An on-device search engine for everything you need to remember. Index your markdown notes, meeting transcripts, documentation, and knowledge bases. Search with keywords or natural language. Ideal for your agentic flows.
We did this at OpsLevel a few years back. Went from AWS managed NAT gateway to fck-nat (Option 1 in the article).
It’s a (small) moving part we now have to maintain. But it’s very much worth the massive cost savings in NATGateway-Bytes.
A big part of OpsLevel is we receive all kinds of event and payload data from prod systems, so as we grew, so did our network costs. fck-nat turned that growing variable cost into an adorably small fixed one.
When mosh came out back in 2013, it solved a pretty real problem of ssh crapping out when you changed networks (like moving from in-office to home). It solves it at the app layer and uses UDP and is designed to work in high loss / latency environments. Very cool.
At the same time, in recent years, I've found that ssh running on top of Wireguard / Tailscale is way more usable than 2013 days. Those latter tools address the roaming IP issues directly at the network layer.
So while there are still issues with ssh / TCP if you're on a really crappy network (heavy packet loss, satellite link, etc), those have been less common in my experience compared to IP changes.
The “killer use case” for Mosh feels a lot less killer now.
My own experience ([1]): the biggest different between "startup inside BigCo" and an actual startup is availability of resources.
"Startup inside BigCo" generally revolves around spinning up a new team that's product focused and delivering quickly.
Depending on which BigCo you're at, delivering quickly could be a departure from how things are normally done. e.g., You don't have to worry about writing a big up front proposal doc, going to the architectural review board, or using the standard infra tooling.
For engineers on a team, this "feels" like a startup. There are daily standups. They talk to users and have a sense of ownership on what's built. There can even be some sense of urgency to ship quickly.
While "BigCo startup" teams mimic a lot of the same procedures and activities as a startup, there is an underlying support structure at BigCo that isn't there in an actual startup. IMO, that makes the experiences substantially different.
Some examples:
- The cost of failure is different. At BigCo, if the project fails, it's generally OK. Each engineer can be reassigned to some new team at BigCo. At a startup, if the project fails, the entire company fails.
- There are more people to ask for help. At BigCo, if you're stuck on some hairy engineering issue, you have a swell of engineering talent to lean on for help and guidance. At a startup, you have StackOverflow, Google, and maybe some folks in your personal network to lean on for help.
- There's more than just product development. At BigCo, generally only the engineering / product development team is structured like a startup. After the code is "done", the regular product marketing org, marketing org, and sales org (if that's a thing), can kick into gear. At a startup, there is no such massive support structure.
- On the topic of marketing, having the brand of BigCo is a huge boon to a new product. For mobile apps, there's a lot more trust in seeing "NewProduct by BigCo" vs. just "NewProduct" in the app store. Your rockstar CEO may even tweet out the launch announcement to his millions of followers.
- And yes, at BigCo, when it's lunchtime, you can go to the cafeteria and decide if you want the steak or the coq au vin for lunch. (well, before COVID at least)
---
[1] - I've worked for really small startups (< 8 people), really big companies (I was person 2000+), and small companies that became big (joined at 20, left at 200+, now at 500+).
An on-device search engine for everything you need to remember. Index your markdown notes, meeting transcripts, documentation, and knowledge bases. Search with keywords or natural language. Ideal for your agentic flows.