#xsl is so bad

[xylophonetangerine]

Yesterday I decided to work on an XSLT template for just a moment or two and ended up spending over twelve hours on it.

[maia]

A Complete History of My Salary & Wages

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast interview of Ashley C Ford where she laid out the details on how much money she makes, and from which sources. I’ve thought about it a couple times since then and found it very grounding and reassuring whenever I did, even though I am not on the same career path as Ford, and I had never heard of her before the interview. (I have since started following her on twitter though and highly recommend it).

If you follow me on twitter, you know I am brutally honest on all kind of intimate topics. It’s because I believe in the strength behind transparency and the impact it can create. Transparency is particularly powerful with salaries and compensation, and that is why we had transparent salaries at Pinch. Well, that’s my motivational vibe.

So I am posting my complete salary history here in the hopes that it is interesting or helpful to other people.

2007: ~$25,000 in wages

Spock hired me as a summer marketing intern: $2,500/month salary (with potential for a $1,500 bonus at end of summer).

I was 18 when I started at Spock and had my 19th birthday there. I adored working for Spock — it taught me that being excited about the internet could be a career. And my boss Jay was the first person who really believed in me, and was willing to give me enough rope to hang myself. He told me not to tell people I was 18 because they would underestimate me, that I should tell them I was 27. I told most people I was 27 until I actually was. At the end of the summer I decided to take time off from college and continue working for Spock. They brought me on full-time, at a $75k salary.

I had spent the summer living in Redwood City (where Spock’s office is) and renting a room for $800. After the summer I moved to San Francisco and sublet at different places, paying between $600 for a room and $1000 for a studio apartment.

2008: $28,307 in wages

Most of my friends left Spock, so it seemed like the right thing to do. I emailed SeeqPod because I thought they had the coolest product in all of tech at the time — a web app that streamed music from the internet on the iPhone! (this was before there were 3rd party apps on the iPhone). I told them I was really excited about what they were building and would love to contribute however possible and would come on as an unpaid intern. They interviewed me and I did a take-home project: writing a Product Requirements Document for a Hi5 App (Hi5 was the third largest social network after Myspace and Facebook at the time). SeeqPod hired me as a product manager, I think with a $60k salary. My boss Mike was the second person (in an infinite stream) to believe in me and take a big chance on me.

I didn’t have an iPhone, just a flip phone, but I was so excited about the idea of posting photos on the internet from a mobile phone that I set up a tumblr called https://www.maiaeats.com/ that would post new entries every time I texted it a photo or text. I recorded everything I ate in this way.

I went back to college for my sophomore year in the fall. When I left, the CEO of SeeqPod said “Maia, you are the most diplomatic person I’ve ever had work for me. I watch you in meetings help people take their foot out of their mouths and start espousing your idea as if it was their own”. SeeqPod said they would keep my equity vesting over the school year, and we planned for me to transfer to Berkeley the next year as a college junior, to keep working for them. SeeqPod got sued out of existence though, so I stayed on at Olin.

2009: ~$10k in wages

In summer 2009, one of my former colleagues had been impressed with my work at Spock and wanted me to run marketing at his startup, Archivd. I did, but unfortunately his company went under about a month after I started when his cofounder couldn’t get a work visa.

For the rest of the summer, I picked up a half-time job running social media at a startup called NationalBLS in San Francisco. I got another half-time job doing front-end web development for Sprowtt, in Palo Alto (like Kickstarter + AngelList). I lived in a basement in Oakland and had a terrible commute.

That fall, I lived in Cambridge and got a part-time internship at HubSpot while in college. It was magical to live in Cambridge and work for HubSpot… the best time I had during college. I think they offered me $14/hour and I surprised them by negotiating to $15/hour.

2010: $1,800 in wages

I worked full-time for Hubspot ($15/hour) for the month of January before I went to study abroad in Copenhagen for Spring semester. I stayed in Europe that summer and did not work the rest of the year.

2011: $0 in wages

I graduated college in May 2011, sort of… having spent the spring busy trying to convalesce from a horrible car accident in January 2011, I was behind on my school work and so I walked on stage at the ceremony in May but technically hadn’t graduated yet. My generous professors let me make up the work in summer/fall, and I got my diploma at the end of the Fall 2011 semester.

