dejv

Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives.

The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives.

We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.

I did pick an area where customers don't want to adopt new tech. Software for farmers anyone? And it was not just my error in picking this exact field, there are struggling competitors with millions and millions of VC money and YC stripes and no winners in sight.

Not all niches, no matter how big, are created equal. I would try to either find something with raising tide or place where potential customers are actively searching and buying what you have to offer and will profit from it.

I read Spelunky book from this series and found it extremely well written and very insightful in areas of game design. I've actually play the game after I've read the book.

I actually do, after years of being indie developer I joined fintech company as a tech lead and am working 4 days a week for 80% of pay and spend extra day working on my farm. I do have flexible schedule, but usually take either Wed or Thu day off.

As far as I know I was first who had this arrangement two years ago, but now I see it quite common among my team. I am also thinking about lowering my work to 3 days a week for further pay reduction.

Haiku is lacking full featured web browser like Chromium or Firefox. They do have some basic browser available, but its capability is very limited.

Meanwhile in many countries in Europe there is bark beetle epidemic that is destroying our spruce forrests and lumber is currently cheapest and most abundant ever.

We have two functional paternosters in my hometown and you can easily drive around the clock in them. There are warning signs, but once you miss the last stop there are another signs that tell you not to panic.

I guess I would date myself, but:

- syntax highlighting in text editor

- tabs in browsers (in my case that was Firefox before it was called Firefox)

- DVCS, I've started with Bazaar then moved to Git (of course). Used VCS (painful) and SVN (less so) before that.

- REST APIs and discovering Sinatra framework to write them.

- Rails. First time I saw famous "write blog in 15 minutes" my head was blown.

I am not familiar with US legislative, but in EU the organic certification describe viticulture part only. Secret to cheap organic winemaking is having fruit from some places like Chile or Argentina that have harsh climate for diseases

It is very hard to create luxury wine in the middle of nowhere so the price of land is big factor in cost of wines in premium and luxury segment. 1 hectare of good plot in top regions like Barolo, Bordeaux, Champagne or Burgundy starts around 1 to 2 millions of euros, but top plots goes much further than that, 10 millions of euros for hectare of Burgundy Grand Cru is not unheard of. You are making around 4000 litres of wine per year on 1 hectare.

It depends. I am not that familiar with US, but in most of Europe you do have layered system. Basic table wine rules are quite relaxed, but then you have higher levels with more or less strict rules for farming practices, yield and vinification practices. Those practices are then checked by governing body or goverment.

Like two-buch Chuck, right?

I also found: https://www.kalw.org/post/evaluating-taste-and-cost-two-buck...

But I haven't read it yet, so I am not sure if it is worth it.

"Contains sulfites" is awesome label as it is impossible to make wine without it: small amount of sulfites are created as by-product of fermentation.

The problem is calling those highly procesed products as being wine. I would call those wine-like drinks in the same way McD burger is burger-like product.

Personally I would be worry of pesticide residues in wines. Not just those bottom cheap bottles, but from all mass and non-bio certified producers. Few years ago there was high level of arsenic found in two-buch Chunk, but it is very common across the board: "Together the 34 bottles of conventional wine contained 148 pesticide residues. All 34 bottles contained at least one pesticide, while the mean number of pesticides per bottle was more than four. The highest number of residues found in a single bottle was 10."[0].

Those traces are probably not going to kill you, but let just not see all wines as being created equal.

[0] https://www.wineanorak.com/pesticideresiduesinwine.htm

Almost anything you find on shelves of your local supermarket is going to be heavily procesed industrial wine. The price itself will determine use of more expensive/time consuming proceses, but at the end they are all just drink products.

If wine is just a drink for you than there is huge amount of good wines for $10 - $15. Nicely done, good products.

For me, huge wine nerd (and also owner/winemaker of small organic winery) the wine is more like a postcard from faraway place and book of poetry at the same time. I am sure I am not going to be able to tell difference between cheap and expensive wines sometimes, but that is not a point. There is a more into wine than primary aromatics if you want to dig deep into into.

There will be a lot of comments on how $2 wine taste good. Burger from McD taste pretty good as well, right? The problem with those cheap wines is not the taste itself, but the way they are made.

The price of wine is determined by price of grapes. To achieve low price of your input you need vineyards that are hugely productive (say 10 to 20 times of those used for quality production). Even vineyards used for high quality production need a lot of chemical inputs (compared to rest of agriculture), but here we need to go even higher due to high density of grapes and zero green management.

All of the vineyards are optimised for mechanical prunning, management and harvest. No problem with that and we are also seeing this trend in more and more premium wines due to rising cost of work and technological progress.

At the end of growing stage we are having grapes that are not that ripe: probably not a lot of sugar, harsh tanins, lots of acids (and also structure of various acids will be on harsh acid types) and probably some rot on wines (this is normal even in high quality wines).

No problem with any of those parameters: low sugars could be fixed by infusing sucrose, acid could be removed by using potasium bicarbonate, tanin structure could be improved by using artifical tanins (or tanins extracted from wood), color could be fixed by acetaldehyde (cause of headaches, together with high SO2 levels) and whole structure might be balanced by using reverse osmosis.

