ibudiallo

He started a business in 2017, and closed the doors in 2018. What?

Recently, I was contacted by a person who told me he saw one of my videos on YouTube about Ycombinator (it had 50 views!!!), he had to meet me in person. We met a couple days later. He was a very smart guy with an impressive resume.

He quit his job in equipment manufacturing to pursue entrepreneurship. He was a former USC student, so naturally he traveled back to California, rented a small room where him and his business partner churned on their idea. It was a sort of classified for colleges.

Not a terrible idea in anyway. He knew the college life so he must have known things I didn't. I told him he should have tested his idea before quitting his job and moving into a whole other country where he had only been a student. He showed me the website, and it was obviously made by someone who was learning React. There is no need to go fancy when you are still testing your ideas. But there was a problem.

They were paying thousands of dollars a month to keep this barely functional app running.

This is something I see a lot of young people entering web development are doing. They get beefed-up cloud services that eat up a good chunk of their money. Most people think this is the regular cost of being online. It's not! A year later, the domain name doesn't resolve either.

In the story, OP alludes living with his parents. I imagine to save money. But then there is $40k. I hope that it wasn't mostly on the AWS cost. But he gathered valuable data that did cost money.

Don't shut down the website. Keep it running and make the data available in read only mode and add a donation button (alternative to ads). It should cost $5 a month to host on linode or digitalocean. Don't let the money you spent go down the drain.

This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik).

I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog.

If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize it for you.

I once gave a 3 days estimate for a client project. 2 days to make sure I build it right and a third for testing. It turned into a 7 weeks project: https://idiallo.com/blog/18000-dollars-static-web-page

The trouble is not that the AI can be wrong, it's that we will rely on its answers to make decisions.

When the facial recognition software combines your facial expression and your name, while you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; Your terrorist score is at 52%. A police car is dispatched.

In 2017, my contract was not transferred to the new system. The automated system saw that an ex employee was scanning his key cards multiple times. Security was dispatched to catch the rogue employee. Now a simple questioning should have cleared things up, but the computer had already flagged me as troublesome. Long story short, I was fired.

When the machine calculates your emotions, the results are unquestionable. Or, we don't know how it got to the answer, so we trust that it is right. It is a computer after all.

What scares me is not how fast machine learning is being deployed to every aspect of our lives. My scare is our reaction to it.

They use philanthropy to look noble in the effort of creating a greener planet through recycling. And note that this effort is voluntary, from the kindness of their heart. While, they are the ones creating the problem in the first place. They'll fight any law that will stop them from creating the problem and benefiting from it.

I was hired back 3 weeks later, with a small apology and no pay. I looked for another opportunity right away and quit the job.

Today, I design and build automated systems for a startup. I made sure that the "AI" has a big red button that stops the process and spits out a backtrace of all the steps it took so we can be accountable and reverse any damage.

When I finally stopped using Facebook, I didn't close the account. It's just there. It's no longer part of what I do. At some point I realized that the worst thing about the network is not that they do shady things, or trick you into staying, or meddle with politics. The worst thing is the person you gradually become.

The moment you meet someone, you check their facebook, look through their pictures, browse their posts. When you become friends with someone, everytime there is tension you check facebook to see if they haven't posted about it. If it's a lover, you base the status of the relationship on their posts and frequency of pictures. If it's an ex...

In 2015 I wrote [1]:

> On facebook, why would I give someone privacy when I have access to all this information. And I don't even need their permission. I can watch your private pictures because you made them available. It's not that I can find out where you work, where you live, where you eat, everything about you. It's that I actually do find out without ever hiring a private detective. It's not what I can do, it's what I do!

Facebook turns you into an insecure person.

[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/facebook-and-me

At night, I lay down and replay my day. I can still smell the moist in the air before it rained today.

But then I stopped. The most I did during that decade was read Wikipedia entries or cliff notes. But one day I stumbled upon the alchemist. The book came to me at a moment I truly needed it, and it offered me some answers. Little after I read another fiction, Life of Pi. These are simple books with profound messages that can easily lure you back into reading. I ended reading more than 20 books that year.

Today, I can't imagine myself not reading. Books are where smart people take their time to clearly and precisely formulate their ideas. And the great advantage is that when you forget what's in a book, you can read it again.

I spent an hour looking through them today and I've only seen one false positive and of course someone reported it instantly.

It's pretty useful. One of the questions I saw today was from few years ago and no one had answered it. Someone added a "me too" answer that wasn't helpful. I flagged that answer and provided a new answer to the question, and now it may help someone in the future.