I sold stock I had bought during college with my income from my year off to pay for my life this year.

2012: $61,988 in wages

Desperate for a job, my friend Richa helped me find a role at the consultancy she worked for in January 2012, where I wrote XSL-T (it’s like CSS, for XML documents). I made $60k salary (less than I had made when I was 19), but I was grateful for the opportunity (and for the health insurance!). They originally offered me $55k, and I negotiated up a smidge.

At the end of the summer, I met Meg who was starting a new company, Rocksbox. She hired me as her first employee, a UX designer. I think Meg asked me “What do people like you make?” and I said “Something like $75k,” and she said “Ok, that seems fine.” My salary was $72k.

2013: $22,416 in wages

Meg invited me to join on as cofounder & CTO of Rocksbox. As a cofounder, I took no salary for much of the year.

I lived in a two bedroom apartment with several other people — my friend Katie and I technically shared a bedroom together with one queen bed and both spent most nights at our respective boyfriend’s apartments. The household hosted people from Airbnb in our dining room and I made an additional $5k on top of my $22k salary to put towards my rent.

I remember being exhausted, flipping Airbnb rooms. My boyfriend asked “This seems really terrible, why do you do it?” I said “…. for the money, obviously.” He said “Oh but you don’t need the money,” and I sat there quietly, thinking, what does it mean for one to need the money?

2014: $66,323 in wages

Meg raised $1.5M for Rocksbox, and I was able to take a higher salary — I think back to $72k!

We still hosted Airbnbs in our dining room from which I made an extra $3,300.

My lawsuit against the guy who hit me with his truck settled for $100k. My lawyer took 1/3 and transferred me $66,000: the most humiliating, exhausting, painful, least worth it money I have ever “earned” in my entire life.

2015: $84,725 in wages

I was making more from Rocksbox — my salary increased from ~$72k at the beginning of 2015 to about ~$150k towards the end of the year.

My roommates and I moved to a big fancy house with a separate bedroom where we could host people on Airbnb. Technically my rent was $2,400/month but with the Airbnb it usually netted out to $1,400. I made $2,400 from Airbnb this year.

2016: $67,769 in wages

I left Rocksbox (and my $150k annual salary) to start Pinch, where we paid ourselves $50k. Rocksbox bought back my unvested equity for $780.

This year, with the separate bedroom on Airbnb, I made another $9,220. In September my roommate and I moved to a different apartment and stopped hosting on Airbnb. My rent was $1,500.

2017: $58,686 in wages

Towards the end of 2017, our $50k salary at Pinch was really starting to hurt. We raised a bit more and upped our salaries to $100k. The money from my car accident dwindled. I moved to my own apartment for the first time, and my rent was $2,000/month.

2018: $121,277 in wages

In summer 2018, we sold Pinch to Chime. My job offer at Chime was for $175k.

Some of our offers for Pinch came with a signing bonus. I wanted to evaluate offers based on the people and the culture, so I told myself I would act as though I had received a signing bonus even if I technically hadn’t. When we joined Chime (no signing bonus), I bought myself a scooter online. It never arrived, and I eventually did a chargeback on my credit card.

2019: $195,834 in wages

My salary at Chime was increased to $200k early in 2019 as a market adjustment, where it remains today. In October 2019 I moved out of my $2,000/month apartment to couch-surf with plans to eventually move to New York.

Conclusion

I was really excited about the idea of writing this post and bringing transparency. The process of writing it out and reliving it all though… it feels bad. I think of myself as a happy person, but when I read this now, I feel for my younger self. I worked and scrambled and stressed out about everything.

I’ve tweeted before that my biggest regret of my 20’s is that I didn’t spend more money. It wasn’t received well by the financial responsibility crowd on twitter, but my guess is that they’ve had a different (and more stable) career history than I have. I do regret that I saved any money in my 20's — I should have spent it all, spent freely on frivolous creature comforts, used money to make my life easier whenever possible and worried less about the future. But of course, hindsight is 20/20.

[file-formats-programming]

PDF to PDF/A Conversion, Enhanced Text Search & Text Extraction in PDF Files inside .NET Apps

What's New in this Release?

