You know, I’ve found myself doing the same thing: I usually have a git versioned ‘notes.org’ file in whatever repo I’m working in, and I’ll rebase it away before opening the branch for peer review. I also don’t feel the need to do this with my personal projects, not even the larger ones.
I suppose that’s because I insist on understanding more of the tech stack for my personal projects than I do for my work projects.
What is YCombinator's take for their 100k investment? Also, it seems like YCombinator sells businesses as a product, not product as a business. Like their marketing on the website is all geared to investing in a business, not investing in a product that leads to a business. That seems to be the 21st century trend. Can you explain this dichotomy in today's market? It seems kinda fake.
Number of github repos, which likely correlates to number of users. It also is probably a better gauge of the number of maintained, relevant libraries available. Clojure is used in production quite a bit nowadays, and there are excellent libraries for all kinds of modern tasks.
Can you elaborate on the Californian bias with regard to community colleges? Is the California community college system better/worse than other states?
I’m a native Californian that went straight to a 4 year, but I sometimes think about how much cheaper college would have been if I had gone to community first.
Went to CC in California. Paid ridiculously little. All classes transferred, started with killer foundations at a fraction of the cost. Transferred to UC. Been employed 8 years. Nobody's ever asked where the first 2 years of college were from. Not even for my first job.
I don't know why more people don't go that route. It's like $26 dollars a unit, the books cost more than the classes do. The professors were dope as hell - especially in the hard sciences. Plus you didn't have a lecture hall with 150, 200 kids in it - you had 30, 50 for a "big" class. The instructors always showed up to office hours, they all spoke great English, and actually cared if you understood the material - they weren't ditching class to prepare for a conference, or having a TA do the actual teaching. They genuinely liked their subjects.
Going to CC is practically a secret weapon. I'd hire a CC graduate over a "bootcamp" graduate any day of the week.
I believe the California community college system is better than most states. Let me elaborate.
In the summer before my freshman year, I didn't really have much to do, and so I decided to take up a course. My options were to either take it at the UC where I'd attend, or to take an equivalent offering at a local CC. When I looked at the price, there was a 10-fold difference, $2000 against $200.
It was a no brainer to enroll at the CC: transferring credits was easy because the UC system and the CC system already have an agreement [1]. This is in addition to the transfer agreement between the two institutions, where CC students are guaranteed admission to some of the UCs if they fulfill the requirements [2].
Before the first day, I recall having low expectations; I had bought into the mindset that a smaller tuition meant a shabbier campus and a worse experience. I was dreadfully wrong: the place was modern, and my class size numbered around 15 people.
More over, its population was diverse. I didn't see only college students; there were middle schoolers, high schoolers, international students, and even parents dragging their children to camps. In general, the place had people serious enough about their education that they would spend a nice summer doing so.
Here, it seemed was a greater emphasis on the community side of college. I want to mention that this is in contrast to what I've previous seen. I came from a high school which didn't focus on getting people ahead, but on only keeping them from following behind; that was the primarily the idea of summer school. I've also heard of high school students paying for private SAT/ACT tutoring, and for online AP courses. In hindsight, CCCs act as equalizers in the field of education -- I would even say they are the modern day equivalent of churches in our state.
I’ve been programming lisp for a few years now (Scheme then CL) and write Clojure daily for my current job. I initially described Clojure as: the worst dialect of lisp I’ve used, but the only one I’ve been paid to write in. It’s grown a lot on me over the past few months, but I still end up missing CL every now and then at work (I think I mainly like CL’s Slime more than Clojure’s Cider).
What were some unsettling points about the Clojure project you worked on? One thing I’ve noticed is that since Clojure is a relatively new language, a lot of newer lispers will start off with it, and I imagine that companies are more likely to try Clojure than CL as a first lisp. Consequently, the Clojure code you run into on the job may be of lower quality.
Laziness is quite dangerous given existence of side effects in Clojure - this would the most common error for new developers. I missed LOOP even it has a bad reputation - nevertheless it covers almost all useful cases in practice. We were misusing AOT compilation, the behavior of that code was surprising sometimes.
