ToJans

I posted a comment a little while ago [1] where I explained how I started to understand scales etc.

While this might only cover a small part of the spectrum, it might make something "click". #FingersCrossed

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31213765

"Observe" is the gathering of information.

"Orient" is "given all this information, what are the possible solutions"

Decide on one solution, and then act upon it.

Repeat ad infinitum.

A small suggestion for your docs: instead of using foo and bar, you might be better off using well known examples, like cart and items, or projects and tasks. This usually helps to understand the context. One might even add a schema of the explainer context in the documentation somewhere.

I beg to differ. It's unbiased people like Carmack who tend to think out of the box. I don't think we can state that he did invent the FPS genre, but at the very least he was one of the initial catalysts.

People who work in the field for a long time tend to have a certain bias towards a solution. Often these people are stuck in a local maxima. Outsiders can offer a new perspective that results in a breakthrough, usually by starting from first principles or looking at different side-tracks that used to lead to a dead end.

A great example is Musk's SpaceX: when he noticed how much he had to pay for a rocket engine, he went back to first principles and said: "I'll just build it myself". Combine that with the insight that a rocket should be able to land properly to make re-use a valid option, and it disrupts a whole field.

And once someone did it, others know it's possible and start achieving it as well.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just think about George "Good Will Hunting" Dantzig [1] with the (in)famous "I assumed these were homework assignments, not unsolved math problems" [1] or Eliud Kipchoge running a marathon in under 2 hours.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

- John Cage

High hopes!

[1] https://bigthink.com/high-culture/george-dantzig-real-will-h...

At the risk of getting downvoted: most of the impressions IT people have on other jobs are extremely one-dimensional and naive. In my personal opinion, a lot of IT people have the impression that their job is "the most important and complex" job, and they could easily do another job of they put their minds to it.

My suggestion is to put your money where your mouth is, and try it. You will most likely figure out soon enough that - like any almost any service job where you have a lot of independence - sales is really hard, nuanced and requires a lot of strategy, tactics and logistics.

There's a huge difference between someone who's using a phone script to book an appointment for a utility provider, and someone who is selling high ticket services like the one that most likely pays your wages. The fact that you've had a few people of the first scenario on the phone can give you a hugely wrong impression about sales (pars pro toto).

Sales can be as complex or simple as software development: there is a huge difference between someone who uses an if statement in an excel formula and somebody who builds an extremely optimized HFT system with FPGA or whatever they might use...

In fact, I think there might be lots of parallels to software architecture: you need to figure out the proper model that helps you to actually sell something: not only making sure the buyer has BANT (budget / time / authority / need), but also making the buyer aware that you exist, that he trusts you, what his triggers are, when he gets triggered, how the buyer process works, who your champion might be, macro-economical factors that make your sale a no-brainer, how the sector you're active in works, what your competitor landscape looks like, how the politics in the organisation work ...

Why do I have the need and think I have the authority to say this? I've been doing both sales and development, and being an IT guy first, my arrogance of "I can do sales and marketing too, it's just some ads / SEO / phonecalls and follow ups" has cost me almost a decade of opportunity cost. It's been a humbling and eye-opening experience that finally made me realize that - even though there are some jobs where you don't need your brain - a lot of jobs are way more complex than you can imagine. Parallels to "I can build that in a weekend" are not far away from "I could switch to a high end sales job by just reading a few books over the weekend".

Very nice. Having walked down this path: get the signature under the contract or an advance before you build "one more feature".

In my experience "one more feature" is usually a very polite way to say "no", and it can be a sign that you haven't identified the proper solution to their "hair-on-fire" problem yet.

(I've built the exact features prospects requested, and after showing the built feature I usually got another excuse, i.e. "I would also need feature y first", or "not right now", "no budget ATM",... )

If you nail the hair-on-fire problem people should be considering how to finance it or start asking "by when can we use it".

Having been a developer first, I also hugely underestimated the importance of a proper ICP, value proposition etc. Your messaging might be a big part of the reason that people are saying no or yes on the spot.

May everything work in your favor in 2023!

"I'll have my gpt mail your gpt"

Mostly web, as that's my area of expertise.

- Start of the movement from cloud/SaaS computing/storage to edge devices/client-side/on-prem.

- Amount of new successful SaaS orgs will decimate. The only 2 SaaS markets that will grow will be highly vertical/specialized or very big orgs offering commodity. They both will use value based pricing, but for the first growth will be sales-led and prices will be high, and the second will use product-led growth, and prices will be a race to the bottom of the market.

- Return to aspx/cgi-bin/single php/... files, as more and more services will simply bind together existing third party services.

- Return to server-side default first.

- People will start discovering P2P and start using it.

