tropshop

Did the massive regulation on the taxi industry stop Uber? If you build something people find genuinely useful, you will become a force that causes the market to adapt. Regulation follows innovation.

I recently found https://svelte.technology and looking forward to trying it out. It has no run-time like React or any other virtual DOM engine, but instead does compile-time static analysis.

It is a Rich Harris project (authored Rollup, Ractive, Bublé) so might be worth paying attention to.

> It is not, however, pedophilia, or in any way behavior associated with pedophilia

Sorry that the general public does not follow the guidelines of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

He/she is not just being pedantic, but also disingenuous by attempting to paint it as clear cut black and white. Hebephilia is absolutely closely related to pedophilia, and should not be tolerated any less.

I'm throwing out a generalization, but developers tend to have destructive personality traits when it comes to collaboration. I've never seen mentorship discouraged for those who work well with other people. It can level up a team and compound productivity. If you are seen as easily triggered or judgemental, your manager is wise to limit your interactions, since you can still be a productive individual contributor.

I'm not on Facebook, but from the outside, it sure looks like pure evil. A tool for the state and other powers that be to gauge the pulse on what is culturally acceptable so they can further shape the narrative of underlying agenda. This one was a miss, but someone is up to something and I'm sure this will re-surface in the future after more time spent blurring the lines. Maybe an army of bots and shill accounts promoting a catchy hashtag aimed at 14 year olds as the new grown and sexy.

We deserve better. Let's build tools truly focused on the community and the well-being of those who participate to better connect and uplift the world around us.

Just wanted to note that I found myself nodding as I read through almost all your recent comments. As someone just starting to bootstrap a business, I'm curious about yours. Care to share?

E-commerce is unique in that it has such a massive impact on revenue generation, but the skills needed to effectively manage it are rarely inline with the core competencies of the business.

Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship a product that immediately increases revenue in a fraction of the time. It generally only takes a few basic UI improvements and timing strategic automatic email tiggers.

Find a consultant that will make more from what you already have, and move on to your business problems. You don’t need to pivot into an internet company to be successful.

> Bulletin makes it effortless to put a spotlight on inspiring stories that aren’t being told.

Bulletin will never take off with this as a core objective. Consuming stories and producing ever increasing click bait material is what drove society to social media addiction.

People escape this when it comes to local community. People care about action and real world interactions. A generic feed of user content that happened to be published by someone near you is not a very strong signal, and more importantly, does nothing to push you towards action.

Many comments here lean towards Bulletin having potential to be useful if Google gets this right. Well, I'm not convinced it is off on the right start. We should focus on specific niches, and build software to help them connect. In the process, shape an underlying platform that supports communication for all these niche groups, but without a one-size-fits-all user experience. Bulletins can be spawned for city council, schools, professional associations, family activities, or any topic where people share a common interest and attend events. This has been churning on my mind for some time now, and I hope to pave some way on this in 2018. It is interesting to see Facebook and Google declare local communities and groups as a priority. They almost look incompetent on how to actually serve these needs. They have all the money and resources imaginable to throw at it, but I think orchestrating these products simply run counter to their DNA.

Why must this quality be present at the founding table? I work with small businesses (<50M revenue) who have software needs to better connect with customers. The company leaders and stakeholders have successfully grown a business through a combination of hustle, good fortune, and retaining productive employees.

Growth problems occur as the business scales and decisions inevitably favor the shortest possible path to a better solution, however small, and with little regard to the long term. Balancing the long term with the incremental iterations is the holy grail of strategy. It takes a blend of industry expertise, the sales funnel, and the right software abstractions that solve cross-cutting problems.

Most founders know the first two very well, but the last one is difficult to crack. It requires sound architectural knowledge of the current system, along with a curious interest of how the rest of the company works. The lines of code need to be secondary to the human side of the business. This is a rare find.

Great founders find a way to fill this role. Sometimes they land a great hire, but other times they find a trusted consultant, and keep the vision flowing from the top.

I hope more software engineers start to recognize the value in the knowledge they have, and shift their focus on how to maximally _apply_ it, instead of waiting for a requirements document and acceptance criteria.

What you described is a hiring problem. Marketing is knowing who your buyer is and finding creative ways to get their attention.

Try working on your positioning so that you are not hitched to the <JS framework of the year>. You will forever be competing with the low end of the market if you cannot market yourself.

Strong technical leadership and defining clear code boundaries is the secret sauce to scaling successfully. The shiniest tooling will not save your team.

Hi Kabir,

Everybody here seems to want to dish out advice, but I'd like to turn the mic to you. I'm a new parent with two kids under 3. I also started my career my learning HTML/CSS on my own in the early 2000s. It was a different world back then. What are you most grateful for about how your parents raised you, and what constraints did they impose? I want to protect my kids from all the crap, but don't want to stifle their creativity and desire to learn freely.

