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Yeah, that's true too. That would help a lot to keep more equity.

I'm nervous to fund raise now, as I know investors would try to take advantage of the situation.

Yeah, that's a good point.

The mantra for startups is never give up, but I'm close to pushing it as far as I can go... I'm starting to get into risky territory.

The thing that holds me up though is all the stories we hear, like Travis Kalanick with Red Swoosh and Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX. Down to a few days of payroll and figured out a way to make it work...

We accidentally created an infinite loop with our crm and an api on aws.

We at first didn't realize what was happening, then couldn't figure out how to stop it. The bill ended up being 10x what I had budgeted.

I talked to aws and they graciously refunded me a 1/3 of the bill. So it helped, but still wiped out the remaining runway I had.

Well two things. The company I'd be joining is run by a friend, so I'm unsure if he'd let me do both. He'd likely want me to focus on just his thing, especially if he's paying so much.

Then #2, the industry my company is in is moving very fast and is very competitive. If I slow down too much, the company might get left behind.

Could be weeks or a couple months. I've been working on landing a number of big deals for months and all I need is 2 to come through and I'll be good.

I've already maxed out all my credit cards, cashed out my 401k, and sold almost all my assets.

The bank won't give any loans as they look at my personal credit.

I agree with the others. Those are signs of bad software dev, not SPAs in particular.

It's relatively easy now to break up the 7MB bundle into chunks and load on demand. So you get the benefit of both the fast, small initial load while other stuff loads in the background.

Then I'm not sure what you're referring to on links and waiting for single interactions...

With SPAs it's actually easier with the History API to create deeply nested stateful apps via the url / links. The confirmation modal, maybe your backend API sucks? Idk what your talking about with a 6s delay.

On top of that, a pure SPA means you have a static website, which means you can host the whole app off something like S3. We save so much money by hosting our stuff statically.

From my experience, I often see that the business guys take the engineers opinions with a "grain of salt".

As in, they listen to the engineer, but don't 100% take the advice. Being that engineers opinions don't always "align" with the business.

Example: Engineer recommends we really need to update the database. Technically it is important, but we could push it another few months and still "survive" as a business.

So I agree with the other posters that quitting might be an option.

Of course if what they're proposing is fraud, then by all means quit.

But perhaps they just aren't taking you seriously, and if you threaten to quit, then they might realize how important this topic is to you.

Also, you have more power than you think, even with minimal equity rights. Good engineers are not the easiest to find.

Thanks man.

I've been finally making serious progress on my startup, and have been picking up bigger customers lately.

I kind of fucked up and decided to try the whole solo founder thing. I don't recommend it.

I had a few bad experiences with cofounders at previous startups, so my rationale was to wait for the right person to come along. But that never happened... so I decided to just go solo.

Being a solo founder has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been brutal at times.

So what did I work on in 2017? Keeping the company alive and trying to make shit happen.

I'm now 2 years in, still alive, and 2018 is looking really good.

Depends on the company you work at, but most tech companies I've been at have gone the "micro" services approach.

Example:

- 1 repo for the frontend - 1 for each api - 1 for the infrastructure terraform scripts

It's good for CI / CD and general code base organization. Also easier to track changes and handle security. You give devs access only to the repos they need to do their job.

Our team has a product with multiple integrations and internal apis, so we easily have 40+ repos.

It's gotten pretty challenging from what it used to be.

A lot of small things... but basically if you load from an actual browser (headless) and cycle IPs, it's pretty hard for a site to pinpoint you as a bot vs a user.

I've found that a good rule of thumb is the "3 rule".

When you start using the same code in more than 3 places, put it in a shared lib type of file / folder.

When you start using the same code across 3 projects, put that into a "module" and manage independently in version control.

Depends on the language / framework you're using, but I've found that general rule pretty helpful in my experience.

Good points. Never thought of it that way.

I was thinking the same thing. I think it would be interesting to explore this area more and try to model it computationally.

Your point about physical features made me think of how physical attractiveness plays into human development as well.

Research has shown that beauty in humans is defined as physical symmetry. So "novelty" in our case might be defined as someone who is really ugly - the elephant man.

So in this case, beauty wouldn't really fit into the robot walking example as it's neither fitness (moving the foot forward) or novelty. More a different type of fitness that increases the odds of reproduction.

Awesome, thanks! I've been reading up a bit and this is exactly what I was hoping to find.

Yeah, I figured that. I imagine it's a bit challenging to model though.

You'd have to be running every instance simultaneously and have them all observing and reacting to each other.

Also gets into some interesting "morality" type of questions. As in if an instance cheats to get ahead, are there consequences?

I found this article really intriguing as someone new to this field.