Aspose team is pleased to announce the release of Aspose.Pdf for .NET 17.4.0. It has specifically focused towards stability of existing features for PDF files creation as well as manipulation. Aspose.Pdf for .NET is widely being used by many customers and trusted name due to its robustness and reliability on various platforms. Therefore apart from standard desktop versions of Windows, it is equally supported on Server editions of Windows and users can use it in Desktop and Web Enterprise Applications. Keeping same aspects of stability and reliability in mind, with every new release, Aspose team are introducing some exciting new features as well as strive to bring more stability to existing features of API. Therefore in this new release, Aspose team has made improvements in PDF to PDF/A conversion feature to cater more customers scenarios and to handle documents with different structure and complexity. This API is also amazing in Text manipulation, whether its Text Addition, Text extraction, Text Search or Text replacement. However in this release, Aspose team has specifically improved the Text extraction feature and many of the customers reported issues related to this feature have been fixed in this release version. Furthermore, the PDF file conversion to other supported file formats is also improved. Ever since the release of the first MergedAPI version of Aspose.Pdf for .NET 6.0 in July-2011, it has included the Classes and Enumerations from legacy Aspose.Pdf for .NET under Aspose.Pdf.Generator namespace, the Classes and Enumerations of legacy Aspose.Pdf.Kit for .NET under Aspose.Pdf.Facades namespace and a new Document Object Model for PDF files creation as well as manipulation under Aspose.Pdf namespace. The legacy Aspose.Pdf.Generator only provided the capabilities to create PDF documents from scratch and legacy Aspose.Pdf.Kit for .NET provided the functionality to manipulate existing PDF files. But the new DOM approach of Aspose.Pdf namespace facilitates the creation of PDF files from scratch; as well as manipulation of existing PDF files. So in order to minimize / eliminate the confusion of customers to stumbled upon between legacy Aspose.Pdf.Generator and new Aspose.Pdf namespace, starting next release of Aspose.Pdf for .NET 17.5, Aspose team is going to discontinue Aspose.Pdf.Generator namespace from API. Nevertheless, the new DOM approach contains all the features offered by legacy Aspose.Pdf.Generator.  This change may impact some customers who haven’t yet migrated their code from legacy Aspose.Pdf.Generator to new DOM approach, but Aspose team is always delighted to help Aspose customers and would love to facilitate them regarding their migration towards new DOM. Also please note that with this change, the size of product binaries will also be reduced.  The list of important new and improved features are given below

The flattened file from XFA form cannot be opened in Chrome or Firefox.

Create separate local links for duplicate text

NullReferenceException is thrown when trying to get artifact text

ArgumentException is thrown when trying to get artifact text

Exception when trying to load PDF document

Exception when trying to get signature names

Exception thrown when trying to get the names of the fields in a form

PDF to PDFA conversion performance issue

Failed to validate PDF_X_3 and PDF_X_1A

Stamp looks incorrect when size and rotate angle are set

Convert Web Page to PDF - bad layout

When PDF is converted to PDF_A_1B, the text looks different

For Helvetica and Courier fonts, page number in the TOC entry is missing

When PDF is converted to DOCX, the text is missing.(converted to image)

Images not rendered to next page

PDF to PDFA1b conversion results in-compliant PDFA document

Other most recent bug fixes are also included in this release.

Newly added documentation pages and articles

Some new tips and articles have now been added into Aspose.Pdf for .NET documentation that may guide users riefly how to use Aspose.Pdf for performing different tasks like the followings.

Extract Text from PDF

Add SWF File Annotation to PDF Document

Overview: Aspose.Pdf for .NET

Aspose.Pdf is a .Net Pdf component for the creation and manipulation of Pdf documents without using Adobe Acrobat. Create PDF by API, XML templates & XSL-FO files. It supports form field creation, PDF compression options, table creation & manipulation, graph objects, extensive hyperlink functionality, extended security controls, custom font handling, add or remove bookmarks; TOC; attachments & annotations; import or export PDF form data and many more. Also convert HTML, XSL-FO and MS WORD to PDF.

More about Aspose.Pdf for .NET

Homepage of Aspose.Pdf for .NET C#

Download Aspose.Pdf for .NET

[file-formats-programming]

Calculate Table PDF Width & Embed Media Files inside PDF Document using .NET

What's New in this Release?

