leros

My basic rule is this: Don't use cloud services if you're not big enough to have a dedicated account manager and can get customer service. This means spending like $10k/mo on the big clouds.

I don't use GCP, AWS, etc for these reasons. I had a similar algorithmic flag shutdown a previous startup running on GCP and it destroyed the business.

I do have GMail and GSuite for my current business, but I have everything backed up outside of Google and can switch to a new provider pretty quick by changing my MX records. I could use an alternative but I do like GSuite.

No issues at all. I have two tabs in the RN app. One tab is basically the entire app, which is just an embedded web view. The other tab is a basic account tab (sign in, log out, delete account, cancel plan). I also have native auth and native payments.

I'm not 100% sure yet, but I might regret using React-Native over Capacitor. I have to bridge things like auth and payments between the web view and the native app. For example, the web app has a flow where you need to login, so it opens the login modal. If you're inside the mobile app, instead of doing that, it sends a message up to the native app to open the native app's login modal. Then once login is complete, the native app sends a message into the webview with the auth token. Similar thing for payments. That all works great, but occasionally I want to make a breaking change. Since it takes many weeks to get an update rolled out everyone, I have to keep the webapp backwards compatible for a long time. That slows down iterating on stuff like AB testing checkout flows. I don't think I'd have to worry about this if I was using Capacitor because the native functionality would be mostly driven from the webapp code.

My mobile app is pretty decent actually. Other than some stylistic differences, I can't tell where the native wrapper ends and then embedded view starts. The embedded view is a SPA though so it never does full page loads.

Yeah, I had a lengthy customer service email template explaining how to install the PWA for when people asked about a mobile app. Almost nobody installed it.

Its a monthly/annual subscription. They can pay on the website or via native payments in the mobile app. The subscription works no matter where you bought it.

From what I gathered with my imperfect data, almost nobody was using the app as a PWA even with an in-app nudge for it. I instantly got lots of downloads when I released iOS and Android apps. My users just don't want PWAs for the most part it seems.

There's usually some random mandatory updates I have to do about 1-2 times a year, so you need updates even with no development.

My React-Native wrapper app handles native auth and native payments, so I occasionally need to tweak that, but it's rare.

I'm considering a rewrite in Capacitor so I can change those things without modifying the mobile app. It's not that releasing the mobile app is a big deal, but it's that it can take many weeks for users to update the mobile app, so I have to keep the website backwards compatible with the old mobile app. It makes testing new checkout flows and stuff more difficult.

I have an app that is literally just a wrapper around the website. The mobile website and the mobile app are the exact same experience.

Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app.

I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.

It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.

Fwiw, I stopped using ChatGPT and went to a competitor because the checks slow down ChatGPT so much that the webapp becomes unusable in anything but a new short chat. CPU usage goes to 100%, you can't type, the entire tab freezes, etc. It's a miserable experience to use and I'm on a relatively new MacBook not some old computer. If you read around it's a very common problem people have been having for a while now.

Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?

I'm curious as TinyPilot is your most successful project and it looks like the most business-oriented thing you built: as in, its a product aimed at serious businesses. Whereas Zestful is a niche micro-saas and Is It Keto is a niche website. Perhaps I'm characterizing things wrong, but that's my rough perception.

How odd. I googled their name and a few sentences from their post. They post stuff in a few other places too. They appear to be some sort of electronics installer from China. I don't see a single promotional link anywhere but it's all the same content for months, obviously written by AI. Must be some bad attempt at marketing.

I see junior devs hyping vibe coding and senior devs mostly using AI as an assistant. I fall in the latter camp myself.

I've hired and trained tons of junior devs out of university. They become 20x productive after a year of experience. I think vibe coding is getting new devs to 5x productivity, which seems amazing, but then they get stuck there because they're not learning. So after year one, they're a 5x developer, not a 20x developer like they should be.

I have some young friends who are 1-3 years into software careers I'm surprised by how little they know.

My personal policy is to not use cloud services that I can't get good support for. That rules out the big clouds for me unfortunately.

Companies do the least they can to employ people. That means paying them just enough and giving them just enough perks. I'm sure they'd provide housing if it was needed to competitively hire.

I've seen big companies like Microsoft offer company housing for new immigrants to ease their move to the US. It's also not uncommon for companies to pay for your cross-country move and temporary housing until you can buy a house.

I'm sure their terms of service allows them to do stuff like this

You could probably become rich wholesaling gravel in your city. There are plenty of opportunities all around. Execution is key.

Not really.

I know the original email was something like "Alert: you have a new thing: X Thing"

And the new emails are a prompt something like "we know all of this about the user and all of this about the X thing, write an email alerting them to the new thing with these particular goals".

I really don't know much about it so I'm being pretty vague and generic.

The best clear example I've seen of LLMs making money is a company that now generates custom email text instead of using standard email templates. They increased engagement by some meaningful metric like +15% which translates into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

I know lots of junior developers using tools like Cursor. When talking to them about it, they say they're not really learning how to program and don't know what they're doing most of the time. I do question how effective they actually are.

I recall that before AI, junior developers weren't very productive their first year on the job, but they became at least 10x as productive as they ramped up.

I'm left wondering if the "AI boost" that junior devs are getting now is leaving them less productive than if they had the ramp up that we had in the past. Maybe AI is making them 2-3x as productive but they're staying stuck there. Whereas without AI they might learn more and reach higher productivity.

The experienced devs I know use AI as a collaborative tool on the side. Like asking Claude or ChatGPT targeted questions. That's what I'm doing as well. I know I can code much faster than the junior devs using Cursor that I interact with.

I've used WebAssembly for complex cross platform SDKs. I write the core SDK once in WebAssembly and then wrap it with an API layer for each SDK. It sure beats updating and testing complex logic for 30 different SDKs.

It is very cool art!

How is MapBox going for this free tool? Is it costing you money?

I was at Microsoft in 2007. We were told to say "Bing it" but everyone was using Google to look stuff up for work.

If you want to be extremely resilient with your infrastructure, you should be multi-cloud anyway. So you can rely on US infra like AWS and also something like Hetzner. Then you're still good if the US stuff goes crazy.

I'll check it out!

Fwiw, after spending a few minutes on your website, I see nothing that indicates your software works on Google Drive or Photos. It just looks like a Backblaze alternative. There might be some room to showcase your offering a bit more.

I am a Backblaze customer so I will definitely consider your software as an alternative.

I haven't seen entrepreneurship generally be looked upon favorably in the corporate world. It's often a red flag that you'll get bored in a niche role or be difficult to manage. At least for technical ICs.

As I understand it, even a low 6-figure exit is a huge plus for you in the entrepreneurial world. It should be a lift for you in the eyes of people like founders and investors.

Does this not require a massive database of tiles?

I ask because I've been looking to self host some sort of map tile server and they seem to have database in the hundreds of GB.

Things lining up (aka luck) is important but people who work hard create more opportunities for that to happen.

That's ok for enterprise stuff where revenue per user is high. I'd hate to lose a 5/6 figure deal because I have to spend time rolling out some sort of enterprise auth solution for a client.

Firebase Auth if I don't need enterprise stuff. Auth0 if I do.

I'm curious to explore some alternatives for enterprise auth like Clerk, but haven't yet.