If I'm understanding this right, it seems like most approaches up to this point are focused on evolving a single "unit" or brain / person.

You have the concept of "nature" that selects which units will advance to the next generation and passing on "DNA". First based on fitness and now the new approach is novelty.

This may seem a bit naive, but has anyone explored adding a social dimension?

For the robot walking example, you have nature choosing novelty and those that made progress.

A basic social dimension could have units observing other units and sharing information.

But then there's a variety of other dimensions - a unit blocking another unit from walking (cheating), a bigger unit destroying a smaller one, maybe success via misc factors like physical symmetry / popularity.

Idk. Just curious to learn more and where the research is at.

Sounds like I'm the minority, but if done tactfully I don't mind articles that have gifs.

It kind of provides another dimension to the article as you get to see the author's emotions as they wrote it.

With that said, there is definitely a point where there are too many...

I sort mine too - depends on the color. Darks go in cold and whites generally on hot.

I wear a lot of white sports socks. All of them are pure white after years of having them.

I live in SV as well.

Hard to say really. I'm just beginning to raise seed funding myself, so I'll have more perspective on that side soon. So far so good though.

On the VC side... I went to a VC panel in SF a couple weeks ago, and they all were gushing how this is the best time ever to raise money. They are all looking to invest.

There does seem to be a consensus though that investors are preferring to invest in "quality" businesses now vs chasing the Ubers and Uber for this. So potentially in line with the article talking about the levels of "uninvested cash".

Agreed. I used to work for a division of Intuit (not financial stuff) and a lot of the dev work I saw was pretty shoddy. Lots of weird bugs constantly.

With that said, security is taken very seriously and most of the stuff I experienced was UI related. So hard to say...

I started off doing manual build / deploy for a project and it was a total pain in the ass. From packaging the code, to versioning, rollbacks, deploy. Then that doesn't even include setting up API Gateway if you want an endpoint for the function.

Since then I've been using Serverless for all my projects and it's the best thing I've tried thus far. It's not perfect, but now I'm able to abstract everything away as you configure pretty much everything from a .yml file.

With that said, there are still some rough spots with Lambda:

1) Working with env vars. Default is to store them in plain text in the Lambda config. Fine for basic stuff, but I didn't want that for DB creds. You can store them encrypted, but then you have to setup logic to decrypt in the function. Kind of a pain.

2) Working within a subnet to access private resources incurs an extra delay. There is already a cold start time for Lambda functions, but to access the subnet adds more time... Apparently AWS is aware and is exploring a fix.

3) Monitoring could be better. Cloudwatch is not the most user friendly tool for trying to find something specific.

With that said, as a whole Lambda is pretty awesome. We don't have to worry about setting up ec2 instances, load balancing, auto scaling, etc for a new api. We can just focus on the logic and we're able to roll out new stuff so much faster. Then our costs are pretty much nothing.

Definitely. To get anywhere near profitable you need to have the right people and to be in it for the long haul.

The funny thing about this whole shit show is that could have been me.

Before transitioning to tech in SF, I had a career in the entertainment industry down in LA. My buddy pitched me with marketing jargon just like this for a Coachella style festival, and I got sucked in.

We spent on and off a year working on it and actually made decent progress. The biggest band we had on board was Pearl Jam.

Eventually it became obvious we were in over our heads and that my buddy had no idea what he was doing.

I'm curious about that too. They must have gotten close or raised all of it, as they actually attempted to have the event.

That is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah there is a bit of a learning curve there. I was doing the same when I first started.

It really depends on what you're trying to do, but it really comes down to storing state and data in a central location.

If it's a simple component, passing the on click callback to a child that updates the parent master state is pretty straightforward. So for example selecting an item in a list and updating the active item when a list item is clicked.

If it's a really deeply nested component though, that can get a bit harder. I've had some success passing simple string values via the context reference, which makes the values accessible to all the children.

Another pattern I've used is having a state store similar to the flux pattern using eventemitter. I'm using this pattern a lot on thebigpicture.io for the editor page. There's two main columns in the page that are very deeply nested, so I created a separate state store and individual components are able to listen to changes from different events.

Yeah, I totally understand what you mean. I felt the same when I first got on AWS.

What helped me immensely was taking a job where they had the whole stack on AWS, and I had the chance to learn by doing.

Secondly, I signed up for this class on Udemy and that taught me the details of setting up a legit infrastructure.

https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-asso...

I agree it's challenging at first, but once you understand what's going on it's fucking awesome. You can configure every little thing and I have my system decently optimized to cost next to nothing.

Note: Link is to our blog post discussing the project. The link to the Github repo is near the bottom of the post.

Sure thing. Thanks.

I've actually been looking at Snowplow and that seems pretty badass so far. Might work for what I'm looking at.