Aspose team is pleased to announce the release of Aspose.Pdf for .NET 17.3.0. This month release includes new feature to calculate Table width and embed media files(audio and video) in PDF document along with some other important features. Aspose team has also enhanced Footnote feature and HTML text support in this version in addition to many other bug fixes reported in old releases that improves the APIs functionality. Aspose team has implemented a new annotation RichMediaAnnotation in Aspose.Pdf for .NET 17.3. It is used to embed media files within PDF document. In fact RichMediaAnnotation is container for SWF (Flash) script. Due to license restriction Aspose team cannot include third-party flash scripts in our product, so users should provide their own script for playing video or audio. For example users can use VideoPlayer and AudioPlayer shipped with Adobe Acrobat. Please check documentation link for sample code and details to embed video/audio files in PDF document. In some scenarios, users have not hard coded the Table width in PDF document and later users want to know its width for some post processing. This release introduced a new method GetWidth() to calculate Table width in this release. Aspose.Pdf supports insertion of HTML string in PDF document. If HTML specified fonts are available on host system then it uses same fonts, otherwise it uses system default fonts for HTML string. It has received some requirements to support font overriding feature for HTML string. This release implemented TextState object in HtmlFramgent class, now users can override font details of HTML string. In current release, It has also added support to set color of FootNote label(node identifier). It has implemented TextState object in FootNote class. Users can set FootNote label color using TextState.  The list of important new and improved features are given below

Support feature to calculate Table Cell width

Find table width

Movie is not embedded inside PDF file

PDF to PDF/A-2u - Support this conversion format

Setting Footnote Text color

Support of TextState in HtmlFragment

When color PDF is converted to grayscale, the text stays in color while the picture is black-white

When PDF is converted to TIFF, the output file has black boxes

When PDF converted to PDF_A_1B, the first page is missing a picture

PDF to PDFA1b: compliance failure due to CMYK error

PDF to PDF/A - white image background overlaps background image

PCL to PDF: incorrect output is generated

Incorrect ColorType information is being returned

Pdf file is not compilant with PDF/A-1a format (transparency and missing objects)

PDF to PDF/A - Conversion process takes too much time

PDF to PDF/A - Resultant file is too large

Page color is being detected BlackandWhite instead RGB

RgbToDeviceGrayConversionStrategy convert RGB to black and white instead grayscale

Hyperlink is not working in FloatingBox

Character's size issue when rendering pdf into html

Line Spacing Increased on Multiline Textbox

Latest Aspose.Pdf don't show correct ImagePlacement.Rotation

PDF to PDF/A - Missing contents and formatting issues

PDF to DOCX: TOC alignment issue

When PDF is converted to PDF_A_1B, output file is still PDF

When PDF is converted to PDF_A_1B, output file is still classic PDF

Conversion Pdf to Pdfa - output not compliant

When PDF is converted to HTML, produced HTML looks bad and some letters are stretched

PDF to JPEG - Some symbols look like different in resultant file

Additional characters (curly braces) when converting XPS to PDF

PDF to HTML - Color filling isn't displayed for some objects

XFA form is not being converted to Standard Acro Form

PDF to DOCX - Resultant text appears to be in Russian

PDF to PDF/A - Resultant file gets corrupted

Other most recent bug fixes are also included in this release.

Newly added documentation pages and articles

Some new tips and articles have now been added into Aspose.Pdf for .NET documentation that may guide users riefly how to use Aspose.Pdf for performing different tasks like the followings.

Adding RichMediaAnnotation

Add SWF File Annotation to PDF Document

Overview: Aspose.Pdf for .NET

Aspose.Pdf is a .Net Pdf component for the creation and manipulation of Pdf documents without using Adobe Acrobat. Create PDF by API, XML templates & XSL-FO files. It supports form field creation, PDF compression options, table creation & manipulation, graph objects, extensive hyperlink functionality, extended security controls, custom font handling, add or remove bookmarks; TOC; attachments & annotations; import or export PDF form data and many more. Also convert HTML, XSL-FO and MS WORD to PDF.

More about Aspose.Pdf for .NET

Homepage of Aspose.Pdf for .NET C#

Download Aspose.Pdf for .NET