After use of ten or maybe 50 different additive you get your $2 bottle of wine-like drink. It might even taste good.

It reminds me group of Slovak tourist that booked flights to Niš, Serbia instead of Nice, France as is pronounced a same. They really looked forward to nice beach vacation and were disappointed a bit.

I am not really sentimental person and I refuse to take photos or even think about past much, so it is not bleak at all I just forget things very easily. I was driven by curiosity and after few years I was saturated. I still like to travel, it is just not only thing I am thinking about (and actually doing) day and night.

At that time I was also seeing new generation of wine makers back at my home that started to do things I always wanted to do and I felt that should be me. So I pack my bag, book a ticket and get my hands dirty (literally) by tending vines and making wine.

It taught me that it is ok to not be high on career/income ladder and there many niches outside tech that are worth to be living in and you can easily carve some for yourself.

I traveled for five years or so. I was having great time, but I've probably overdid it for year or two.

What worked well for me was quiting mixing backpacker circus with less known destination. It was fun to sleep at hostels, party with fellow travelers and have fun, but it gets old after while. I split my trips into 3 to 6 months chunks after which I just come back to one of my bases, recharge for a bit and then went to somewhere else. I usually mix things us so after 6 months in SE Asia, I went to Balkans, then Japan and then somewhere more popular with backpackers like Argentina.

It is great experience to have, but I would not put much hope in being truly transformative. Now, almost, 10 years later it just feel like it never happen, memories are fading fast as I went with settled life.

People are often scared about their career outlook or other long term consequences, but I didn't experience any of those.

For anyone interested in small fusion reactors there is another startup called Tokamak Energy with great Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UCuSlFJbBUIj1zfJLRnGXSow

I don't know how this thing goes outside of EU, but here as a farmer I have to go throgh state multiday exams every few years that makes me personally liable for all harm to other crops, population of bees and people who actually operate tractors.

As a person in charge of spray program I have to make sure that weather condition is ok to spray (temperature, wind), my sprayers comply to standards and are tested in certified laboratory (things jet size, droplet size and uniformity) and I need to log every information and keep all that records for years to be checked by authorities anytime (and they do check them often).

It is easy to see pesticides as a easy target, but I am affraid that it is actually not easy to dump toxic in the air, water and land as almost any gram of pesticide and packaging have to be accounted for and handled with care.

(btw I am working in organic agriculture and do not use any pesticides except of sulfur and bit of a copper and I don't have any interest in conventional agriculture business)

I spent two decades as a Delphi contractor. Not doing it anymore, but I still see a lot of control software for industrial machinery and lab equipment (at least those made in EU), POS and kiosk software as well as custom ERP and ERP style software.

I am currently working on NIR spectrometer and I am actually thinking about using Lazarus for driving touch screen instead of web based dashboard.

Oh yeah, the amount of reports are insane. There were more than 200 different reports implemented in the tool and most of them have been customized for each separate customer. It was spaghetti bowl of half baked custom DSL, config files and what not.

I am not writing Delphi code anymore (but did that for close to 20 years professionally), but there are many artifacts still up and running and would probably run for next few decades if not longer.

1) I've started my programming career by creating new user interface for device that measures properties of metal joins on [BIG] machines [1]. It is used by many mining and energy companies. First version of this device was created somewhere in 70s so I guess this new one will last for many decades to come.

2) There was a time when every company created its own ERP software and I was hired to help maintain 500k lines of code monster that is used by fair chunk of construction companies in Austria. All the accounting, warehouse, quoting, payroll and what not was based on top of old Paradox database. Custom hacks were deployed to make sure we fit everything into 64kb of index space and I've got massive headaches trying to make work decades old database in networking mode. Another fun year was at the time when Vista changed memory layout and you sometimes crash everything because of memory location that was meant to be for printers is now occupied by sound stuff and you've touched protected memory. Anyway as far as I know this system is up and running, counting numbers, printing invoices, work orders and quotes all days long.

[1] https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/...

My two cents as a remote dev for past two decades I think we are not going back as the landscape changed a lot: the scene used to consist of code me a facebook clone for 200USD to getting rich iOS apps towards seeing more bootstrapped high margin businesses and VC backed startups. This last group starting to learn doing remote work effectively and they manage to mine this talent pool profitably

This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they make a killing.

Few years ago I was traveling High Atlas mountains in Morocco and happen to spend week or so hanging out in Berber village and became friendly with interesting bunch of local people that meet every evening to talk in their local dialect.

Interestingly most of original language is now gone and consist of many Arabic words. I was very surprised that most common words (say Tuesday if my memory serve me right) were lost first, but many more complex words not. Also traditional script is now gone and was replaced with modern made up script.

It is definitely a niche varietal, planted area is still shrinking, especially in my home of Czech republic where it was most planted red grape varietal, but there is growing interest among high end growers in Austria so I think the varietal has some future among wine geeks.