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jbardnz

919 karma · joined August 21, 2012

hello@jarrad.dev
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jbardnz··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (October 2019)
SEEKING WORK - Auckland, NZ or REMOTE Laravel Expert: I have 6 years experience as a Laravel developer and 4 more before that as a PHP/Web developer. Previously I was CTO of a startup (Designer Wardrobe) - I took that website from a 5 page MVP to a massive codebase that served around 3 million hits/month. More recently I helped another company speed up an important API they were having trouble with, I took the loading time from > 5 seconds to ~300ms without any breaking changes.

I currently run my own startup and I am seeking part time consulting work to help me bootstrap.

More details of all of my work is here: https://jarrad.dev

Contact me on hello@jarrad.dev

jbardnz··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (May 2019)
SEEKING WORK - Auckland, NZ or REMOTE Laravel Expert:

I have 6 years experience as a Laravel developer and 4 more before that as a PHP/Web developer. Previously I was CTO of a startup (Designer Wardrobe) - I took that website from a 5 page MVP to a massive codebase that served around 3 million hits/month. More recently I helped another company speed up an important API they were having trouble with, I took the loading time from > 5 seconds to ~300ms without any breaking changes.

I currently run my own startup and I am seeking part time consulting work to help me bootstrap.

More details of all of my work is here: https://jarrad.dev

Contact me on hello@jarrad.dev

jbardnz··on Ask HN: Do you know of any good product taking advantage of NLP?
Expanding on the OP question, does anyone know anybody doing interesting things with abstractive summarization (outside of salesforce or whitepapers)?
jbardnz··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (April 2019)
SEEKING WORK - Auckland, NZ or REMOTE

Laravel Expert:

I have 6 years experience as a Laravel developer and 4 more before that as a PHP/Web developer. Previously I was CTO of a startup (Designer Wardrobe) - I took that website from a 5 page MVP to a massive codebase that served around 3 million hits/month. More recently I helped another company speed up an important API they were having trouble with, I took the loading time from > 5 seconds to ~300ms without any breaking changes.

I currently run my own startup and I am seeking part time consulting work to help me bootstrap.

More details of all of my work is here: https://jarrad.dev

Contact me on hello@jarrad.dev

jbardnz··on Remove.bg – A service to remove the background of any photo
This is really cool but pricing for commercial images seems high. At work we use pixelz.com which is an API for human image processing. They clear cut/resize/rotate and recolor for around $0.60 per image. Results are fantastic, we have around 1 in 1000 images that have to be sent for reprocessing.

The only advantage I could see to using this is the instant turn around.

Edit: I was looking at the one off pricing. It looks like subscriptions are really good value.

jbardnz··on Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
I love the idea of Superhuman but haven't been able to get an invite. Do you happen to have one (email in profile)?
jbardnz··on Ask HN: I built a referral program for developers, would love feedback
Looks really great. As a developer I would be way more motivated by this than some free credits for my companies account.

How do you handle fulfillment? Seems like it could be a real time suck if it is manual? Also do you ship internationally?

jbardnz··on YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting
Maybe this is real, but it doesn't seem to line up with what I have heard from other Youtubers.

Firstly it is almost certain that a video is initially demonetized by an algorithm. Only during a manual review is it looked at by a human.

The main complaint from Youtubers is that the algorithm is way too strict and inconsistent. But the manual review process is pretty fair and the vast majority of videos get remonetized. The issue here being that by the time a manual review is complete most of the views for a video have already happened.

I could of missed it, but I have seen very few complaints about the manual review process being overly strict or biased.

jbardnz··on MailChimp vs. Amazon SES – How I Reduced My Monthly Bill
I have the exact same use case and have not been able to find a service that does it. We have a machine learning service that generates some content for each user but the rest of the email is just a standard newsletter.

In the end we just fire it from our web application like a transaction email, this has a few disadvantages though:

- Sending to our list of 100k users takes a good portion of the day, although this could be fixed if we used the bulk send APIs our transnational email provider has.

- Our marketing team can't easily edit the rest of the content in the newsletter so it generally remains pretty static or needs developer time just to send a newsletter.

I'm not really sure how such a service would work though, would the email provider make a webhook call back to your servers with the user id and you server return the content for that section?

jbardnz··on Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces
I have been looking for an abstractive summarization API for quite some time, any idea when you will be releasing this. If you are planning any sort of beta I would love to be part of it :)
jbardnz··on Is Vue.js a save choice?
I really like VueJS and I actually think it is a pretty safe choice. While it has been gaining a lot of momentum recently (especially in the Laravel community were it has become the default frontend framework), it has actually been around for well over 2 years. Evan talks about the stability of the project more here: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/

Another really important point is that Evan is able to work on this fulltime thanks to a really successful Patreon. This is super rare for a open source project but pretty much guarantees support for the project for the foreseeable future.

jbardnz··on How I built an app with 500,000 users in 5 days on a $100 server
First I would say Pokemon Go has done incredibly well to handle such massive growth so quickly, no doubt they were able to leverage a lot from Ingress but I could imagine many other companies having days of downtime while trying to scale up so quickly.