But the main failure in my opinion was absence of good development patterns which leverage strengths of the language and mitigate weaknesses. Dynamic languages such as lisp absolutely need REPL as primary development mode, conventions has to be strictly enforced and consistency is much more important than in languages with rich static typing. Clojure can be and is successful in many projects. But if your team is trying write Java with parenthesis everything is hard.
But patchwork is a pale comparison to many of the web based collaborative code review tools. Its basically a patch tracker plus some simple state tracking, rather than a full blown interactive communications tool.
Of course, my pleasure :) I'll send you an email too just to say hi.
So, in my case, I was living in Chile and I had booked tickets to Thailand and Japan (Ironically I ended up moving back to the USA for a full time job that I wasn't planning on landing!!)
In Chiang Mai Thailand, specifically, you can book a 1-3 month apartment for about $150 a month USD cash. They speak english, there's no lease, no craziness. And only a few guest houses offer these types of prices and terms, so you really had to hear about it from a friend of a friend type situation.
So I wanted to build a site that was a "curated list" of these apartments. And I didn't even have firm data, names and numbers of landlords, availability, etc. I just wanted to make something that looked and felt like airbnb, but was light-weight and mobile friendly (text, css, and basic js only. site load files of just a few KB not MB!!!)
So, I mocked it up, and made some posts to some reddits and discords where I was only sort of a contributing member. I basically said, "guys, all of us are having a lot of problems finding legit landlords with good terms and prices abroad. I have a list of a few that are good, but I want to scale it out and make it available as like a public service to our channel. Is this something you guys would read? aka, is it worth my time to do this for fun?"
And the response was overwhelming. "YES! I want to see this list!" and "Thank you so much!!! I'm having no luck booking a room right now". and etc etc. People I've never heard of messaging me for months, "Did you finish it yet?"
From a technical standpoint, the site was a success. It looked and felt like a responsive airbnb that worked on any device. The problem was that it was extremely, extremely difficult to collect data of any kind. Language barriers, not network effects, nothing. These landlords are so hard to find, they're like ghosts!!!
So the product fell dormant because of an inability to scale to the level of service needed for it to be useful. But the demand is there, and the grassroots method I used to discover that demand was really successful and mostly by accident ;)
I know the line of business you’re talking about - getting landlords to list their properties. It is a gnarly problem, but one that’s solvable. The catch is that it is truly hyper local.
You can’t do Thai from Chile. It needs to be done by being physically present in different major Thai destinations that you want to list, going from door to door to meet the landlords you already know about, and to discover other you don’t know about. It is literally a pariah dog’s job while you’re getting started (and you’ll graduate into a working dog’s job if you’re successful), but once you have established basic rapport and have the contact numbers (not just emails) of the landlords, you could very well just call from from a nice Thai beach, as long as you maintain periodic physical contact. It is great that the app is polished, but additionally (if you already havent) you’ll have to make the technical side such that it is extremely easy to update - and the owners can do it themselves. Convice the owners to do it themselves. Make a few local friends who speak English, and are young and hungry, make them commissioned agents. Take them along with you, assign each renter to an agent, and be fair (and initially generous) with the agents. But be sure you the “keys” are with only you.
If you do it right, and are able to be accepted into the culture (important to behave as they do, be very humble, and give up the traditional “confidence”/arrogance commonly espoused in western society), and be sociable enough to blend in with the landlords, you might become a social phenomenon, and get many more landlords through word of mouth. I strongly recommend you give a serious go, physically, hyper-locally, town-to-town, house-to-house. Not just make the app and expect that the supply side will come looking (the demand side will, you’ve already figured that out). You have to go to them, convince them, request them, implore to them, show them the money, and the potential market (don’t expect them to understand the benefits straight off the bat). You’ll also get into trouble when a renter trashes a place. When you do, either sell to AirBnB or hire experienced people from that company. When you pull it off, you’ll be like a mini/local airbnb, and worth a decent fraction of what they’re worth.
Understand that this is a supply-demand business. Your demand will be off the internet. Market it the way you know. The supply part is very different. Do Thai landlords frequent Reddit in droves?
I suppose that’s because I insist on understanding more of the tech stack for my personal projects than I do for my work projects.