justinram11

I graduated college and started the digital nomad thing back in 2016 -- first traveling to mainland China and then spending some time in Taiwan.

Intending to stay a stay a few months, I thought it would be good to learn the basics and met my now-wife through a language exchange group.

Time has a way of getting away from you, and I've now lived in Taiwan for a decade now with a 5 and a 2 year old. The first couple of years I did sit down and self-study for 30-60m a day, but have mostly deferred my dreams of getting to an advanced level to later in life.

I'm currently at a lower-intermediate level (somewhere around old HSK4) -- can get around (food, transportation, etc), handle most government and doctor visits, and have basic conversations around weather, food, and where I'm from. I still can't handwrite anything other than my chinese name, but can get by with pinyin on my phone and computer just fine.

I did actually vibe code an app to try and break through the intermediate plateau whenever I get time to come back to it (maybe once both kids are in school): https://nextword.app (note I haven't kept it up to date or am even sure if stripe still works on it).

Something I've enjoyed more than I expected is Google and Apple photos sending me photo memories and compilations of various things in my life and my kids lives over the last decade.

I'm really bullish on taking more video of my kids, with the thought that it will become easier and easier for AI to put them into little compilations I can enjoy later.

Mostly for myself (stripe isn't actually even hooked up anymore afaik), but a Mandarin language learning app: https://nextword.app .

Deepseek v4 pro does a pretty good job of actually adhering to the word restrictions.

Most language learning content is "slop" anyway -- so might as well generate slop that's at least a little interesting.

Actually on my list this week to take a look at putting an intelligence escalation flow MVP together (initial assumption would be that flash is good for 60-80% of my user's workflows, with only the tricky questions needing a more capable model. Whether I can put together a proper detection system is yet to be seen).

That's about what we've seen as well (even directly from deepseek themselves).

We've been using it for async "heartbeat" processing and sms replies, but it's just too slow for live chat replies (which is a shame, as I'd really love to use it there).

Very capable model, but also very slow.

Bought the exact same machine (same config and ram as well) around the same time off ebay for ~$280. Part of me wonders if I should sell it, but I do occasionally like to play with homelab stuff.

I have a 3060 12gb card I'd love to hook up to my PoE Reolink cameras for face detection and to get off of the Reolink app.

I actually enjoy it much more than I thought I would.

I love tinkering and solving problems on the computer, and it's fun to have a space to do it with my hands in the real world. Learning the basics of carpentry to erect a fence, basics of plumbing and the various international fitting types to install a (from japan) bidet toilet, cat6 throughout the house and trench out to the garage, basics of hvac for a whole-house humidifier and smart thermostat (MN winters) -- have all felt like very fun projects.

Next project is probably trying to replace the plumbing up to our second floor bathroom with pex (water pressure upstairs is very poor).

Also helps that I have a very handy dad that I can fall back on to ask questions or help.

This was around 2020-2022 during COVID, but the whole process from start to finish from Taiwan took a little over two years for us (we had issues with the financial supporting documents that took 3 months round trip twice to get resolved -- so potentially would have been closer to 18 months had we done everything correctly).

Extremely frustrating process to say the least (my Taiwan resident card was sorted in less than a month).

Just bought that exact kit for my Minisforum 790S7 build at the eye watering $592... Kicking myself as I was just starting to contemplate it early Oct but not yet seriously looking

Have you checked out Ona [1] (gitpod's pivot)?

[1] https://ona.com/

As a mostly java dev, I choose Rails 8 w/ Jumpstart Pro [1] for my latest startup and it's been a joy to work with.

There is something about Rails' convention over configuration that plays really well with LLMs, and I love not having to fiddle with _too_ much javascript (it's still tbd whether hotwire and stimulus is actually better than react from my POV).

I've recently started also exploring Hotwire Native to get mobile apps launched and so far have been really impressed that it "mostly just works".

If I'm successful, I'm sure I will get to a scale where I'm wishing for static typing, but so far I've been able to accomplish way more with Rails in the same amount of time than I have in any other stack.

To answer your question, I'm very open to paying for features that I think will save me time (such as JumpStart). From what I've read, however, I think that's a hard road to go down to be frank.

[1] https://jumpstartrails.com/

Curious if the suspend / hibernate "just works" when you close the lid?

I feel like I've tried several times to get this working in both Linux and Windows on various laptops and have never actually found a reliable solution (often resulting in having a hot and dead laptop in my backpack).

Although I think Cursor has the best UX (love how they queue up diffs that you then go through and can review/approve/deny easily while the agent still works), I've since switched to Claude Code + JetBrains IDEs as the sweet spot for powerful IDE + AI Agent.

Perhaps I just haven't found the right combination of plugins, but I can't for the life of me get VSCode code navigations (go to, find definitions, refactor method, etc) to work half as well as a JetBrains IDE (much less get a debugger working).

I've recently been experimenting with Jumpstart Rails [1] in Cursor and it feels like a super power (coming from a generalist-but-mostly-spring-boot dev).

I'm really burnt out by the current state of JS, and the way rails 8.0 does server-side rendering feels like a complete breath of fresh air. The ability to just add slight JS functionality with stimulus and action cable seems like just the right level of abstraction for most web apps.

[1] https://jumpstartrails.com/

Kotlin would have definitely been a step up over Java purely for null safety.

In hindsight, RoR or Django would probably have been a better starting place considering their financial constraints (non-technical bootstrapping founders), but now that they are larger and more established Spring Boot seems a great framework given their current situation (the originally contracting code needed a major re-write anyway so I'm not sure that would have actually costed more time to go from RoR/Django -> Spring Boot)

The startup that I work at had started as a project a contracting company had taken on, and they had chosen Java Spring Boot to handle their REST API backend back in 2020.