I also tend to disagree a bit with the article. For every situation like this were early scalability is important their are a 1000 MVP apps that are prematurely optimized or over engineered. At the end of the day the chance of anyone building an app that will get over 100,000+ in a week (and keep those users coming back) is very very very slim.

jbardnz··on Ask HN: Cheap dedicated hosting options for side projects
Seen as you already mention Vultr as an option they actually have dedicated block storage plans: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/blockstorage/

A 500GB SSD is $50/month which seems fairly reasonable. You can use it directly with a cheap VPS from them as well.

jbardnz··on Managing two million web servers
You mean just like you can with Apache or Nginx?
jbardnz··on Feature Toggles
I really like the idea of feature toggles but i'm scared of quickly having a lot of technical debt because of them.

I was looking at using something like https://launchdarkly.com but the pricing is very expensive even at fairly small scale.

jbardnz··on What It’s Like to Need Hardly Any Sleep
I am not a short sleeper, in some aspects I wish I was. The advantages seem huge as you would be able to be a lot more productive. I wonder though if the personality traits of restlessness and not being able to switch off are common among all short sleepers?
jbardnz··on Did Apple just cancel all recurring in-app subscriptions for EU customers?
I can't speak for Apple but a number of other large companies in EU have done exactly this, I assume because they have no choice as they can't change the price of a subscription after it is active.
jbardnz··on Replicated PostgreSQL with pgpool2
I use Postgres with Laravel so i'm not writing any SQL queries directly, can you go into more detail about why this won't work for me?
jbardnz··on MakeDrive: Filesystem for the web
This looks really cool. I love the demo application integrating with Brackets. I could imagine me setting this up and running it on my Chromebook instead of Google Drive.
jbardnz··on Ask HN: What to do when the .com is too expensive?
Yeah in all likely hood any other .com's will be parked but as you mentioned in your post similar domains are selling for $1400 or around the price you are happy to pay. If this one broker is asking way to much move on and find a different .com that you can afford.
jbardnz··on Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment
Pretty interesting video. A few things of note:

-Tabs are important to almost all web users these days. Maybe you could hide them and display them on hover but I don't think you should ever move them an extra click away.

-Not a huge fan of the click-to-play feature. Maybe it would work if you could whitelist plugins rather than websites, I guess you lose most of your security benefits by doing this though.

I think he actually raises a good point at the end though, he wouldn't use this for work but may use it elsewhere. That's great, but typical web users only want to use one browser, they get familiar with the interface and stick to that everywhere they go. If people use a certain browser at work chances are they use the same one at home, and I don't think this is powerful for many people to use at work.

jbardnz··on Do you need Front end? I'm looking for early adopters for my startup
This is exactly the sort of thing I am looking for my SaaS. I'm awful at front end and i'm using a few templates at the moment but it could be greatly improved. You can contact me on my username at gmail.
jbardnz··on Stripe launches in Australia
I know that the only bank that allows international currency transactions is BNZ so they are likely fairly expensive seen as they have an monopoly on it.
jbardnz··on Stripe launches in Australia
Using Paypal at the moment, as te_chris said PX pay is decent but requires a merchant account which is expensive and slow to setup. As far as I am aware their aren't any other decent solutions. Kiwipay could be good but at the moment it isn't really suitable for anything more than casual payments.
jbardnz··on Stripe launches in Australia
That is amazing news. Payments are absolutely horrible in NZ, I have been desperate for Stripe to be here for the longest time :)
jbardnz··on Ask HN: Is making one-page websites for apps a pain?
I buy mine from http://themeforest.net I have always been happy with the result.
jbardnz··on 7 Reasons our app costs $99.99
While I somewhat agree with your post I guess they answer this with number 3. Windows is a mass market app, this is not, you can't really compare the pricing of the two.
jbardnz··on Compressor.io – Compress and optimize your images
It would be nice to have some information on the site about how this actually works and what advantages it has over exporting from Photoshop.
jbardnz··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2013)
SEEKING WORK - CHC, NZ/Remote

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ColdFusion/Javascript developer based in New Zealand. Looking for local or remote work.

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Technologies:

-ColdFusion/Railo

-Javascript/Jquery/Jquery Mobile

-Node.JS

-HTML5/CSS3

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5+ years experiencing working with these technologies. This is my first time venturing into freelancing so happy to provide code samples/test projects.

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Contact me on jbardnz[at]gmail.com