joeblau

This is actually what I was listening to on Friday morning that prompted me to build this.

It's just my own mental model that I use to separate companies like Hertz and Taxi's (both of whole have have apps) from Lyft and Uber.

How would you describe the difference between those two types of companies?

You're absolutely correct. That's why if I applied to work at any of those companies (I've already worked at Amazon) I would be extremely particular about what project I work on.

> Does either camp have second thoughts about how their careers have progressed?

Anecdotally from our conversations, I would say that they see computer programming as being less valuable than people programming. My friends do have lots of ideas for things and one in particular will keep saying that he wants to "re-learn iOS dev" or "learn Elixir", but he never does. I've started down the path of learning how to angel invest, which is where I'm trying to learn my people management skills.

> Would you trade places with any of those friends?

Absolutely not.

> Would either of them trade places with you?

I doubt it.

> Do you have an 'exit' plan out of software engineering or do you plan to stick with it to the very end?

I'm already on a trajectory where I won't need to work a traditional job the rest of my life. None of my friends who are climbing the management chain are anywhere near that. I honestly love building and learning (I just finished up a 3.5 day hack-a-thon yesterday). My next path will lead me either to building a company, helping people start tech-enabled companies or helping someone co-found a company. Unless I become a CEO, I don't plan to stop programming.

You know what's funny. I would not call the environment you're describing as a tech company. I would call what you're talking about a tech-enabled company. If you are working at a tech-enabled company, then I 100% agree with you about moving to management becoming inevitable. Tech-enabled IC's are basically rendering JSON/SQL/NoSQL in on Desktop/Web/Mobile. If you're company is just spinning up .Net Core/Node/Django/fill-in-framework-here to build a website to show some data, that's not a tech company to me.

When I say tech company, I'm talking about companies where software engineering skills actually matter. where a O(n²) algorithm also will cost your business. In my definition of a tech company there are tons of new things happening. Look at the spaces like AR, self-driving, rocketry, and machine-learning, and computational photography — no one in any of those fields is doing the same thing they were doing even 2 years ago.

I’m in my late 30’s and almost all of my good friends with a CS/BIT degree has cycled into management. The interesting thing I’m noticing now is that they all have ideas for projects but zero capacity to build anything because they’ve lost their building muscles. They also seem reluctant to really want to learn anything else which is antithetical to software engineering where a new framework is out every day.

I wouldn't have any problems giving these APIs access via the web, but one challenge with the websites is that I'm never 100% sure that when I "retract" a permission or say "stop tracking me" that it's done. I think that if access to these API's were wrapped in some sort of Privacy API that superseded each website's privacy and data collection polices I would be more comfortable with this. These changes just seem like something Google threw over the wall to get things working with Chrome and every other browser developer said "no thanks".

A buy button for a buy button... sounds like a startup idea.

Where is the “Buy” button?!

YC also has a post for their seed deck template[1].

[1] - https://blog.ycombinator.com/intro-to-the-yc-seed-deck/

Start a community for helping people ideate on side project ideas.

While I do like the style sheet that was created, the marketing spin on this page was off-putting to me as well.

This is a good resource to see who is being impacted[1].

[1] - https://downdetector.com

That’s interesting. I need to spend more time and look into how this works.

I just checked their block explorer[1] and it looks like 98% of the passports are Chinese.

https://ubic.network

I was explaining my background so someone a few days ago in an introduction and I said “I used to do crypto working on PKI infrastructure.” They responded that they had never heard of that token. Unfortunately, I think cryptocurrency is what is top of mind when the majority of people hear the word “crypto” so I’ve been relegated to saying “cryptography” when describing my background.

The article says 435 in Sept which was 8%.

Super cool backstory. I also wondered what brought you here as well.

Haha sorry, I'll replace that with the word Apple in the future.

Yeah that is understandable. The data is still going to be surfaced via Duck Duck Go, but that's not the same as having an integrated experience.

Ah yes, you are correct! the iPhone weather app data is from Yahoo.

If  shuts down the 1M+ (less than 5M) Google[1] accounts and then this weather app becomes the default system backing Siri, there will be a lot more users than the Google Play store users Dark Sky is losing.

Right now, Apple's weather is backed by Yahoo! so my guess is that Yahoo! is going away and all 1 billion  devices will now be using Dark Sky.

[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.darksky.da...

I used to use LICEcap, but for some reason it was failing me (I don’t remember what). I went on a journey (through 10 Mac gif makers) to find the “best” gif maker and I settled on GIF Brewery[1] and I’ve never looked back.

[1] - https://gfycat.com/gifbrewery

Google is planning on implementing part of this in 2022[1]. Not sure what they are going to do about the browser storage though.

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21064698/google-third-par...

I don’t even play games but I wouldn’t expect a web game to store all of its metadata in my local storage. I would expect it to store data on their own severs and only store active gameplay information locally.

My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.

I LOL'd. I was really wondering what was behind this link.

My brother has one of these in his new condo. let's just say this toilet paper binge that we're on in the US isn't really impacting his life at all right now.

Yeah — That is called guided access mode. I use an Apple API that requires you to double gesture to bring up any menus or leave the app. This has actually proved sufficient for keeping my kid kid in bounds. You can always 4-finger pinch and leave my app though.

Unfortunalty, the only reason I was able to make this work in a day is that it uses two proprietary Apple libraries.

PencilKit — which provides all of the UI for drawing and selecting drawing tools.

ReplayKit - which is designed for games but, I'm using it to just record the whole screen.

There is really not that much code outside of just calling into those frameworks which is what allowed me to make this in such a short time. If these types of libraries exist on Android, I could probably create something, but I'm not super familiar with Android's library ecosystem.

I wrote this tool (started on Thursday) called Doodle that is designed to give kids a quick drawing canvas. It's a super simple app that I made for my son who kept drawing over all of my Apple notes. You can draw, then press the button in the top right to quickly erase your drawing (Like an Etch A Sketch).

Someone nerd-sniped me and I added in the ability to record a video as well. Technically, you could use it to do quick 5-10 minute drawing/narrated lessons and export them for educational purposes.

Site: https://joeblau.com/doodle/

Source: https://github.com/joeblau/doodle

AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1503601939