sbilstein

Depends on the source. Many tutorials on Hackernoon or Medium or even personal sites are written by beginners trying to grow some web presence (if they are trying to make a career change) or just trying to edify their knowledge. It's great to learn something well by teaching another.

You end up in a blind leading the blind situation however and I find the most high quality tutorials end up being (usually) in the official documentation.

OTOH, lots of experienced devs forget the details that really get in the way! For example, I just learned I need to use an undocumented flag "disableOptimisticBPs" to enable breakpoints using Jest and Typescript with VSCode. I figured this out digging through Github issues. If I was to write a tutorial next week, there is a really high probability I'd forget this obscure step is what made my life easy.

On the other hand, ACTransit from Oakland to SF is really quite good for commuting.

Investors spend all day hearing startup pitches from companies who would gladly accept a check from them.

Engineers spend a grueling month or two getting onsite offers from maybe 8 companies at the most and one or two offers.

Agree 100%, a very misleading metaphor.

I thought it would be hard but once I jumped on deleting my account I feel much better. Friends get in touch with me over text or email. Many of my friends prefer using email at this point anyhow, possibly since most of my male friends are programmers or luddites or both.

My girlfriend still gets Facebook invites for things but increasingly we get email invites for parties and similar. I get my news more actively through browsing sources now; I navigate to Pitchfork or a subreddit for music stuff.

It's easier than it sounds; people will find a way to get in touch and new people you meet will just be fine with texting.

Disagree. Just because you start bootstrapping doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind one day and take on some investment. Put yourself on a schedule and give yourself options when it comes to funding.

Just because you have an “obvious” path to a sustainable business doesn’t guarantee it will be big enough or fast enough to meet your vision or the demand when you find it.

Not every restaurant starts out selling sandwiches on a food cart.

It was a surprise to my cofounder and I too when we started but our attorney told us investors prefer it. Makes sense that I wouldn’t own half a business if I quit in a week. We signed the papers and don’t really think about it, especially since we’re partners as well it would put investors at ease if we had some legal binding to the business long term

Depends on the size and success of your team. I’ve seen startup acquisitions land the CTO: tech lead, eng manager, senior eng manager, and director.

Cop, copy, copy.

I taught myself about color palettes, gradients, margins, and typography by carefully hitting inspect element on websites I love. You’ll get an idea of font sizes that make sense for headers, tables, written content and more. Inspect buttons to see how designers use shadows or changes to indicate function.

Once you start copying enough and read a book or two on design it will start making sense. Pay obsessive detail to how a payment flow or navigation reacts on a site you love when you do something wrong.

Less is more and start by building out simple forms that feel slick and intuitive. Copy the landing page of a website like Strava. Copy the landing page of a SaaS product you love. Copy the layout and typography of the Stripe documentation. You’ll eventually have enough tools to start making more informed decisions when you are not copying.

Finding a spouse is not like applying for a job unless you are on the bachelor. You meet the person one on one and you don’t compete with anyone but your best self.

No one i ever dated with which I experienced some “competition” was a good match in the long run anyhow. YMMV I guess.

The best engineer I knew at my last gig (a unicorn company we all use daily) worked at the major adult entertainment company for many years haha. Dude was a total family man by the time I met him and the nicest sharpest tech lead.

I don’t use macros but it looks like I should tbh

VSCode is fast, stable, and the plugin ecosystem really beats Sublime Text at this point. I was skeptical because Microsoft but it is hands down my favorite editor.

You'd be surprised. Since switching is so low, you can pay your way to acquiring all the supply and demand to kick something off, hence all the ridesharing companies in NYC: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ubers-competitors-in-nyc-are-...

If you subsidize driving and subsidize riding significantly, people will sign up. A $40 bonus covers several rides for a customer so they'll hold onto the app at least until they've used their initial free offering.

As someone who lives in a really shitty part of SF, crime will affect you. Your apartments garage will get broken into, your packages will be stolen. People you don’t know will brazenly ask to buzz in at all times. If you are female, you will be harassed. If you are male, you may be harassed. It’s tolerable and my landlord has all kinds of fantastic security measures but it’s no breeze. Fights on the street can get pretty heated and you never know when something bad will go down. I balance all that with an apartment large enough to run my company from and entertain my dog but I’m totally down to move once I have enough capital to get a proper office and a nice place.

A few startups (including mine) are trying to help with human interaction in this space:

Papa (joinpapa.com): bring college students to seniors as short term caregivers

Ayuda (ayudacare.com / I am the co-founder of this one): We connect seniors in assisted living facilities with freelancers such as musicians, fitness teachers, and more.

