Happy Mastra user here! Strikes the right balance between letting me build with higher level abstractions but providing lower level controls when needed. I looked at a handful of other frameworks before getting started and the clarity & easy of use of Mastra stood out. Nice work.
Readit NewsZoomo | Full Time | Remote (USA Pacific, USA Mountain time zones) and Hybrid (Sydney, Australia) | Multiple Roles
I'm the VP of Product at Zoomo, the industry leader in light electric vehicle (LEV) solutions for urban delivery. We provide the e-bikes, software, financing, and maintenance solutions that couriers and companies in the restaurant, grocery, quick commerce, and parcel delivery industries need to sustainably transition billions of urban delivery miles to light electric vehicles.
We have a global footprint across the U.S., U.K, Europe, and Australia, and are now the trusted partner to some of the world’s leading and most innovative companies like Uber, DoorDash, Dexus, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Wholefoods, Gorillas, Just Eat, Getir and many more.
We closed an $80M Series B round earlier this year and are actively hiring for several different roles on our software team, including:
- Head of Software Engineering
- Mobile Developer (iOS and Android)
- Product Designer
You can also reach me at alan.wells [at] ridezoomo [dot] com if you have questions. No agencies please.
My kids are 3, 5, and 7. I feel your situation exactly. Luckily, I’m an early riser and have my creative bursts before most people are even in the office. I’ve learned to make my “me” time a priority but early enough that even on the weekends I’m still present and helping carry my share of the load around the house.
I’m usually up around 4:30 and have the dog walked by 5:30.
Summer in the Pacific Northwest means I’ve got plenty of light by 6 and I go hit the archery range or take the dog for a longer hike through the woods.
In the winter it’s pitch black til 7 so I go to the office earlier.
Go to my office between 5:30-7:30 where I’m going to focus on learning something new, side project, hobby project, etc. til 9:30.
Gym at noon (most days), home by 5:30. I don’t even try and do mentally taxing work after we get the kids to bed (around 7:30). Usually it’s helping cleanup, hanging with the wife, TV, and asleep by 9:30ish.
Because life is life, some mornings I’ve got the dog walked and am in the office by 5, sometimes I’ve got a meeting at 8, or have to take kids to school.
On weekends I do the exact same morning routine except I’ll be on the computer at home and usually no gym.
There are plenty of times where I’ve got a good flow going and my alarm buzzes at 5pm and I just have to tear myself away and get home.
Traveling is what kills me. My morning routine sets up my whole day and gets my head where it needs to be. When I’m traveling for work it’s not so bad because I hit the hotel gym and usually get even more morning time to myself. Traveling with the family (like over the holidays when I’m staying at the in-laws) leaves me jumping out of my skin without the physical and mental exercises I’m used to. I haven’t cracked that nut yet, but I’m really trying to not be such a dick about it to the wife this year.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the most important part! I’m definitely still working on this, myself. I found that really jumping in and ACTUALLY participating with the kids is a salve for that mental itch that seems to not be getting scratched when I am obsessing over something in the back of my mind. Building LEGO, kicking ass at Guess Who, etc. can still be pretty fun if we just get over ourselves and let go. Or if I REALLY still want to take the dog in the woods, bring the kids with and it’s a whole new adventure.
2 kids here (10 months old and 2 years old). The early morning schedule has been key for me too, it’s the only way I’ve found to get a consistent 8-9 hr workday in while still being around to help with breakfast, preschool dropoff, and dinner. I try to be in bed by 8pm, read for 15 mins to help quiet my mind, and try to be asleep by 8:30pm. I get up around 4:30am and can usually get a solid 1.5-2 hours of focused work time in before the kids get up around 6:30am.
Haven’t found much time for anything other than parenting + work, but I switched to biking for a portion of my commute so that gives me 40 mins/day of exercise every weekday (except when traveling).
Your point about participating with the kids also resonates with me. It’s easy to be grumpy/impatient after a tough week at work followed by a long night of multiple wake ups, but some of the best days I’ve had since my 2nd was born are when I manage to hit the mental reset button in the morning and get myself back into a state of mind where I can still have a good time with my kids.
Edit: also, I’ve found that getting up at least an hour before the kids do, even if I haven’t slept well and in principle should probably keep sleeping, helps me keep my sanity.
alanwells commented on Ask HN: What questions did you ask (or wish you asked) your cofounder? · Posted by u/ovatsug25
Some topics worth exploring that I've seen become areas of co-founder conflict:
* When faced with a difficult decision and incomplete information, how do you decide what course of action to take? Can you talk through a real life example of a situation like this?
* Let's assume we decide to be co-founders and start this company together. What kinds of things would cause you to want/need to leave the company you helped start? Are there milestones, financial or otherwise, that the company needs to hit in order for you to keep working on it for the long term?
* When it's just the two of us working on the company, how would you like to divide responsibilities between the two of us? If we succeed in growing the company beyond just the two of us, what do you want your role in the company to be?
Hi there, fellow designer here who also doesn't like to fit in the narrow box of most product design roles. I've been doing this generalist thing for 10 years, and I've found that it makes applying for jobs pretty challenging - most companies are looking to fill a specific role and won't value the breadth of your interests.
I think there are 3 ways that you can make this generalist path work without it being career suicide.
