OpenAlex is an open index of the world's scholarly research: hundreds of millions of articles linked to authors, institutions, and topics, free via API and bulk download. Traffic runs about a billion API calls per month from universities, governments, and AI companies. The team behind it is a small nonprofit funded by grants and enterprise support.
We're hiring two engineers to work across the whole backend, which is SQL and PySpark on Databricks, Python/Flask APIs, Elasticsearch, and Cloudflare Workers. It's a small team with lots of autonomy. You'll notice what's missing, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it. We're AI-native, with agents writing all of our code.
Our startup uses managed elasticsearch through elastic. We're a very small team so support/consulting advice is important to us and they are good at that.
I was a naysayer but find copilot makes me more productive. Especially at writing tests. It's very good at recognizing patterns in your own work, and completing an entire test based on the function name.
I tried to do this and I couldn't figure it out. I never got the sense that it knew anything about the code I had written, just that it was dreaming stuff up from its training set.
Depending on what you're doing with it, that may technically be against the TOS on any of their "self-serve" plans, including the paid ones. You might get away with it anyway, especially if your traffic is low, but you'd be rolling the dice.
If it's consumed by a web app, doesn't it make it okay? Otherwise any api behind cloudflare would be violating the TOS...
> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content
The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.
Probably OK, but access it from Electron (let alone fully-native apps) and now you may not technically not be OK anymore—is that functionally equivalent to a web browser? Hard to say. And much of the benefit of web APIs, versus just serving pages and HTML fragments, is being able to serve those kinds of heterogenous clients, or to allow access to 3rd parties, and who knows what they might use to access it, so... yeah, you can push low-usefulness (browser-only, first-party-use-only) web APIs through Cloudflare and you're likely in the clear, but go beyond that and it gets murky fast.
And even then, the web API thing is subject to the rest of the restrictions in that same section ("serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8") so "serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited" (emphasis mine) meaning that if too much of your traffic is JSON or protobufs or what have you, they could send you a nastygram or simply cut you off, though they might choose not to.
Personally, I'd not rely on Cloudflare's free or $20 plans past MVP/experimentation or hobbyist use, precisely because the terms are restrictive and vague. Too risky. Then again, what can you expect for nothing-to-peanuts prices?
We do that with CloudFront. Default is no cache, but some API responses specifically enable caching in the response headers (mainly the version check API).
I did. If you need eviction, things get either suboptimal, complicated or costly. If you don't need that the only other thing to watch out is the upload size limit, and we'll only if that is ever relevant to you. You might want a direct endpoint for these.
We managed to get it working for analytical SQL queries [1] for our database. It's kind of questionable whether this is an intended use of Cloudflare, but it feels like it, since we use it for query results, which are essentially a static asset in our use case (dashboards and visualizations).
I was very successful on UpWork. However, it is not something you can jump into with no work history on the site, like "I have 16 years experience so my rate is $125/hr." People don't believe you when you say that. They want to see proof from a third party. So you need to start lower ($30 to $50/hr), stay in a niche, and successfully complete jobs while gradually raising your rates.
When someone sees glowing reviews and completed jobs, you become the "easy button" and they will pay more to decrease their risk. When they see 10 completed jobs with 5 star reviews, all mentioning the exact type of work they need, they can be pretty sure the 11th will be successful. It's possible to charge $125 or more an hour on UpWork and have to keep your settings updated so that you are not spammed with invites.
I sound like a shill for Upwork (promise I'm not!). But the fees for long-term clients (>$10k in earnings) is 5%. If you go on your own and bill through a system you will likely pay 3%. So it's not that different.
I have history on Upwork, and pretty good one. But I haven't used it in 6 years, and my rate then was around $60/h and it's double that now. But I keep hearing how terrible and underpaid it is in here, hence this post.
I would give it another shot. Since your history is older you likely need to keep your rate at $60 for a while and complete a few jobs. But UpWork has the biggest market and there are plenty of people out there willing to pay for developers with a solid history.
People say it's underpaid or terrible, but part of that reputation comes from people doing one or two jobs and quitting. Plus, I've hired developers on UpWork and a lot of people suck at writing proposals. I have a lot of advice on that too.
Do not use UpWork. They take a big cut, the clients you get are generally garbage, and they can close your account (and even keep your funds) for any reason.
I used to use UpWork extensively 10yrs ago, with lots of success. We tried to use UpWork recently and cant even create an account. There is no real way to figure out how to make it work or what the issue might be. The site has gone downhill fast.
No, I am not, but someone explicitly asked you for an alternative. But it's nice to have an alternative ready, otherwise you just sound bitter. Plus, you are not adding to the discussion, the reader is stuck with the same original question - where do you find contract work?
They asked me for an alternative, and I'm giving low value comments by saying I don't have one?
Not all comments need to add to the original discussion. Saying I do not suggest someone uses Upwork and giving my first hand experience of using the platform adds some value to someone.
This - I recently hired someone for 80$ an hour for a quick Sharepoint Powerblabber fix - one online meeting, he pointed me to the solution in 20 minutes, charged 30 minutes - everyone was happy.
All very professional - answered promptly knew his stuff + the necessary meet and greet in the beginning.
Do you use the spyware tools they want you to use ‘for your and their protection’? As a senior engineer and not in kindergarten, I cannot imagine anyone with over a year or so experience doing that.
Also, the other way around, when you hire a senior and they insist on using that crap, they are more likely to scam you as you cannot dispute hours made ‘if the recorded screens show code’.
I agree that a small team of engineers can do big things. But 15 engineers to run Uber ride share in maintenance mode? That's insane. I would love to see a breakdown of each engineer's responsibilities in that scenario.
Heroku is my tried and true. I've likely done thousands of deploys over the years and have never had one go bad or leave my app in a bad state. I have rolled back an app a few times due to bad configs and it was always quick and left me with a huge sigh of relief.
That being said, they are very stagnant on features. A dyno has operated the same way, at the same size, at the same price for like 10 years now? The main features I would like to see are auto-scaling for all dynos and IPs that allow you to restrict database traffic. Render looks promising in that department and could likely get business from me if Heroku doesn't change in the next couple years.
OpenAlex is an open index of the world's scholarly research: hundreds of millions of articles linked to authors, institutions, and topics, free via API and bulk download. Traffic runs about a billion API calls per month from universities, governments, and AI companies. The team behind it is a small nonprofit funded by grants and enterprise support.
We're hiring two engineers to work across the whole backend, which is SQL and PySpark on Databricks, Python/Flask APIs, Elasticsearch, and Cloudflare Workers. It's a small team with lots of autonomy. You'll notice what's missing, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it. We're AI-native, with agents writing all of our code.
Apply here: https://openalex.org/jobs/software-engineer
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