- Some variant of SQLite that you can run from the browser and update client-side will emerge. This might result in the re-discovery of offline web apps.

- A lot of AI driven content will appear, resulting in too much content and the need for a circle of trust (i.e. what are some good websites). Generic search might become less useful with things like ChatGPT, and something like the old webrings concept will probably emerge, although it might be differently implemented (i.e. a protocol, social media thing, ...)

bonus (as it's related to what I'm doing on a daily basis): something like the Metaverse will start emerging, but it will be web based using WebXR, in splintered/mostly gated communities. AR on mobile phones will become more accessible to consumers via phone, and a common way to interact with these things will emerge this year.

Like above, send an email to tom at the domain mentioned in my profile.

Sure, just send an email to tom at the domain name mentioned in my profile.

Disclaimer: solo bootstrapper, currently growing reasonably, but still way below 1M ARR. I did start with a pilot / first customer and then started doing cold outreach, while trying SEO/ads/social without much success for a few years.

I tried combining both product-led and sales-led, and addressing a lot of different kinds of businesses, but this ended up making my go-to-market more complicated and resulted in almost zero sales.

Second half of this year I finally switched it to sales led targeting a very specific niche, and ended up with a very clear and simple offering for a very specific kind of customer.

This feels counterintuitive because you exclude a huge part of your TAM, but it allows you to be the perfect match for a very specific profile.

Instead of getting a lot of leads with a gazillion questions because they don't trust you, they now start thinking about if/how they can afford it after the first online session.

To get the path of the least resistance, you need to address the exact problems of a certain kind of prospect, conveying your value as easy as possible, and making it a no-brainer for them to commit.

But, don't take my word for it, just ask me again by the end of 2023 whether this all worked out of not.

(I did get some very positive feedback from somebody who bootstrapped, scaled up and sold his company, so I do have high hopes/expectations.)

^^ +10000

I think a lot of us have been there.

There's a big difference whether your service:

- is B2B/B2C;

- uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth;

- targets a broad market or a niche (the more niche it is, the better it speaks to your target market, f.e. coaching vs developer coaching vs coaching Java developers VS coaching Java developers in machine learning vs coaching Java developers that use machine learning in the agricultural world...)

- uses different pricing models;

- ...

I've been on this route for 8 years with some consulting stints in between to pay the bills, and it wasn't until this year that my sales pitch finally started to land. Refining my target audience has been a big part of this...

There's a lot of nuance in how to present your offer, and you need to get everything exactly right to convert someone. You have to make someone an offer so good it would feel stupid for them to refuse.

In my opinion a lot of the "snake oil sellers" try to pitch the universal product-led growth approach to a very broad market that works for everything and that you can do from your computer.

In reality, they are most likely optimized to sell as much courses as possible, coming with very generic advice, and don't really care about the results for their target audience.

Another point: unless your target audience is on indie hackers, you should not be spending your time there at all.

I feel for you, so if you want to have a short chat, I might be able to give you some pointers. Feel free to reach out.

In the end, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on, and as the world is in constant flux, what works today will probably not work tomorrow, so you have to find your own path...

And, there's no shame in having tried and failed; by trying you're already within the minority that took action.

By the way, in my experience, people pay way more for an IT consultant that has lived and experienced the bigger picture of running a business, so even if you failed, you should be better off that someone that didn't try...

Update: formatting

In Belgium there is a huge issue with pfas caused by 3M [1], having contaminated things like drinking water etc, so it's not even safe to eat vegetables from your garden or eggs from your chickens.

It's a massacre TBH, mostly exposing the head-in-the-sand, umbrella using fingerpointing mentality of Belgian politics. I can imagine 3M has sites like these all over the world, so I would assume this only scratches the surface...

Edit: typos, it's early in the morning here ...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-foreve...

As a keyboard warrior spending hours sitting in front of the computer, I was having back pain issues and gaining weight every year.

This summer I decided to tackle the root cause, so I started doing daily walks during my yearly vacation (about six months ago). Most walks were short (30min), and some took a couple of hours because I was visiting friends/family/local events, going for small groceries, ... If it was less than 10km/(~ 7 miles), I had the time and the weather was reasonable, I walked.

I was convinced I would have to walk a lot in bad weather, but this turned out not to be the case: in the morning I check my calendar and the weather for that day, and mentally mark a few opportunity windows to go for a walk.

After doing this, the biggest task is getting up and putting on my waking shoes and coat (and chest light when it can get dark) when the time is there. Once I do get out the door, I usually have to force myself not to walk further than I initially planned.

In the beginning 30 minutes felt like a long walk. When I go for a walk now, it feels like I'm only beginning to get in the flow after 30 minutes. I do have a fixed route for my brisk walks that I tend to do during weekdays, which is a little over 6km and now takes at most an hour. (It used to take way longer when I started, so there's progress there as well.)