Although probably not the decision I would have made, it's actually a pretty nice ecosystem that has scaled really well and been fairly easy to work with. Java 21 has _most_ of the QoL features that I like (I'd still really like a `?.` null operator that I can chain together) as well as the ability to reach for JPQL/SQL easily with JpaRepositories when performance is needed.

It's been fairly easy to onboard devs to the project even if they have not had previous experience with Java, and has maintained relatively decent code quality over the last 4 years.

I'm currently working on a LLM project for them that is being completed in Python, however, due to most of the tools being python-first and most of the LLM talent being python-first.

> Oh, and the original author doesn't work here anymore so no one's here to explain the original code's intent.

To be fair, even if I still work there I don't know that I'm going to be of much help 6 months later other than a "oh yeah, I remember that had some weird business requirements"

IANAL or Accountant, but just a heads up that under the new Section 174 rules, foreign developers have to be amortized over 15 years (5 years for a domestic developer)

Hsinchu, Taiwan

Pro: Taiwan is overall a very convenient place to live. Cheap delicious food; convenience stores on every other block; public transportation is great in Taipei, decent everywhere else; beautiful mountain hiking trails, and beautiful beaches in the south; very friendly people

Con: Real-estate is ridiculously expensive especially when you factor in the local salaries; Local work culture is very much long hours to give the boss face (I work remotely); Mandarin isn't the easiest language to learn (especially if you have hopes of reading/writing); The Taiwanese often miss my favorite form of humor -- sarcasm

(Living in Hsinchu to be close to my wife's family while we have little kids, but Kaohsiung and Taipei are tied for my favorite Taiwanese city to live).

Same thing in our case -- we didn't want to move to the US right away (wanted to spend ~6-9 more months in Taiwan anyway). It ended up being a 2 year slog through covid, was brutal.

Wish we would have had an overwhelming urge to get married when we were visiting my family in the states instead.

Had literally the exact same issue with my spouse, but without the luck of finding an insurance person who cared. At the end of the day, it wasn't worth the $200 to continue fighting it (had already invested ~5 hours into phone calls back and forth between the clinic and insurance company).

Infuriating to say the least.

When I was 12-13 I wanted to get a new gaming laptop, and so learned enough HTML to sell custom websites on Craigslist for $50 a pop over a summer, and made close to $600 (my parents helped cover the rest).

That turned into php and custom wordpress implementations for more money (all terribly coded in retrospect). I even ended up making a 100% custom CMS for our WoW guild website.

I've never been great at sitting down with a book to learn, and need a problem I'm trying to actively solve (with much googling).

Please shoot me a message -- email on profile

Fresh Coffee -- I had bought an expensive latte machine but was still using typical store-bough coffee. My latte's were "good" but not "great".

Ordered fresh light roast coffee from Happy Mug and it's like a whole new world. I'm getting Cherry, Blueberry, Coconut, Raspberry flavors in my latte every morning that I didn't even know were possible.

MoneyDolly | Senior Flutter Developer | US Remote | Full-Time

MoneyDolly is transforming the North American fundraising industry by putting more money into the hands of students and allowing them to do what they love.

We are looking for a senior flutter developer who's loves wearing multiple hats and able to help us define, implement, and architect our mobile fundraising app.

We are a small team of 6 developers that have a high degree of trust with all of our team members. We are looking for someone who thrives in an environment of high autonomy while keeping a sane work/life balance (most of us have families).

If interested, please send your resume over with "HN Flutter" in the subject to (CTO/Tech Lead): justin [at] moneydolly.com

I didn't realize the creator of Skritter was on HN! Just want to say that I've really enjoyed your app, and it's helped immensely with trying to learn Chinese

MoneyDolly | Generalist Data Engineer | REMOTE - US | https://moneydolly.com

MoneyDolly is transforming the North American fundraising industry by putting more money into the hands of students and allowing them to do what they love.

We are looking for a data engineer who's loves wearing multiple hats and able to help us define, implement, and analyze our data to help our company grow and tackle new markets and features.

We are a small team of 6 developers that have a high degree of trust with all of our team members. We are looking for someone who thrives in an environment of high autonomy while keeping a sane work/life balance (most of us have families).

Familiar with (or adjacent technologies): DBT, Data Modeling, SQL, Python / Pipelines, Business Intelligence

If interested, please send your resume over with "HN" in the subject to (CTO/TechLead): justin [at] moneydolly.com

I agree with the financial plan -- draw a line in your bank account for when you will start looking for a job again.

You can then calibrate what you want to do with approximately how much time you want to take off (i.e. it's much cheaper to backpack around SE Asia [sans the plane ticket] than it is to take a luxury vacation in Switzerland).

Would suggest not having an experience plan though -- I did something similar after graduating college (with very little financial safety net) and the most liberating thing ever was to wake up everyday and not have a plan for what I was going to do that day (I'm smiling right now at that feeling).

Book a flight to Bangkok, get a hostel for 3-5 days to get over the jetlag, and plan your trip as you go -- you never know who you're going to meet along the way or where the wind might take you.

I've also noticed this while learning Chinese -- I think quite a bit of the initial difficulty with learning a second language is just training your brain what to expect next.

Going into a 711 to get a coffee in Taiwan you know approximately what questions they are going to ask: size, hot/cold, do you want a bag (to hang on your scooter), and do you want a receipt.

Similar with the supermarket, a restaurant, when getting train tickets, etc.

You're just building up what questions to expect next for the scenario -- if the conversation deviates from that (even with words or questions you might know) your brain has a hard time initially adapting to that.

CSCI 1901 (Computer Programming I) at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities