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floodfx

267 karma · joined December 17, 2008

Startup junkie, engineer, and tinkerer

- https://donnie.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnieflood - https://github.com/floodfx

donnie at floodx dot com

Currently CEO at ContextBridge (https://contextbridge.ai)

submissionscomments
floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2020)
Homebound | Front-end / Full-Stack Engineers / Engineering Managers | Full-time | Denver or Remote (US-only)

Homebound is a "full-stack startup"[1] in the US homebuilding market. Our mission is to help communities rebuild after natural disasters such as the recent wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington which have unfortunately destroyed thousands of homes. We primarily build single family homes in Northern & Southern California along with the technology to make the home building process more modern, transparent, affordable, and rapid. We were founded after the Tubbs Fire [2] which destroyed thousands of homes in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake County, and threatened our CEO's home [3], and are deeply connected to the mission.

The challenge and opportunity for engineers at Homebound is to build delightful experiences for a range of different types of users -- from homeowners to construction professionals. We are still a small (<15) engineering team and are looking for key contributors who have both strong skills and also a passion for establishing best practices for our future Homebound teammates. We are dedicating to building a team based around three principals: community, craftsmanship, and communication. Finally, we are backed by world-class investors and led by experienced software and construction executives.

We'd love to connect with mission-driven, quality-oriented engineers and engineering managers who err on the side of over-communication. Email joinengineering@homebound.com or direct to me at donnie@homebound.com.

(Tech Stack: GraphQL, React, TypeScript, Postgres, AWS)

[1] - https://a16z.com/2015/01/22/the-full-stack-startup/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire

[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2020/01/16/she-al...

floodfx··on Now Is the Perfect Time to Memorize a Poem
What are the poems?
floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2020)
Homebound | Front-end / Full-Stack Engineers | Full-time | Denver or Remote (US-only)

Homebound is a "full-stack startup"[1] in the US homebuilding market. We build single family homes in Northern California and Southern California along with the technology to make the home building process more modern, transparent, affordable, and rapid. We were founded after the Tubbs Fire [2] which destroyed thousands of homes in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake County, and threatened our CEO's home [3], and are deeply connected to the mission.

The challenge and opportunity for engineers at Homebound is to build delightful experiences for a range of different types of users -- from homeowners to construction professionals. We are still a small (<10) engineering team and are looking for key contributors who have both strong skills and also a passion for establishing best practices for our future Homebound teammates. We are dedicating to building a team based around three principals: community, craftsmanship, and communication.

We'd love to connect with mission-driven, quality-oriented engineers who over-index on communication. Email joinengineering@homebound.com or direct to me at donnie@homebound.com.

(Tech Stack: GraphQL, React, TypeScript)

[1] - https://a16z.com/2015/01/22/the-full-stack-startup/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire

[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2020/01/16/she-al...

floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2019)
Homebound | Front-end / Full-Stack Engineers (Typescript) | Full-time | Denver or Remote

Homebound is a “full-stack startup”[1] in the US homebuilding market. We build single family homes and the technology to make the home building process more modern, transparent, affordable, and rapid. We were founded after the Tubbs Fire [2] which destroyed thousands of homes in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake County, including our co-founder’s home, and are deeply connected to the mission.

The challenge and opportunity for engineers at Homebound is to build delightful experiences for a range of different types of users -- from homeowners to construction professionals. We are just starting to build our engineering team, and are looking for key contributors who have both strong skills and also a passion for establishing best practices and patterns for our future Homebound engineers.

Connect with us at joinengineering@homebound.com or direct to me at donnie@homebound.com.

[1] - https://a16z.com/2015/01/22/the-full-stack-startup/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire

floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2019)
Homebound | Front-end / Full-Stack Engineers (Typescript) | Full-time | Denver or Remote

Homebound is a “full-stack startup”[1] in the US homebuilding market. We build single family homes and the technology to make the home building process more modern, transparent, affordable, and rapid. We were founded after the Tubbs Fire [2] which destroyed thousands of homes in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake County, including our co-founder’s home, and are deeply connected to the mission.

The challenge and opportunity for engineers at Homebound is to build delightful experiences for a range of different types of users -- from homeowners to construction professionals. We are just starting to build our engineering team, and are looking for key contributors who have both strong skills and also a passion for establishing best practices and patterns for our future Homebound engineers.

Connect with us at joinengineering@homebound.com or direct to me at donnie@homebound.com.

[1] - https://a16z.com/2015/01/22/the-full-stack-startup/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire

floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2018)
GuildEducation | Staff/Principal Data Engineers, Staff/Principal Platform Engineers, Staff/Principal Front-End Engineers, Sr SalesForce Engineers | Denver, CO / Relo Available | Full Time

Guild (https://guildeducation.com) is a well funded ($70M+) and very fast growing startup based in Denver that is helps large employers (Walmart, Disney, Chipotle, Lowes, etc) provide direct funding to their employee's education (high school, trades, college prep, college, masters, etc).

This is a high revenue growth business with strong B2B2C marketplace dynamics in a regulated space which means we are building a strong moat. Funded by well known SV investors.

Our technology team is still small with lots of opportunities for greenfield projects, dynamic technical challenges, and leadership opportunities across the engineering org.

HMU at donnie@ or our head tech recruiter at sage@

floodfx··on Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009)
I wrote an app called MakerSession [1] which was inspired by this essay. MakerSession automatically blocks out time on your (google or microsoft) calendar based on when your day starts/ends and how much time you need to get stuff done...