I tend to go for bigger walks during the weekends, or as a "reward" when I close a big deal/wrap up a big task...

So what did I do with all that time before I went for these walks? A lot of it was mostly feeling productive/creative: browsing around on the internet, noodling at the piano/guitar, watching TV or doing a gazillion small things. Turns out having a fixed walking window where I let my mind wander is way better for me personally: I tend to come home with at least one insight, doing a lot of "gedankenexperiments" (thought experiments) and come back more zen.

Next to this it's also improving my physique slowly but gradually. I keep close track of my progress via a smartwatch, because I'm an IT guy after all, and love tracking progress...

All things considered, it took a few weeks/months to build this habit, but in the end it was all about starting small and building up gradually, stacking up one little habit on top of the other as time progressed.

Over the last fortnight I have been unable to go for walks due to a medical procedure, and I missed my daily walks a lot. Thankfully I'm now able to slowly reboot the habit, and I don't plan on stopping with these walks anytime soon.

Highly recommended!

The 90s demoscene called...

This is how we do it in reality. Missing answers are very important!

The only correct answer is "A: mail them" if you want to stay statistically relevant.

You cannot ignore the group that didn't answer the questionnaire, as they will most likely expose some of the behavior that you are researching (i.e. about life etc), and might have a huge impact on your results.

So, the statistical result you currently have (based on the 90/120 students) will most likely be biased, and is invalid. (25% of missing input that might heavily impact your outcome is most likely making your results useless)

Thus, the only way to make it statistically relevant is getting more answers from the no-show group.

B. If you start over and do the same thing you will most likely get similar results/no-shows. So that will not be a good solution

D. As explained before, ignoring the no-shows results in a potentially biased outcome.

E. If your initial set is most likely biased, adding another 30 subjects will not fix your initial bias.

I remember being stuck on Haskell lenses for a while, until I asked the brilliant Scott Wlaschin during a speakers' dinner in Lithuania to explain lenses in layman's terms to me, to which he simply replied "it's just like property getters and setters". Short, to the point, and I immediately understood the core value prop. There's of course a lot more to it, but in essence that's what it's about...

Not true. I currently own one unit, and do have a slightly negative cashflow, but that's not really a problem.

The biggest advantage of real estate is that enables you to hedge your capital. My bank happily gave me a loan for 80% of the property value.

I would not be able to get a loan at these conditions without having the real estate as collateral.

So, while I do pay a small amount per month myself (which has gone down substantially recently due to 10% indexation), my tenant pays the biggest share of my loan.

As for rules and legislative obligations: I pay a professional organization to manage this for me. This does come at a cost, but it buys me a peace of mind. (It's all about risk vs reward, so no big surprise there.)

And finally: once the loan is finished, I can hedge that rental income to finance (multiple) new properties.

Update: one additional remark for those who might be triggered by this comment: I prefer to buy older buildings, so I have to make sure that l have "some" extra cash available for big ticket items coming my way: replacement of roofs, elevators and such. So I am betting on having to invest some extra cash over the course of one or more decades. However, if you do not want to do that, you can reduce the risk by going for newly-built, paying the extra premium upfront, have a reasonably steady cash flow from the start.

Also, as a rule of thumb, consider 10/12 of the yearly rent as a "regular" income. This should be more than enough to cover the "normal" expenses you might have.

This is exactly what Taleb wrote about [1].

Systems start out very fragile. Over time they get more and more robust, as edge cases and events result in more rules and rigidity. This works until they become so robust that they can no longer cope with the change when something unexpected -i.e. a black swan event - happens.

The only way to counter this, to make a system that improves in coping with disorder/chaos as it encounters it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

Update: reworded that last sentence a bit.

The biggest issue with technical debt is that it encompasses too many things at once. To fix it you need to be specific about your scope, goals etc...

Availability, adaptability, maintainability, ... most of the NFAs/quality attributes can have a different impact on the business. I've done a lot of in- & out "help the house is on fire" assignments that typically last half a year.

In my last project f.e. the team was delivering fast, high quality code, but the biggest issue was build & deployment took over a week and lots of errors/iterations due to lack of proper architecture and maturity/DevOps.

(Assignment: fix the current "CTO"'s biggest fires, phase him out, replace him temporarily and find a replacement, without interrupting delivery of new features.)

So I made "deployability" a priority, and created some huge debt by using docker-in-docker containers to at least have an automated, reproducible deployment unit available.

Next was "lack of trust from the stakeholders", so we installed a weekly sprint, created a high level architecture diagram and a preliminary planning that we updated reach month, so they at least had an idea what we were doing. Important note : our Jira tickets were only for communicating progress with the stakeholders, so only using business language etc...