I left mithril for domvm. It has a smaller focus and less magic.

https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm

Or, the group of four writes something an order of magnitude more complex. It becomes difficult to make changes, estimates grow, and execution is consistently buggy.

With the right unicorn, one can act swiftly, groom a lean architecture, and make instinctive calls that move the needle of the entire roadmap. Real unicorns present sound technical strategies and inspire new opportunities that help push the company to the next level.

Then I guess this market is ripe for disruption: aka a boring CRUD app that eliminates paper and increases network visibility.

What do hyper-productive teams look like these days? I've always been part of small teams, with only a few true workhorses, joined by other filler bodies. Productivity was mostly a mystery to management.

I do not understand team sizes of 50+ for some web app product. The formula only requires a few (3) workhorses that make up a collaboration of skills in product design and engineering, and finding ways to keep them curious. Add a junior position if a workhorse is keen on mentorship.

Why take on such high risk with a large team?

In production, I have a horribly designed schema running couchdb 1.6 and node. It is serving a few thousand users, but has serious architectural issues.

I started in freelance php web development, then switched to Ruby/Rails in 2006 and haven't looked back. I'm now thinking mobile access, unreliable networks, and global connectivity so it was time to re-survey the land. My MVP was with Node.js and CouchDB 1.6, but now I'm almost ready with a much more robust and well defined rewrite in Phoenix 1.3 and CouchDB 2.1

I agree that the 2.0 release was subpar. I actually needed to beta test against master because of a bug in the 2.0.0 release. But even with the rough patches, cutting Node.js and going all in on BEAM/OTP - I'm hoping will pay off for the next decade and then some.

As far as CouchDB, I agree nothing is a magic bullet, but after better learning the entire CouchDB API surface, I was much better off at schema design and where to put logic in _design files vs application layer. I actually run a conflict-free schema now, and still benefit from master-master sync and first class offline support. I'm not saying the concepts are trivial, but when done in the correct CouchDB way, and getting all the benefits that come with that, I cannot imagine what it would take to manually handle sync logic with Ruby and SQL, which is why I asked.

> So, systems with many users (tens of thousands -> millions) would be stuck replicating an equal number of couch databases constantly

I also ran into this when using `continuous: true` to create persistent replication, which suffers from this 1-to-1 resource problem. I now use a single listener on `_db_changes` and fire one-off replication to the aggregate db. I'm also keeping an eye on spiegel[1]

I'm curious on how you handle offline support, sync conflicts, and multiple devices. I started with CouchDB 1.x and have been through enough growing pains to wonder how things would have been to stick with SQL, but I think the future is only brighter. CouchDB 2.1 looks great, and I hope the entire erlang ecosystem continues to see growth and adoption.

[1] https://github.com/redgeoff/spiegel

Code is a liability.

I used to think the evenings when the whole family is asleep was the best time to get in the zone as well. But then I would be up until 3am and have a hard time sleeping. Grogginess would linger around the next day, and my wife and kids would get the short, irritable side of me. I felt I was constantly fighting to be productive.

Now, I have an exercise routine in the mornings. I wake up with my 2 daughters (both under 3) at ~7am and immediately setup for a 30min workout video. The kids love routine, so they adapted very easily. I make breakfast after cooling down, my wife is able to have a peaceful shower, then around 9am she takes over. I think that moment to herself in the morning helps her to reset for another crazy day.

Now I hit the shower and my mind now starts to lock in. I start creating a mental agenda of what I need to get done. Feeling rejuvenated, I hit the ground running. Creativity and focus now flow naturally throughout the day. I usually feel super productive and accomplished by dinner time. It is easy to let go and be ready to join the family. Sometimes I continue working through dinner, but no screens after 10pm has given me massive productivity gains.

I thought this was a native app?

I haven't used Mongo before. I have always been a Ruby/SQL shop, but now using Elixir/CouchDB. It was an awkward transition away from SQL, but I'm betting on this as a future stack.

Most notable: You write your logic in JS (See _view and _list functions). There are no transactions. Geolocation is not easy.

He is not talking about a pure web app, he actually explicitly said _hybrid_

Hybrid definition: a thing made by combining two different elements; a mixture.

Using a cordova plugin to tap into native code while developing with web standards is a hybrid approach.

> This is the kind of polish that's really hard to do in hybrid, especially power efficiently.

Actually, CouchDB is great at supporting offline-first, local data that syncs behind the scenes.

Here are two mobile implementations that will work cross-platform:

https://github.com/couchbaselabs/Couchbase-Lite-PhoneGap-Plu...

https://github.com/cloudant/sync-cordova-plugin

Or more people are just moving on from Rails. I used to religiously follow every release. That ended shortly have the first few 3.x releases

Would you elaborate on what makes a disease a good fit and these grand-challenge class problems?