[1]-https://makersession.com

floodfx··on JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
Hey this sounds like a great setup. I've been wondering if Kotlin -> JavaScript could work for React. Do you have some more documentation or code that you could share on how to setup a project?
floodfx··on Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda
This is pretty cool but to be pedantic this is actually API Gateway proxying requests to AWS Lambda not just a Lambda function. Zappa and other Serverless Frameworks sort of obfuscate the fact that API Gateway is setup in front of Lambda but that is what is happening here. Again, cool example.
floodfx··on Lyft Carpool: A New Way to Commute
Fair but OTOH I don't mind walking 5 minutes for a free ride into the city.
floodfx··on Lyft Carpool: A New Way to Commute
I've been riding the Casual Carpool for the last 6 years. Love it! The reason drivers don't care about "revenue" is that they are driving across the bridge anyway and care more about the time than money. Another way to think about it is the 30 minutes saved by picking up riders and getting into the carpool lane is payment enough. Also explains the reason why riding back to east bay is not "successful". It isn't particularly faster nor as convenient.
floodfx··on S3sync – Tool belt for managing your S3 buckets
You should check out this suite of S3 cmd line tools too - https://github.com/aboisvert/s3cp
floodfx··on You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors
We do something similar at Bizo. Here's a quick write up of an Amazon Web Services-centric approach:

http://dev.bizo.com/2012/04/capturing-client-side-js-errors-...

floodfx··on I'm a Citizen of the Internet, Where's My Passport?
The great thing about the internet is you don't need a passport...
floodfx··on Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service from AWS
one of our developers built a local emulated simpledb clone for development/testing that is open sourced at:

https://github.com/stephenh/fakesdb

floodfx··on Google Ads of the Future
The ad in question looks a lot like a facebook ad unit. Nice way for them to allow advertisers to reuse their facebook creative across Google's network.
floodfx··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (June 2011)
San Francisco - SENIOR, JUNIOR,INTERN, REMOTE, H1B

Bizo is hiring Software Engineers...

We’re a small, disciplined team that gets a lot done. We have more data centers than engineers. We write quality, scalable software. We survived the AWS outage unscathed. We believe in teamwork and communication: comments, design reviews, code reviews for every change, weekly tech talks. We believe in giving developers ownership over projects. We believe Engineering is more than coding. We have fun and keep the beer fridge well stocked.

We are looking for motivated problem solvers with an entrepreneurial / hacker spirit.

Our development blog: http://dev.bizo.com/ Our open source projects: http://code.bizo.com/

Languages we (mainly) use: Java, Scala, Ruby, Javascript. Languages we’ve used in hackdays, so who knows: Erlang, Go, C, Groovy, R, matlab. Other technologies: AWS (EC2, S3, SimpleDB, …, everything really), Hadoop, Hive, GWT, AppEngine, Linux, Tomcat, Nginx, MongoDB, MySQL, Solr.

And, we’re open. We believe in the right tool for the right job, and we are willing to try things out and take risks when it makes sense.

More info available at: http://bizoneers.com or email: bizoneers@bizo.com

-Donnie (donnie@bizo.com)

floodfx··on "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
I'll probably be downvoted for this but seems to me the root cause of this problem is Reddit's architectural decision to remain in a single availability zone. If it wasn't EBS it could have been some other issue related to the single AZ that could have brought the site down. Blaming EBS, particularly if you knew it to be a potential weakness in your architecture, seems like a deflection of responsibility.
floodfx··on Within 3 days another power outage at Linode (Fremont)
Out of curiosity, I am wondering why someone would choose Linode over AWS?
floodfx··on Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers
Great PR but probably misleading. For instance, we signed up initially and didn't find it too useful (although they've added a lot of features since then). We didn't delete our account until just now and when we logged in (again just now) we had 6k notifications from instance startup/shutdown. Never once did we "manage" any of these instances on cloudkick.
floodfx··on Ask HN: Interview Thank You Emails. Necessary?
always ask for a business card...
floodfx··on Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
we get a weekly box from the fruitguys [fruitguys.com] at work. it is like $25 and keeps our office of about 10 covered.
floodfx··on A couple neat things about using chemical elements as hostnames
naming servers is so BAWS (before AWS). :)
floodfx··on App Engine SDK 1.3.5 - New Task Queue, Python Precompilation, and Blob Features
Does anyone use AppEngine in production? I am not trying to troll but we've have had pretty poor performance getting data out of their datastore. We only have a couple operations apps running on it and I could not imagine running anything that need to perform on GAE. BTW - We've had slowness in both Java and Python...
floodfx··on Ask HN: JVM templating engines? Looking for JSP alternatives
GXP is decent. (http://code.google.com/p/gxp/)

You could also try GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). Obviously more than just a templating engine but very cool.

floodfx··on Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links
FF makes money off revenue generated when you search and click on google ad. They do not replace links on content that you generate without telling you. Apples/Oranges my friend...

Personally I use posterous as my personal site and I don't appreciate this.

floodfx··on The Data-Driven Life
agree - his annual reports are beautiful...
floodfx··on The Data-Driven Life
I've been reading about "Quantified Self" on kk.org for a while. I didn't realize it was actually Gary Wolf and others writing a lot of the content. Pretty interesting stuff...

One simple idea is to have an API to enable easy collection of quantified self data as well as to consume it. Thought about it myself at one point but I am not passionate about it.

Daytum (http://daytum.com/) has a nice webapp but no API...

floodfx··on Get Things Done Like a Zen Master
similar advice from Marc Andreessen: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...
floodfx··on Ask HN: Are you happy, well-rounded? (dealing w/ depression/lack of motivation)
Try living in the present and not stressing out about the future or past... I recommend you read (or better yet listen to the audio book version) Ekhart Tolle's "The Power of Now". From the Amazon description: "the author describes his transition from despair to self-realization soon after his 29th birthday."
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