1) Start your own profitable small business. It's not easy but if you can get to the point of personal financial sustainability based on something you've built, then you can stop worrying about the fact that nobody wants to hire you. Words of caution here - if you go this route, you will spend most of your time doing things other than design work and coding. Also, don't consider "start a business" synonymous with "start a startup". Startups are a very particular kind of business, but they aren't the only kind, and they have an extremely high failure rate. If you go this route, I would strongly consider focusing on building a small, profitable business first before you attempt to build a hypergrowth startup backed by outside capital. For this path, seek inspiration from https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
2) Commit to the freelance gig path and make it work. This is pretty similar to #1 except in this case you're doing work for hire instead of building a product that generates revenue. I've done this path before as well, and found that the most challenging thing was to get a consistent pipeline of client projects. I think this is easier than it has been before. If I were doing this today, I would focus on building a reputation and profile on one of the gig marketplaces (Gigster seems like the best of the bunch right now) and use that to help fill the pipeline of projects. If you go this route, your personal financial planning should include a buffer for weathering weeks or months without work, as the lumpiness of income from the freelance life is one of the most challenging parts for someone who is starting fresh and trying to build a client base.
3) Find a very early stage startup that is so small that they value generalists over specialists and is working in an area that you're excited about and has high potential for growth. When you find this company, take almost any job they will offer you, and start working hard. If the company grows, there will be opportunities to take on more responsibilities. Over time, if you can prove your abilities in design and coding with hands on projects inside the ocompany, there will probably be many ways to contribute in these areas. You typically won't find companies like this by skimming the headlines of recent funding announcements - those companies have already made it far enough that they are usually focused on hiring specialists. Your sweet spot here will be smaller, scrappier companies that haven't made it that far yet and need to get a lot done with very little. Searching AngelList for startups that have raised only seed funding or no outside capital and are OK with remote work would be a good start here.
alanwells commented on Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware [video] (2016) youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5c... · Posted by u/bmuppireddy
I don't know much about HW development but recently I wanted to play around with making a smart quadcopter to play with ML - so I'm looking in to what would be required on the hardware side.
Devboards I see online with a high powered ARM board are in 150-200$ range for the devboard without camera/sensors and with stuff I don't need (network ports, display ports, etc).
Then I look at my 150$ Chinese smartphone (Xaomi RedMi Note 3 Pro) - it has Snapdragon 652 - Quad Core 64 bit CPU, OpenCL 2 capable GPU, 3GB ram, 16 GB storage, 13MP and 5MP cameras attached, gyro on board and 4G/WiFi/GPS, 4kMAh battery. The specs alone are better then the best devboard I found.
So I'm thinking if I can get it to boot without screen I could throw away the case and the screen, hook up GPIO trough USB for 10$ and get a better dev board than I would for 200$ with all the sensors and IO and a battery on top ?
I wonder how much it would cost me if I could just buy the parts on these markets and not have to disassemble a complete phone.
Check out the neo platform that comma.ai is building for self driving vehicles. It is meant for cars not drones but it might be a good starting point for you: https://github.com/commaai/neo
alanwells commented on I have 404,772 users. Now what? pud.com/post/21248770833/... · Posted by u/pud
If you really like the site & community you have built and are in it for the long term, here's an idea: build a stock market for buying a share of an individual musician's or song's future revenue.
With crowdfunding legislation passed, you could wait the 9 months for the SEC to determine the regulations for crowdfunding brokers and become one of the first brokers, with a focus on building a marketplace for investing in undiscovered musical talent. You could also, in the same platform, provide a secondary marketplace for reselling those shares so there is liquidity for early investors.
If musicians are better equipped than most to recognize the talent in other musicians, your site provides the perfect community in which to build this marketplace. The high school kid who can really jam on the guitar today might be tomorrow's superstar, and perhaps a community of musicians could recognize that, invest in him, and eventually earn a return on their investment. With the crowdfunding model, the minimum investment could be quite small and within reach for many on the site.
Your business model could be as a traditional broker - taking a fee for the stock purchase, or as a flat monthly fee for active traders. Or you could have your fee be in equity in every musician that sells their shares on the market, but that seems like it could generate conflicts of interest.
If the $2500/month burn is an immediate issue or might force a shutdown, ask your users to donate and try to get enough to cover 18 months of expenses ("personal appeal from jimmy wales"-inspired banner might work), giving the the time needed to wait for the SEC and build the marketplace.
Yes.
I write everything in TextPad first, saving as I go with Control-S to the appropriate directory using the date & time in the file name. I like to work full screen in large letters and I love lime green on black.
I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons). Seems like I'm the only one who has a record of anything because of my practice.
I operate under the assumption that anything free will go away at some point. I plan on moving somewhere else with my data. Also, it's really easy to find anything on my hard disk.
A little background:
Years ago, I found my best friend from college and we started to exchange emails. I emailed him a trivia quiz with 20 questions. He later told me that he was laughing like crazy while he answered them for the next hour. His wife called him when he was on Question #19. By the time he returned, his computer had crashed and he lost everything. (This was obviously pre-Gmail.) Now we'll never know what he answered.
I don't know what will be important later, so I'll never let anything like that ever happen to me.
Years ago, when computers were more crash-prone and and autosave wasn't yet a feature in MS Word, I ran a keylogger on my own computer for just this reason. On several occasions, it saved me from having to rewrite multiple pages of school assignments I would have otherwise lost due to crashes.
Rocketable acquires profitable SaaS companies and transforms them into fully autonomous systems. No human operators. No engineering team shipping features. No support staff answering tickets. Just AI running the entire business.
This sounds crazy to most people, but we think the trajectory is obvious. If we're right, you'll have built the infrastructure that runs a new kind of company.
Interested? More info & application here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rocketable/jobs/CArgzm...