Medium publication of personal career and life stories, including posts on leaving Google, getting hired there without a degree, and paying with Bitcoin.
HN commenters link it for career advice on getting hired at Google and for personal essays; one calls the Google hiring piece a favorite employability article.
I wrote about this back in 2013 (and made it to the front page of HN): "Scammed By Amazon’s 'A-to-Z Guarantee'"
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/scammed-by-amazons-a-to-z-guarantee-759e4b63a925
tl;dr I sold my old cell phone on Amazon and the buyer claimed it was stolen. Amazon refunded him in full and took the money out of my bank account.
I also sold a computer on Amazon around the same time and the buyer tried to do the same thing. That one I caught and argued successfully for, but it was still a pain to go back and forth.
I had another laptop I wanted to sell online, but because of these two experiences I was really gun-shy. I ended up stuffing it in a cabinet for over a year and eventually sold it to a friend for significantly less than I would have sold it for online--but at least I knew I wouldn't get scammed.
I've had better luck with the Amazon trade-in program, especially since they sometimes do incentives. I've traded in two Kindles and ended up getting a new Paperwhite for only about $40-50 after all the incentives from both old Kindles were in my account.
I've wrote a similar piece of the subject 10 days ago.
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/96a22e176b1
The problem with those non personalise lifecycle emails is that they works on the "commoners" but can easily pissed of the tech savy users. Lucky for Weebly, they don't really care about the HN Crowd.
Lifecycle emails works best when they are highly personalise based on some actions the user made in the app or on the website.
So please, if you are looking in setting up lifecycle emails, make yourself ( and the users ) a favor and use powerful tools like customer.io, getvero, etc to easily create to personalised campaigns.
IANAL but I've been censored by the DMCA before and fought it. My understanding is that perjury is a crime against the court/government, so you'd have to convince a district attorney to pursue it which is rarely done.
Also, the takedown requires a much weaker statement under perjury than the counter-takedown. "the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed". There's (bizarrely) no need to claim good faith.
Edit: here's my story: https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/9ccd3a157914
Yay, my all-time favorite employability-related article. Here's some more useful stuff for who's interested:
* Steve Yegge - Five essential phone screen questions [1]
* The Google Resume (might look iffy but has really strong advice) [2]
* Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree [3]
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions
[2] http://www.thegoogleresume.com
[3] https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/8f381aa6bd5e
Get your resume together - start approaching other companies in your area looking for developers, or start taking on freelance clients and spend your free time building up a small client base that you can comfortably live off.
Once you know you have something that you can jump off to, give in your notice.
Something similar happened to me as a sole developer (I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/86b9d27f9962)
I wrote a short essay on my experience with transitioning from the humanities to web design and development. In short, I think it can be done... and that there are even certain advantages and unique skills that a liberal arts degree provides... but ultimately it comes down to some innate skills combined with lots of hard work. Here is my full essay for anyone interested: https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/d609c1770dd4