And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.
When you say historic buildings, I suppose (hope) you don’t mean listed ones, since they’d be breaking the law? Regardless, it’s a crying shame what people have ripped out of even very ordinary Victorian and Edwardian houses. Decorative mouldings, cast iron fireplaces, original doors, geometric tiling.
You might like to try Write yourself a Git [0] (discussed here previously [1]). YMMV, but I find the best way to learn something deeply is to get hands on. Less of a chance of convincing yourself you understand something that you really don’t.
For less of a time commitment, Git from the inside out [2] is a really nice explanation of the internals, from initializing a repo and the files that creates in the .git directory, all the way to pulling from and pushing to remotes.
Even though the full-size filter would surely work with a phone camera, if you could scale it down to a form factor that clips onto the phone, I can see this selling like hot cakes. Might be one of the rare cases where influencer marketing is really effective too. Is it feasible to grind the glass at a physical scale to make that work?
All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!
Clickbait title, but I wholeheartedly agree with the article’s main assertion, that startups need product engineers who think about more than just code. Engineers who can make decisions for the benefit of the customer, and ultimately the business.
This is all the more reason to delegate responsibilities, rather than tasks (as argued in Little Tasks, Little Trust [0]), so programmers actually get the necessary experience with UX, design, interacting with customers, etc., and exposure to the consequences of what they build, in order to grow into full-fledged product engineers.
I fear though that such roles, and consequently such engineers, are few and far between.
Absolutely. I think that’s why it’s so vital to combine both qualitative and quantitative data.
I doubt there are too many people in tech making this mistake, but without numbers there’s a good chance you fall prey to people’s inaccurate perceptions or explanations for their own behavior.
On the other hand, without those first-hand accounts, it’s all too easy to tell a mistaken story about your numbers. In particular, your users’ sentiment towards their time spent in your app is a guess, unless they tell you.
I think timescale is another crucial dimension to evaluating time-in-app, and whether it’s a positive indicator for your business.
For instance, driving up engagement has doubtless been good for Facebook’s financials in the short- to medium-term. Arguably though, that relentless focus has led to the present political climate where they’re fighting off regulation. Whether that’s an existential threat is yet to be seen (one can only hope), but it certainly casts the metric in a different light.
As you say, it comes down to the fact that there is no silver bullet metric; there’s no substitute for thinking about and dissecting the data you collect.
That’s what qualitative data is for. At the very least, talking to customers and reading their feedback. Preferably followed by organizing that data somehow, and using it to better understand the quantitative data you have.
It’s fair comment, though, that undifferentiated ‘engagement’ is rarely a good metric.
Rather than building dedicated integrations (which can always come later), a relatively quick win that’s tool-agnostic would be to implement webhooks.
I’ve used Typeform’s webhook feature a number of times to good effect, whereby you receive one POST request to whatever endpoint you specify upon each form submission. This may have changed, but when I last used it that was the only way of getting your data out of their system, which was admittedly frustrating. A lot better than nothing though.
Used it for all kinds of things: quizzes hooked up to a loyalty program, to award the user points for all correct answers; satisfaction surveys after ordering a product; writing and photography competitions (again hooked up to the loyalty program); an in-depth annual user survey; etc.
Except I think there’s convincing argument to make that engagement will go down over time, if the algorithm makes no attempt to prioritize or suggest novel content.
The rare occasions I discover a new channel, it’s almost always from some source other than the algorithm: a referral from a friend, this site, another YouTuber, etc. My viewership of the same repetitive roster of videos absolutely tails off until I find something new from elsewhere.
For example, in months of being subscribed to my mechanics [0] (who does incredibly engrossing and relaxing restorations of mechanical stuff), not once was I suggested a video from Baumgartner Restoration [1], an art conservator who produces videos with a similar attention to detail and high production value.
Thematically this should be an easy recommendation for YouTube to make, but evidently the content is just different enough that it scores as a false-negative. After finding the latter channel independently, my viewing time absolutely rose for a while.
In theory, YouTube ought to be able to detect and learn from this signal of non-algorithmic discovery of new content. Yet, here we are.
It would take a pretty monumental effort to build, but I think a huge step forward could be made with a VCS that has knowledge of code structure, and the relationships between source files.
Large scale refactoring is such a fragile affair with git. Conceptually though, it should be possible to cleanly and concisely represent such operations as renaming functions, reordering arguments, widening type parameters, etc.
Stability of the programming language in question is of course highly desirable, if you were to build such a system. The pace of change of Go would be much more conducive to success than that of JavaScript (or TypeScript).
I realized in the last year or two that I was never really bad with names, I just didn’t give myself the chance to be good with them. For someone I’ve just met, it takes a little effort to use their name at least once or twice soon after I learn it, and it’s much more likely to stick.
I’m also much stricter with going through the slight awkwardness if I didn’t catch the name first time (even asking to spell it out to be 100% sure). Then afterwards, I’ll write down the name in Notes with something memorable about the person, and where I met them. 99% of the time, I never look at this again. Just like that, name remembered.
Then, I’ll manage not to use a person’s name next time I see them, even when I know it. Oops.
I fully agree that the default porcelain has poor UX for managing the staging area, but doesn’t a porcelain without it encourage overly large commits?
All sorts of workflows become substantially more difficult (if not impossible) with kitchen sink commits. Undoing a single-line change, for instance. I dislike large pull requests, let alone commits that introduce a half dozen different changes.
Sure, if you’re really disciplined you can produce small commits without staging, by committing as you go along, but you’re breaking flow every time you commit in this style.
I say all this because I would love a CLI that has half-way sane handling of (e.g.) restoring staged, deleted files; doesn’t conflate restoring files with switching branches; has consistency of flags between commands (such as commit vs stash message); etc., etc. I should try gitless ;)
Just to bring to levity to this discussion, your quote very much brings to mind the hilarious and ever-relevant Four Yorkshiremen[0] sketch from Monty Python.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
I highly recommend the browser extension Session Buddy [0], if you, like me, regularly find you’ve opened tens to hundreds of tabs.
It’s quite cathartic to save out my tabs into topic-based sessions, close everything, then reopen just one session on whatever I want to focus on after an exploratory phase.
You say this was your first time outside India. May I ask, what was your path to setting up a company in the US and moving there? Was this via an L1 intra-company transfer, an E2 investor visa, or something else?
I couldn’t get this to work, but setting back my clock to October 20th did the trick (along with deleting the modal’s element via dev tools as jonahx mentions).