> “In the air-ship —” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race.

I wrote 5 articles that I thought were interesting. Then I bought a domain name, wrote a php script to serve them. (If url1 do x, if url2 do y) nothing fancy.

Only when I saw that I could sustain writing regularly I started worrying about the platform. And there is no best platform, only the one you are familiar with.

But around 2002, if I remember correctly, Guinean students from the University of Azhar in Egypt, started working on a new alphabet. They agreed on using latin letters for familiar sounds, since most of Fulanis speak french anyway. They added new letters for those particularly Fulani sounds.

I remember being there in a small college bedroom where they were all gathered around the computer. It had a Pentium III and they were excited about a new Pentium 4 machine that someone had donated but they didn't get the chance to install it yet. I don't remember if the two brothers were there since those names are extremely common for Fulani (yes, my name is Ibrahima too).

I was there to get a hair cut, and along the way they told me the computer had issues. All I did was go to windows Registry, and delete the files that automatically started at boot.

The script in this article is new to me, never saw it before. I read books in the one they made in Egypt, since it's easy to pick up. In fact, I think when you take an official test in Fulani, it is written in the script from Egypt.

Either way, I'm excited for this and hopefully I'll get to learn it quick enough to teach my own children.

Then the snippet appeared, and a bunch of negative comments started to appear. To clarify, my answer was not a solid yes or no, but more of my experience with the tool. But Google snippets conveniently answers with a section that says: "It is pointless."

User's read the snippet, are enraged, click, don't bother to read the article, jump to the comment and say "YOU ARE WRONG."

Now, the controversy brings a decent amount of traffic. But unfortunately, the traffic is not from people reading in the first place.

But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.

For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.

[1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight

I mean, I said it, but I didn't say it like that. At first I thought I was crazy and didn't remember the interview correctly. Luckily, I had recorded the whole session on my computer. I was not crazy.

The interviewers questions were rephrased, and my answers where edited to make them more dramatic.

I had received many calls from journalists, and many didn't run the story at all after I said I will only answer some parts Off the record.

Most often then not, the journalists already has a story when they come to you. All they need is a quote of you saying what they already wrote.

Most people get distracted too quickly to finish reading an article. But with audio, the story becomes the distraction that keeps them listening to the end.

I use DO. My site often gets linked on Reddit and hn and the $10 service handles it just fine. One article I wrote recently got 5 million web requests.

https://idiallo.com

What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are:

1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...)

2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...)

3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+)

The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple content. Or cheap but excellent services like linode, digitalocean, or vultr. They set you back $5/m or less.

Host your own content, make local backups. If your provider complains, find another host, copy and paste your content and update the dns.

*However HTML is not easy. I get it. Most of us here can write it with one hand tied behind our back. But the problem with html is that it gives me choices. Writing is hard enough that I have to use a minimalist text editor just to not be distracted.

When I write and think of a trivia fact, HTML tells me that I can nest it as a side comment in a separate div. In fact, I should use an <aside> tag and style it differently. It would be nice if it could hover on the side of the page without breaking the flow of the content. Ah mobile. I should have it render differently on mobile. Maybe it should be collapsed at first, but then the user can click to expand it...

I use markdown so I only have to think of titles and bulleted lists. If I have to add something complex, I'll turn to html, but it is not my default.

In the case of writing, I don't want to think about html.

In the startup silicon echo chamber, you hear the same things over and over until you start to believe it. In fact, when I read many of these books, nothing came as a surprise because that's all the startup world talks about anyway.

Disrupted made fun of the things that I thought were pretty normal. One example is the culture were building in our own startup. We focused so much on the right culture fit that we got some of the worst people to work with us. And we couldn't see that it was all our fault.

Get a book that has an opposing view of your world. From time to time, someone has to make fun of us or we start to take ourselves too seriously.

I've always wanted to write, and I sought the help of some pretty good writers. They gave me great advice. But no amount of advice can be applied to a blank page.

So I wrote, pretty badly at first, you can see it on my blog.

Writing is hard. Imagine, you have an idea in your head, and you like it. You grab a keyboard and write it down, somehow you write something else, not the idea in your head. You have to force your brain to say what it means to say.

There is no problem with reading other's advice, as long as you have some writing to apply it to. However, in my case I benefit more from reading what those people write, rather then read their advice.

The name is in the domain. Not my main website, but it is a fun project nevertheless.

[1]: https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/x23170.html