This is great! Are you able to do IFA for UL certification? That would be a killer for us!
240 karma · joined August 10, 2016
One of my best hires ever was a VR dev we brought in as an intern. He became the backbone of our Unity/Unreal work, including some genuinely gnarly low-level haptics integration into the physics engine. On paper he didn’t look like the “obvious” pick: he’d majored in English Literature, largely because his (UK) school’s CS track was taught in a way that turned him off (they were still doing Fortran…). But he could build.
After our startup, Improbable scooped him up on the strength of that very real, shippable experience, and he’s now a senior SWE at Epic, doing exactly what he loves.
One practical thing that’s helped me find these kinds of people in startup interviews: optimize for calm + realism. My #1 goal is to get the candidate relaxed enough that I can see how they actually think and code. I often ask them to bring any public code they’ve written and we walk through it together. It’s a great way to surface judgment, taste, and real ownership that don’t show up on a resume.
While that ensured campmates could communicate, it unfortunately isolated us from the wider network—you had to choose one or the other. Also, regarding the UI: if you think Meshcore is bad, Meshtastic is worse. I spent most of my time teaching people how to navigate the clunky, overcomplicated, and inconsistent mobile apps. I’ll likely try building a custom app on top of Meshcore for this year.
For my future web stack the biggest chunk will probably be Daily https://docs.daily.co/reference/daily-js (by @kwindla) as the backbone of our teleoperation orchestration
That said, experiences can vary, especially for visitors. In the capital, Bishkek, tourists might unfortunately encounter opportunistic behavior. There have been instances where police officers have been known to stop foreigners and effectively extort money. This is a serious issue and something visitors should be aware of.
On the other hand, the country offers incredibly unique and positive experiences, especially when you get out into nature. I have vivid memories of hiking in places like Ala Archa National Park. You can be trekking through a valley, thinking you're completely alone, and then stumble upon a traditional nomadic family spending their summer there. These encounters feel worlds away from anything I've experienced in Western countries. I recall one time offering to buy kumis (a traditional fermented mare's milk drink) from a nomad, and he genuinely refused to take any money for it, simply offering it as a gesture of hospitality. These moments highlight a different, very memorable side of Kyrgyzstan."
I also noticed, like others here, that the tracker's size is a problem. My cat managed to remove the collar with my smaller tracker in just two minutes. I've been considering designing an even more compact tracker, integrating it into the collar itself. It would include a battery, GPS, LoRa with an antenna, and a microcontroller with power management. I'd use a small Heltec LoRa+Bluetooth transceiver for this.
Your work has inspired me to revisit my old project. Thanks!
One of the questions that I would add though, is whether the founder is married to a solution or is in search of a problem. First co-founder I worked with was great overall but he was married to a solution, that after talking to prospective users, I realized nobody really wanted.
On a more comical note, some devs go out of their way to show that motion sickness isn't a problem for their game: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/lrj1dy/motion_...