Housecall Pro (www.housecallpro.com) | San Diego, CA | Onsite | Full Time
Our core product is Housecall Pro, an end-to-end SaaS platform that runs all aspects of an SMB home services company, including: scheduling, dispatching, CRM, invoicing, payment processing, and remarketing.
The Housecall Pro backend enables our consumer marketplace, Housecall. Housecall facilitates the complete experience for consumer home services transactions, including: messaging, direct booking, job management, and payment.
Our end-game is to eliminate all the friction of completing services work of any kind. We are looking for someone that revels in the opportunity to solve a problem of this magnitude.
We recently closed our Series-B and have been scaling all parts of the company. Engineering, Product, Sales, Marketing, and Operations all have open roles.
To clarify, it was one landing where I broke two bones. Made a bad decision at the bridge on my 9th jump and broke both sides of my ankle smoking into the side of the canal. I tell everyone I know exactly how I ended up in that situation, what my decision making process was, and how I assess jumps now in order to not put myself in the same situation again.
Also, I work at a large dropzone and with a well-organized group to help coach new jumpers along the way. Me breaking myself on my first weekend is a pretty strong coaching moment that I've watched shift people's view on the sport.
Happy to let you know who I am in real life if you feel this strongly that I'm part of the problem.
To bring a strawman into this: Would you die for your commute? What about a burger? A beer? All of these things kill people, and all of them can be avoided. People don't, because they like them. They accept the given level of risk by mitigating it as best they can, and going on about their lives. Risk is omnipresent.
The real killer is when you don't understand the risk. If you think something has a 1:1mm risk of serious physical harm, you'll probably be alright with it. If something has a 1:100 risk of the same level of physical harm, you'll probably think twice (or you'll prepare yourself differently).
Risk management takes two forms in our world: Unknown Unknowns, and Normalization of Risk. For newbies, unknown unknowns kill them. Thinking something is a 1:1m risk when it's 1:100 provides a real easy way to put yourself in a situation you're unprepared to handle. For experienced jumpers, normalization of risk is what seems to be killing us. If you take a shortcut that increases risk 10x, but you've taken it 1k times, in your brain it just becomes 'the way' and you forget that you're actually multiplying your risk. Do that enough different times and what in your brain is just 'the way' is actually the summation of a complex web of risk-multiplying shortcuts.
Remember both of those things, and you might make to your next birthday. Maybe. Maybe you'll get killed sitting at a stoplight by being rear-ended by a drunk driver, like my first base jumping mentor was.
Active BASE jumper and wingsuit pilot here. Instructor of both.
2016 was by far and away our worst year on record. We lost newbies, heros, and damn near all levels in between. Since then, a few sites have taken a more locked-down approach where we used to be welcome, and as a community we've made progress to band together to push education and conservative decision making over 'dude that was so sketchy.'
A lot of people have brought up the why - why do people do this when they know it's so dangerous? Well, that's a question that everyone needs to make for themselves, but for me it's quite simply that it's the only time I've found my mind to be quiet. It forces me to be present, assess everything in a level of detail that is unparalleled in any other time in my life, and quiet down every other distraction.
Also, it's beautiful. Being in the mountains, on top of buildings, out on bridges, climbing antennae, all with some of your closest friends? It's incredible. There's absolutely nothing on the planet like that level of adventure.
With all that said, it's fucking dangerous. I've managed to have a somewhat clean track record in my two years in the sport, with only two broken bones, but I have probably 20 of the people on the Base Fatality List still in my phone, four of whom I'd call great friends. It's fucking awful losing friends like that, but it's who we are. If they wouldn't have lived a life like this, would they have been them?
A little while back I had the lightning strike closest to my family, when we lost Ian. Here's his story:
"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."
Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.
As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.
For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows:
- Exit safely
- Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight
- Deploy
These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.
After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:
- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds
In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.
So as some people further in the thread have brought up, you start flying wingsuits out of airplanes, and you start in suits that are far more forgiving than the ones you'll end up flying. It's similar to how a pilot first learns how to land a Cessna before you try to land an F-18 on a carrier at night in a storm.
We do often (as instructors) talk about how nervous we get when we're with a student that we're pretty sure is just going to flatspin uncontrollably for like 8k ft and it's just like 'Okay heres everything you need to really have a bad afternoon. Dont? Please?'
Oddly enough (and probably speaking to our mindsets as a community), it was the death of a good buddy of mine that pushed me to finally start base jumping.
Off of a rooftop would be practically suicidal. Wingsuits need time to inflate and start flying, which for the best guys on the planet is around 300 feet. Normal humans require about 400. 'Margin' is a word that has a bunch of different contexts, most of which still put wingsuit base in a reasonably safe range. Terrain flying, which is the sub-discipline of wingsuit base where you're goalposting trees, is indisputably the most dangerous sport on the planet, and I've lost six friends to it in the last year.
I don't know that i'd describe it as 'controversial' but would rather describe it as 'that thing a bunch of people with nowhere near enough experience or currency to be doing it keep doing and fucking killing themselves.'
Tangentally related - We deal with this a lot in Wingsuit BASE jumping (well, in wingsuit skydiving as well, but wake vortices and turbulence (aka 'burbles') have killed more than a few extremely talented pilots in the last year).
It's fucking wild how small of a wing can put off a sizable wake. With wingsuits, if you fly behind and slightly above a buddy, you're going to hit his burble and you're going to immediately lose lift and possibly start spinning. There's a clip floating around of a bunch of us on a training jump in race suits and one of the guys hits a burble from the group and just gets dropped a few hundred feet damn near immediately.
Constructor.io | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-Time
Constructor.io is building the future of search. There are many parts of a search interface — from autocomplete to analytics to recommendations — that every website currently has to rebuild (often poorly) from scratch. At Constructor.io, we want to change all that, let people stop re-inventing the wheel, and offer them outstanding search and search enhancement features in a form that's dead simple to integrate.
Offering that simplicity is challenging. We have to hide bleeding-edge NLP and machine learning behind an easy-to-use interface. And to do that, we need clever engineers with a mind for turning complex algorithms into delightful user interfaces.
We’re looking to add a few members to the team as soon as we can find the right person. Key needs are:
- Senior Javascript & Rails Engineer
-- Deliver the next generation of search enhancement services to our customers. You'll build new features into our Javascript client and help develop our customer-facing website in Rails.
- Senior Full Stack Engineer
-- Develop outstanding back-end performance to power intuitive user interfaces. You'll be building front-end search features and configuring search engines to deliver lightning-fast performance.
- Data Scientist / Engineer
-- Build search and discovery features using massive amounts of click data. Your goal will be to help make our customers' websites awesome and bring our customers more revenue. You'll develop algorithms to improve search efficiency, deliver recommendations, and power self-learning search results.
If you're interested in joining the team, please send your resume and/or LinkedIn and/or Github profile, ideally including links to source code of projects you’ve worked on, to [email protected] and we’ll do our best to reply within a few business days. We’ll usually start with a technical interview over the phone or via video chat, followed by an in-person interview at our offices.