Next I created a few high level - core to the business - happy path tests that ran on staging deployment, which probably was a mistake, because the team ignored the failing tests. (Their mindset wasn't ready for it yet, even though they deployed a failing instance to production twice, resulting in a business outage.)

By then I found a replacement - someone who was almost obsessive about code quality, documentation and process/communication, showed him my idea about feature evolutions, how to coach/manage the teams, and after a month I tapered off my work from full-time to zero in two weeks, because I was experiencing the "mom syndrome" (i.e. "as long as mom is doing it, I'm not picking up my responsibility".) Last time I checked, the team had a little bit of a rough transition phase, but is now doing great.

TL;DR: to tackle technical debt, identify the specific kinds of debt you are dealing with and prioritize/classify with stakeholders what they would like to see fixed first.

Attacking technical debt should be no different than developing a new feature.

I fixed it for you

I like this idea but I would suggest that you invest some time in some UX validation if you want to maximize the potential usage.

I own a SaaS that offers online 3D configurators for outdoor structures [1] since 2014, and tried something similar as a UX experiment a couple of years back; here is the gist of it:

We offered 20 different variations on the screen at the same time, and people had to gradually fine-tune their preference by clicking on the one they liked the most.

I tested this in the field, and it proved to be very confusing to the end-user, unless you highly constrain the amount of parameters that can change at the same time, and describe to the user what changed and go step by step.

In the end I decided to ditch the whole idea in favor of a hard-coded step-by-step wizard where users can adjust the relevant parameters themselves one by one, which tends to work the best for the majority of the users.

=> My suggestion for you would be to do something similar: highly constrain the potential changes, and guide your user step by step. If you manage to do this, I think you might have gold in your hands.

I would also love to challenge the naysayers who say the generated images don't make sense: in my opinion it will only be a matter of time before someone starts training or hardcoding a classifier that invalidates "wrong" images. (Especially if one would be able to generate a reasonable 3D representation of the image without too much effort.)

As someone once said in a random AI video on the internet: "Dear fellow scholars, I wonder what we will be capable of just 2 more papers down the line"

[1] ** edit ** removed the URL, check my profile if you really want to know...

"those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it"

To be more specific: type classes are like generic interfaces with type guards and default implementations.

Submillisecond is a backend web framework around the Rust language, WebAssembly's security and the lunatic scheduler.

I scan everything that is closely or remotely related to the code base: the code, commit logs, diagrams, bug reports, change requests, user manuals, tests, technical logs, databases, other storage, cloud infra, ...

Usually at least one of them stands out, so I at least read this through (usually diagonally).

I might also pick different things based on my goals.

Once I think I have a grasp of the high level aspects, I start pairing or validate with tiny feedback loops.

Update: I also create my own (naive) helicopter view diagram of the context and validate it with people on different levels.

I have been in HVar. It's not cheap, it's the opposite... It's where the super rich people hang out.

Anecdote: When I told a random person I got there by plane he automatically assumed I owned a plane."

It's the logical next step in the evolution of JSON:

- XML/XSLT

- JSON/JSONPatch

I watched a piano/music teaching video from the 60s yesterday that made it all "click" [1]

Most modern music chords patterns are easy to find out on piano.

Start on any of the white keys, and play 7 white keys left to right. That is called a mode: a series of notes separated by certain intervals to compose a song.

Different modes have different vibes. Atmosphere of the song ( sad or happy) is directly correlated by how "willing" the notes are to resolve to the mode root (the first key of 7 you hit).

Now, take a 1-3-5 grip on the white keys (press one key, skip one, press one, skip one, press one). That is called the first chord. Move one to the right, and do it again. That is the second chord. One more to the right is the third etc.

Most popular songs are composed by using mostly the same repeating chord patterns:

- 1-5-1-4 (first, fifth, first, fourth)

- 1-4-5

- 1-5-6-4

If you experiment a little bit with this, you will instantly recognize a lot of songs, although they might be pitched higher or lower.

One step further, is learning different chord fingerings: we started with 1-3-5 which mostly results in a major or minor chord in a mode.

- 5th chords are 1-5

- 7th chords are 1-3-5-7

- sus2 is 1-2-5

- sus4 is 1-4-5

- etc

Now, the next thing you need to learn is to transpose: move songs up or down one or more keys to the left or right, but also taking into account the black keys when moving up/down. This will allow you to play along with a song in the perfect key (starting note of a scale)

There's other things (like modulating modes in songs), but this should give you a headstart.

[1] https://youtu.be/g7oA1-y0EJE

Edit: layout and some extra clarification