ndneighbor

That's my hope too- been at this company for 3+ years and there was a moment of time when it did truly feel like we would just spend time with only larger companies.

However, what's interesting is there is a direct correlation to the amount of conversations we can support and churn! We did put the walls up I'd say 18 months ago. Although it resulted in an okay business outcome as today, user churn numbers actually increased controlling for pricing changes.

Ever since we invested in our support tooling, we've been able to field more conversations and I think we (and the users) are better for it.

Talking to users- no matter how "small" they may be is a potential relationship for us to invest in. We will try to keep our heads to the ground always listening to users.

Talking to users and using our own product are the two hills we will die on. A company dies when they stop doing both, long before any financial reckoning I feel.

This was the case at ${lastCo} and it bothered me to no end as PM. My job is literally talking to customers! Why do I need to chat to a relationship manager so that I can talk to my own customer?!?

That exact point was my very axe to grind and why I am thankful to work on all sorts of comms. automations at Railway when they let me.

I agree, the growth marketer trend of nailing users with a marketing mailer every week drives me insane.

Yep- key point, we work in Discord. We blogged about that too, https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work

The blog post is a bit old but the point mostly stands- we try to keep our customers close to us, but lately, we have extolled the virtues of focus work, so we rotate the customer comms baton through our on-call system.

Excellent questions!

Railway has three support engineers who work on tooling + myself if you count me. (I have been more focused on customer migrations and classical sales as of late.)

One thing that I think we left out of the blog post which would have been helpful context is in our support tool, we have a queue of emails, Discord threads, forum posts, tickets, and Slack threads. Depending on the customer plan, we have an SLO assigned to the conversation. Enterprise people get a response in 1 hour, Pro in 24, and Hobby is best effort (usually 2-3 days at worst).

If we hit any of those timelines, the support on-call (a rotating person who is on the operations/GTM side of the house we call logistics) will get a page on PagerDuty. If the page is missed, it escalates up. We do a on-call rotation for support namely to make sure that we build the empathy for our customers for everyone at Railway while also testing if we built good tools that people know how to use. It's one thing to build something for yourself, a whole other thing to build for others.

Technically with the data flow we have, that is now possible :think:

Hypothesizing aside, there are some interesting options out there like Tightknit and (for Discord) AnswerOverflow. I still think that Slack makes it way too hard to spin up and start up a community- I think there are many Slacks like the CNCF's one that would be nice as a browsable index of content.

As such, Railway's been investing in our own forums for this reason http://help.railway.com/ because we've noticed the decline of forum culture - and we want to bring it back. (Async, well thought out responses)

Maybe this is the next step of that integration!

Oh shoot, double surprise, and now from someone who isn't my co-worker who posted this.

Developer of the feature here, happy to chat through details of the implementation and general developer GTM watercooler advice for those who are building for developers.

Author here! Wasn't expecting this to be posted today but AMA about this implementation.

tl;dr We rolled a two-way Slack bridge with full impersonation into our custom help center software to make 1000s of developers feel like they're getting white glove support directly in Slack. Happy to chat about tangents I couldn't completely explore in the blog.

Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand.

I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as.

If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so.

The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with.

Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.

I really did like this interview quite a bit and helped me deal with the shame of being a bit unfocused, Gwern shows that it all connects in the end.

As someone who used to run a similar program and be part of programs like these in the past, I am a bit underwhelmed by the structure of the program.

This is framed like a way to get free labor, and is a PR miss on the company. Ambassador programs work best when you "deputize" community members who are already doing a good job spreading the word and you give them the maximum allowable resources. This is not that, at the minimum I would be giving priority to batches, free test laptops, and access to the engineering team to people already doing the most promoting the Framework ecosystem.

Hoping that they adjust to the feedback, I love my Intel 11th 13 and would hate to see them accrue brand damage.

One thing I kinda wished was the ability to code into Figma, much like how in Storybook I can have a resource of brand compliant components. For me, it's much easier to rectangle draw and even work with auto-layout, but one side of me just wants an environment where I can define my Figma components with code and just drag 'em around.

That type of middle ground to me, isn't awkward because usually before I want to implement, I am trying to increase the velocity of me trying to play around with ideas before doing raw implementation. ...but that's just me.

As a Miami native, I can tell you for a fact Cuban remittances do indeed happen. The sanctions loosened after the Obama admin d'tente even after the Trump admin restored most of the controls. My alma matter https://cri.fiu.edu/cuban-america/remittance/ has a continued focus of research to see how much flows go back to island nation.

Anyway tl;dr is that Cubans use: https://havanaship.net/nueva-agencia-de-remesas-a-cuba-orbit, which is a gov't controlled remittance operator. As of commenting isn't on the OFAC controlled entity list. It used to be sanctioned after the previous remittance operator was associated with the Cuban Army but is now in compliance.

I guess this explains the recent uptick in spam...

I collect watches, it's my dumb hobby, but there is a cult following in the community for Soviet watches especially Vostoks on the whole price : value that you get from them.

You can see that the factories and materials that were limited really influenced their approaches to design. It's fascinating to see how Soviet engineers approached problems such as shock absorption or bezel design in a completely different manner than their Swiss contemporaries.