A VC with General Catalyst wrote a useful summary on eldercare startups: https://medium.com/@alerner_93836/disrupting-eldercare-97454...

I’m at least glad that there aren’t teams full of disgruntled Googlers maintaining zombie products. That is the worst for job satisfaction.

How long did it take you to build your product? My partner and I are bootstrapping have customers but I’m always way behind on product as a solo dev.

CEOs and CTOs are often involved when working with a very large business. CTOs often end up giving presentations to the top brass about security and technological advantage. If you are high enough to have major influence on the product, you will end up doing sales.

20 minute mental break to prepare some food is a great way to keep energized for more work.

A game changer for me has been a high quality rice cooker. Put rice or quinoa in the cooker as soon as I wake up and my at my “lunch break” I prepare some other stuff, eat and get back to work. I work from home all day generally.

I was mostly in the Scala/Java world for a long time and laughed at the JS community’s obsession with reinventing things. Somehow I ended up using Node on every side project over the years because it was pretty easy to work with.

Fast-forward to now...I’ve decided to build my startup on typescript and node. I find the easy sharing of libraries and types across frontend and backend very liberating.

TS/ES6 are mature and run everywhere. Easy for beginners but functional enough for me. It’s taken me a while but I love JavaScript.

I think putting them on level with sidewalks would be a serious danger for pedestrians, moreso than my risk as a biker. I do wish crosswalks were designed so that cyclists can make left turns on them

I’m a cyclist too but I just don’t see how cities could be built in such a way that avoids stop signs unless everything is a roundabout. It’s annoying to stop on a bike; doesn’t mean I am justified in being lazy about it.

We bring high quality freelancers to perform and teach for seniors at assisted living facilities. Hack: my cofounder is a professional opera singer so she does the first gig at every client.

Very similar for my business’ various pivots. When you don’t have seed funding, this feels like the ONLY way to go.

I don't think we actually disagree on any of those points. You can definitely build businesses anywhere in the world but people move to scenes to increase their chances of an outsize success. Plenty great bands come from small towns and regional scenes but a disproportionate amount of famous, world-touring bands are based out of Brooklyn or LA and the musicians you might meet there are aiming for that lifestyle.

If you define success differently, it's all up for grabs. If you want to build the next Uber, you are giving yourself a bigger shot (and tough competition) by moving to SF. Of course, companies like Mailchimp are massively successful outside of the bubble but there just isn't the same pressure and rising tide in a city like Atlanta than there is in SF.

I suspect many people end up in the Bay Area not to risk it all, disrupt their lives and start a company but simply because they got an awesome job at a growing company. Further down the line the scene makes them consider 'maybe I could do this too'.

FWIW, I got advice when starting my business to move out of the Bay Area and somewhere way cheaper to extend my runway. I'm glad I didn't because even with smaller monthly expenses I'd lose out on the small network I have and the luck afforded to me simply by being here.

Makes sense to me. If you really want to make it big in fashion, you move to a fashion city. If you want to make it big in music, you probably move to LA, Brooklyn, or Nashville. Startups are a scene too; you can succeed elsewhere but why make it harder for yourself?

Not in YC but I'm sure they have tools for all sorts of research and understanding of businesses in various sectors. I imagine they would build tools to analyze government reports, data sets published online, perhaps databases of relevant research papers. They've got 1000 companies in every sector imaginable; you're gonna need tooling to handle all that.

I think OP meant non-professionals. A mental health diagnosis from a laymen is no different than saying "you're crazy!"

I wish I had a good answer. A mix of trusted friends and a thoughtful therapist. If you are in an abusive situation, a therapist should be able to identify it since there are objective frameworks to think about that. It's also easy to reject an "objective" diagnosis of a situation because you are likely to view it from your internalized perspective.

Armchair diagnosis is dangerous IMO. It can be a form of gaslighting. Sure everyone can benefit from therapy, meditation and improving systems for managing sadness, frustration, impatience but telling yourself or someone else you have ADD, compulsive disorder, anxiety is a great way to pop the self esteem bubble and confidence you need to get through life.

In the workplace it's especial dangerous; you can force someone to question why they don't like a job or feel isolated or bullied by convincing them their perception is really the problem.

It doesn't take much effort to convince someone who is upset by circumstance that they have a problem. "You're too sensitive" "you're depressed" "that person has an anxiety problem" when really the environment at the job might really be the problem or some basic coaching might be the solution.

I worked somewhere in which people openly admitted the company culture drove them to therapy yet were so "grateful" for an "open and inclusive" environment. The cognitive dissonance there was very disturbing.

This occurs in families as well. I grew up in an abusive household and, well damn, your parents will do their best to convince you that you are the crazy one and need help.