I've been a big fan of Backblaze for several years now. I'll make sure to stop by your booth at NAB and express my nerdy appreciation for your service.
Compression isn't that hard. Having the best VQ is what matters, which makes having the best compression non trivial depending on the content being encoded. What is Two Orioles doing differently that the Elemental's and Harmonic's of the industry haven't done already?
I burned myself out building and launching a cloud service last year. After that service launched publicly, I quickly took three weeks off. The first week I felt depressed and was barely able to get up in the morning. The second week I started to feel better and was able to achieve daily goals. The third week I started to feel like my normal self but was nowhere close to being ready to go back to work.
Currently, I'm still struggling to have my normal drive during the 9-5. My short-term memory is not at its best. I'm averaging only a couple hours of coding a day but I'm also a lead on my team, so I have a lot of interruptions throughout the day. I feel energized on Monday, but by Friday I feel like a failure (like right now). I feel stuck.
After work I invest my time into improving skill-sets, knowledge, and other projects until 10 or 11 pm. My goal is to have an exit strategy in place by the end of this year.
I know I'm still recovering from the burnout and it seems like it's going to take another year to recover fully. Every week I want to break down, cry, and leave but I'm afraid to jeopardize everything that I've worked hard to achieve.
I would like to share more about my story and background, but I'm afraid to share too many personal details that will identify myself.
I have mixed feelings when reading these stories. I believe that a lot of competition and innovation is needed in our industry and whenever I see a service throw in the towel because of AWS, I cant help but feel that my future is threatened.
From my perspective, it's the smaller companies that pose the biggest threat to AWS/Amazon because they are able to satisfy their customer's needs far better and faster.