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olegp

2,220 karma · joined November 3, 2008

Founder at toughbyte.com, starting something new
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olegp··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
This might be useful: https://www.techtrib.es/guide
olegp··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
There was one 14 years ago. I even gave a talk there once. Maybe some of the original organizers or attendees who commented on this post would be interested in rebooting it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4754269
olegp··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
WhatsApp isn't really required. If you submit the form, we will email about about the date and location of the next event.
olegp··on Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
We're not too strict about that, please join!
olegp··on World Happiness Report 2026
If you happen to be based in the capital of the happiest country in the world and want to be even happier, we have a Hacker News meetup: http://bit.ly/helsinkihn
olegp··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great!

I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.

IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.

olegp··on Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s
That sounds interesting, maybe I could help on the business side of things somehow. I'll email you my calendar link.
olegp··on Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s
Thanks! I noticed afterwards that you mention Kamal in your readme, but you may want to add a comparison section that you link to where you compare your solution to others.

Are you working on this full time and if so, how are you funding it? Are you looking to monetize this somehow?

olegp··on Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s
How's this similar to and different from Kamal? https://kamal-deploy.org/
olegp··on I visited the happiest country. I wish I could unlearn its secret
If you happen to already be in the capital of the happiest country, you should know that we have a Hacker News meetup here: https://bit.ly/helsinkihn

Hopefully this will make you even happier!

olegp··on Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
Unrelated, but if you happen to be in Helsinki, you should join the local Hacker News meetup: https://bit.ly/helsinkihn
olegp··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
If you're in Helsinki, you should come to the next Hacker News meetup on May 18th: https://bit.ly/helsinkihn
olegp··on RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI
Great, thank you!
olegp··on RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI
Would anyone happen to know of a similar library with as good DX but for JavaScript or TypeScript?
olegp··on Tell HN: Helsinki HN Coffee Morning
Looking forward to it! I really enjoyed the HN meetups in London and Cologne, but it's been quite a few years since they had the last ones.
olegp··on Show HN: I am Building a Producthunt alternative
No problem, it's better to launch early.
olegp··on Show HN: I am Building a Producthunt alternative
Congrats on launching! I just submitted https://www.freeats.com

I liked the submission flow, it was nice and simple. The only issue is that at the end of the process I got a page that looked like it was broken, so had to manually navigate to the main page.

olegp··on Optimize Database Performance in Ruby on Rails and ActiveRecord
We're using it for https://www.freeats.com/, an open source applicant tracking system we just launched.

You can check out the source here: https://github.com/freeats/freeats

olegp··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.

We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.

We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.

Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com

olegp··on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
I run the Helsinki JavaScript meetup (https://meetabit.com/communities/helsinkijs) and we also built our own Rails based Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit, so let me comment on your points. I hope this is useful to the original poster as well.

1. Agreed, this has been a huge problem. We partially solved it by adding a captcha, forcing email address verification and adding nofollow to outbound links. Even so we get some spam communities created on occasion which we clean up semi-automatically.

2. Not been a problem for us, but we don't have any social networking features.

3. Has not been a problem for the site for the reason above. However, this has been a bit of an issue at the actual meetups. We've recently introduced an anti-harassment policy to address this problem and I'm thinking of adding functionality related to that to Meetabit.

4. We have a Facebook group as well which was quite active before the pandemic. Now it is completely dead. Whenever I promote events I get the most engagement on LinkedIn of all places. Email is still the best way to get the word out though.

5. Agree about not trying to be everything to everyone. I also think there's a big difference between professional and non-professional meetups, so we've focused on the former with an additional focus on tech. This has allowed us to grow to about 8K users so far with no marketing spend. The features that we have that Meetup.com does not are: talk proposals and archive as well as sponsorship profiles and offers.