They are harder to get considering sanctions after the war in Ukraine but many collectors do revere their watches. I wish Vostoks weren't as out there with their designs nowadays but I hope to collect a few down the line.

I still don't get why there aren't enough monitor panels that are 5K so they can fit with Macintosh's retina standard. What ends up happening is the scaling is done at an incorrect multiple so the dpi causes text to be blurry and not clear.

I guess will have to stick with my LG Ultrafine for another year.

OneAPI isn't bad for PyTorch, the performance isn't there yet but you can tell it's an extremely top priority for Intel.

I hate that too- but the fraud... (And totally heard, I think the distinction on the product comparison vs. the GPL is useful.)

(Also if you send me an email to angelo@railway (dot) app- I will throw some credits your way so you can play around with it.)

Wait no- comments like this are what I enjoy. I personally struggle with the whole dichotomy of "marketing led" writing and then balancing that with just spending 2,000 words talking through test frameworks and cases. Maybe for a future blogpost, but the idea of stateful state tracking is a rabbit hole I can get buried under.

To address your main point, I think Git is in the same camp of Python's origins. Powerful despite the creator's initial intentions. Where like it or not, it becomes a powerful mental API to interact with domains. (Git -> Changesets, Python -> Notebooks/Repls)

When I was working on the material for the feature, I kept on trying to find a parallel that fit within people's mental model without it being a leaky abstraction. (Of course my colleague helps make me sound sane.) Other ideas to get people's attention was talking a bit about YAML, but to your point- I hate the bashing that most DevOps companies do that say: K8s is EVIL!!11!!!. Or end DevOps11!!!!!! - it's a series of practices that help you for an outcome, in the same way how Git, SVN, Mercurial, help you and a team track changes.

Changesets is just one way to maintain a production/infra practice a suite of recommendations that a team can adopt.

Thanks for commenting and I hope it was an interesting read :3

Hey all, OP here from the team who built this feature. This came about from years of trying to coordinate Infra changes from my days wrangling Mesos and then Docker and then, on Railway itsself. Hopefully you really enjoy the deep dive that went into making the backing system for this feature. (even if you don't use Railway)

I am an Intel shill lately but I think it's more of a time thing rather than the desire to keep stuff a secret. They've been pretty good about open documentation on the stuff that matters (like this) such as OpenVINO.

I struggled with game addiction. I found that I have a very addictive personality, when I like stuff, I REALLY LIKE IT. Apparently, I also found out that alcoholism runs in my family, it feels like it might be related.

I understand the struggle of gaming especially when most of your life isn't going so great. The appeal of escapism is hard to bear, that's why on most of my computers I can't install any video games because I found when I said yes to Dota, I was saying no to greater priorities in life.

The thing I stopped being hard on myself however is considering that the time spent playing video games was entirely wasted. My 1,600+ hours playing Dota weirdly enough translated into video editing skills that now help with my job. The anger that I had playing the game caused me to deeply look into managing said emotion. The reflection that I had a problem meant that I could improve myself overall. Sometimes a metaphor, such as games, makes us realize the deep seated issues we had all along...

Great post.

I am fortunate enough like most HN users to be working in tech, and although I can't speak for everyone in this field, we seem to be better off than most. Inflation's hit me hard but knock on wood if anything was to happen, I'd be okay.

However, my brother, who is just starting his career works in IT and has a $50,000~ a year salary. He lives in a Tier 3 city in Florida and the median rent for a studio there is $1,500, up from $600 five or so years ago. After taxes, car insurance, car payment, food, and a night out here and there, he barely can save anything after his student loan payments.

This is ridiculous. I can't imagine what others are facing when it comes to the cost of living crisis that is ongoing here. (And for other folks across the pond in England, it's even worse from what I hear.)

Throughout my travels of America, anecdotally, I am seeing more families making long term accommodations out of motels and we seem unwilling from our governments to even address this. I think it's going to get much worse until it gets better unfortunately...

I know it's not ideal, but I am really rooting for Intel's effort for graphics. From launch nearly a year ago to today, the driver team has been knocking out driver issues and slowly but surely trying to achieve parity with AMD and Nvidia. From what I hear, the team really going for broke on trying to get ML workloads fully supported. When Intel shipped a 16GB card at that price point, you knew that they were really trying, it would be cool if Battlemage (the next gen.) shipped with 32GB for larger models.

I love this answer so much. The garb of wizards indeed.

What's more interesting to me is how it became the shirt du jour of Principal Architects and Palmer Luckey alike, anyone have any insight there?

Getting 502 bad gateway :'(

I think that these update systems aren't intentional backdoors but rather the product of a software team that was put under the gun so to speak. Many products nowadays just leak consumer data (like Toyota's teletronics for their cars) because PMs just demand more and more connected features.

Still grossly irresponsible on Gigabyte's part...

Hey there Rishi, I was not aware someone posted this post on our behalf there. I raised this to Neb. This "feels" like a Windows issue. Whats your env?

Part of what I hated about Product Management at my last role was the consistent helplessness I felt when I was on calls with our customers. I could tell our product wasn't meeting their needs but all I could do was try my best to give the engineers context on how best to eventually meet them.

I remember my first few days on the job just being ripped to shreds by our customers who (understandably) were slighted. Don't miss those days at all.