compensation is $180k+. That does not compare with the high end of the private sector, but that’s reasonable for a lot of people, even at tech companies.
Also, the sense of duty and serving the public is real. And this is not expressed in a tongue and cheek way... it’s an earnest desire to do meaningful work.
Many people who join USDS, 18F, and PIF from the tech industry are there because they genuinely want to do good work.
There's also the "executive schedule" [1] for management, but it doesn't pay much better: $220K for the highest paid ES-1, and a PhD is a requirement. In fact, the president of the US makes only $400K.
I worked for a state university for several years, and while there were certainly those there to collect their paycheck, there were also many who - as the parent suggests - had a very earnest desire to do meaningful work.
> A GS-15 in a metro area like New York, DC, and San Francisco, with experience, can get over $170.
Agencies like USDS, 18F, etc. who are hiring at this level are atypical, and have to do so in order to attract talent away from private sector. GS-13+ slots are typically senior leadership positions and not entry level for anyone unless they have a PhD.
I have been out of the ecosystem for a while, but use Ruby frequently. So the 3x3 is coming along? More up to date places I could see benchmarks or similar?
Note: I have been using Roda with Ruby 2 and it is pretty fast. Can't wait to see what it would be with 3x3.
This might be a bit of a novice question, but will this affect the initializations of ActiveRecord objects in Rails anything?
For example, processing a large CSV file and inserting new rows in a database from it has always been extremely slow using Ruby/Rails unless you basically just write raw SQL that copies from the CSV and don't do any initializations of Rails models, #create, etc. I wonder if this will improve these things at all, but my guess is that it has to do with memory usage and not the speed of Ruby?
I recently started using Sinatra for side projects and it’s an absolute pleasure. It’s simple and reliable. I think it should get a lot more recognition.
Ruby is changing. I doubt it will ever be as big as the Python world, but I can see it coming back into fashion. I’ve been paying attention to the community and it’s still very active.
I think there's a lot of burnout in the JS ecosystem, and many are looking for the efficiency of Rails. However, I'm not certain if Ruby on its own is gaining more of a foothold. For a few years it looked like you'd seen more Ruby generalists with tools like Chef and Puppet, but I think Docker has taken a lot of wind out of those sails.
And then Rails 6 came along and brought NodeJS by way of Yarn and WebPacks. I'm still pretty light on deep Rails knowledge (currently doing my first non-toy project with it), but I was not pleased to see that this pile of bloat now appears to be a requirement.
If you're interested in front-end performance, having a webpack build pipeline for your frontend assets is quite useful, especially if you want to leverage libraries like react or vue and build interactive reusable components, or leverage existing ones.
Tree shaking, minification, chunking, splitting, etc. will help you deliver a faster initial page load, which is a better overall experience and is also factor in search ranking for your public pages.
Front-end engineering has changed because users expect interactive experiences. Rails has an opinionated way to solve this differently using turbolinks and Rails UJS. A very significant proportion of folks don't want to go that route, enough for it to become the default.
“The Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP) called for the establishment of the the Code.gov program office and corresponding technical platform of a website and application programming interface (API). The program office assists agencies with policy, acquisition, and code inventory creation. We are a small but mighty team with five members with expertise and beliefs pertaining to discovering, sharing, and open sourcing the People's code.”
You may also want to read up on 18f.gsa.gov. They publish and share lots of open source code.
Also have a look at the GOV.UK/GDS[0], which strongly influenced the US Digital Service. Pretty much everything digital that government departments do is open by default[1]
Mode is a modern analytics and BI solution that combines SQL, Python, R and visual analysis to answer questions faster.
Used by Segment, Shopify, Twitch, Lyft, Doordash, NYTimes. Learn more about customers. https://mode.com/customers/
Open roles: - Senior Back-End Engineer - Experience with production engineering, mostly Java, some Go and Python - Senior DevOps Engineer - Terraform, Go, AWS ECS
Ping me if you have questions.