As an aside, in case anyone here is considering starting a tech meetup, I've written a few short blog posts on how to run one, which you may find interesting: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/what-is-a-meetup-and-why-shou...

olegp··on Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
Previous discussion when he was arrested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436413
olegp··on Meetup has been acquired by Bending Spoons
Just to provide another data point, I've been running the HelsinkiJS meetup (https://helsinkijs.org/) for 12 years and our upcoming event has had 230+ people register within a day, which is a record. We've also got sponsors lined up for the next 6+ months.

I should add that we ended up building https://meetabit.com/ to make it easier to run the events and it's now being used by around 10 tech meetups in Finland. So, if you're looking for a free Meetup.com alternative, you should check it out. If you have some questions, drop me a line at doreply@meetabit.com.

olegp··on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
A browser based controller for the LEGO Duplo train using the Web Bluetooth API. It works best on mobiles in portrait mode and you can find it here: https://legotrain.netlify.app/

The source is a single HTML file that also contains the JS. Just view source and modify if you're interested in taking this further. What's cool is that the protocol allows you to receive readings from the train and not just send commands. Also, it allows you to drive the train faster than you can via the official mobile app.

olegp··on Ask HN: Have you made IRL friends from HN usage?
I met my co-founder as a result of him posting a Show HN and my comment on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262380

We've been working together on Toughbyte, our second venture, for more than eight years now: https://www.toughbyte.com

olegp··on Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team
Thanks for taking the time to explain!

I suppose I wasn't clear, but we don't typically help with the first tech hires, since I haven't figured out how to do it in a scalable manner. I also believe that very few external recruiters can help here, since most don't have the tech skills required.

Fair point about the blog. I probably wouldn't have written the comment if I didn't think that we have relevant useful content there that I could link to.

olegp··on Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team
What is it about my comment that made you classify it as such? The link to the blog post I wrote or something else?

I'm genuinely curious.

olegp··on Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team
My advice would be to find advisors who are experts in these skills and have them screen for them, while you do everything else. Pay them for their time in cash or options. Make sure to hire senior level people first and then have them screen for these skills in subsequent hires going forward.

Finding external recruiters that are able to screen for these skills is another option, but such recruiters are few and far between and their interests may not be aligned with yours.

At Toughbyte we do tech recruitment and have helped early stage startups hire CTOs on a few occasions where I have been the one assessing their tech skills and culture fit, but this isn't something that I have yet figured out how to delegate properly to other team members.

When it comes to assessing tech skills, this blog post I wrote is worth a read: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/how-to-effectively-assess-cod...

Other posts tagged Hiring may also be of interest.

olegp··on Ask HN: Engineering managers, how do you onboard new hires?
At Toughbyte, our onboarding process looks like this: on the first working day, the new employee has all the necessary accounts set up and receives a document where we’ve detailed how we see their progress after one week, one month, and three months of work. An onboarding checklist helps the new developer navigate the company knowledge base, understand the technologies we’re using, our code base, and the most common mistakes to avoid.

We try to get the new employee to write code from the very first day. They start with simple tasks, such as fixing issues on the frontend, adding tests, and working on the business logic. Such tasks help them get acquainted with the code and lower the risk of breaking something critical.

The onboarding guide is also useful for mentors. It describes the learning plan for the new developer, as well as how to better organize the learning process itself.

More info here: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/how-we-hire-junior-developers...

olegp··on FibJS: Based on V8, uses fibers instead of async
You're right and I was wrong to say that a scheduler isn't needed. I assume a fiber scheduler is usually much simpler than a thread scheduler though, since it just needs to decide which fiber to run, rather than how long to run a thread for and where.
olegp··on FibJS: Based on V8, uses fibers instead of async
It's not a joke. There is no scheduling strategy, since fibers allow only for non pre-emptive multitasking. There may be multiple fibers, but only one running at a time within the same process. If a second request comes in while another is processing and assuming that the first doesn't yield control by doing I/O, for example, then the second request isn't processed until the first one completes. If the first does yield control, then the two may be processed in parallel within the same process, just like with async/await.
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