K
Kelly Sutton
kellysutton.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2015
Kelly Sutton is a software engineer writing about Rails, React, GraphQL, and job searching.
What HN saysHN commenters link his posts on taming large Rails apps, GraphQL, and job search visualization, which one credits for leading them to Triplebyte.
30HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
32stories submitted
726story points
2 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Do We Need GraphQL?4 people · 10 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Moving on from React, a year later3 people · 305 points · first shared 2025 · 241 comments on HN
- 3Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer3 people · 167 points · first shared 2016 · 154 comments on HN
- 4Taming Large Rails Applications with Private ActiveRecord Models3 people · 31 points · first shared 2019 · 8 comments on HN
- 5A Vacancy Has Been Detected (2019)2 people · 106 points · first shared 2020 · 61 comments on HN
- 6Embracing Functional Programming in Ruby (2017)2 people · 36 points · first shared 2017 · 11 comments on HN
- 7Boiling the Ocean with Markup (2016)2 people · 23 points · first shared 2017 · 4 comments on HN
- 8Moving on from React2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 9Deletability2 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10From 25 Minutes to 7 Minutes: Improving the Performance of a Rails CI Pipeline2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Rethinking Static Sites1 people · 14 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 12Campaigns: A long-running effort to enact global change safely1 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Why Do Developers Hate LinkedIn?1 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
- 14A Framework for Making Technology-Product Decisions1 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 15So You Want to Store a File (2021)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
sogen · 2016-10-27
http://kellysutton.com
Stumbled upon this one yesterday, it's from a paper, but well written:
https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html
A long time favorite writer:
http://www.frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs-grain/
xursabgyn · 2017-03-09
My experience working with Triplebyte has been great. I found them through hackernews from a post about visualizing the timeline for a job search [1].
Unlike most people in this thread, I thought their interview process was much more relevant and tangible to real engineering applications than most companies I've interviewed at. I was not presented with any gotchas or arcane algorithms questions.
Finally, the big draw to them as an engineer is that it significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend on the phone with other companies before going on site. I'm still holding a job (hence the anonymous account), so looking for other opportunities was somewhat prohibitive to me.
[1] http://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-f…
seltzered_ · 2024-04-02
Have you talked to folks behind prior startups in the space like layervault?
See http://web.archive.org/web/20150424103031/http://layervault.com/ and https://kellysutton.com/2015/07/21/startup-theory-of-relativity.html
caspar · 2021-04-22
Perhaps you already have ideas on how to solve for this situation, but in case it helps: forcing active record model accesses to go via a layer of indirection can help with untangling this sort of thing: https://kellysutton.com/2019/10/29/taming-large-rails-codebases-with-p…
That said, for microservice extraction specifically, a bit of creative metaprogramming/monkey patching of AR to identify & categorize your callers is probably easier.
kellysutton · 2018-06-14
Do we need GraphQL? https://kellysutton.com/2017/01/02/do-we-need-graphql.html
(Disclaimer: From my personal blog)
nemild · 2017-07-24
I'm pretty disappointed by this title.
I know that it might be said in fun - and is an easy way to get clicks, but it feeds into the narrative of new, shiny tech. As the article points out at the end, there are very real engineering tradeoffs with GraphQL - and the answer isn't as easy as REST is dead, anachronistic technology that no engineer should consider (the XML analogy felt particularly inflammatory).
Kelly and I were chatting about GraphQL, and his post might be a more thoughtful engineering post: http://kellysutton.com/2017/01/02/do-we-need-graphql.html (the title - Do we need GraphQL? - is at least the way I'd expect engineers to approach the problem, where he discusses the tradeoffs)
In my MongoDB series, I point out a past case where Free Code Camp fed the hype, by telling engineers that the reason everyone had to learn the MEAN stack was due to employability in the software industry: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-real-reason-to-learn-the-mean-stac…
(you had to dig into the article to realize that their argument was more nuanced, and that they taught SQL first before MongoDB)
A number of "engineering" posts are not written as a thoughtful engineer might, and are in many ways marketing for the products sold (like a training program or code camp).