cmonaghan (u/cmonaghan)

cmonaghan commented on Ask HN: What are the best books for professional effectiveness? · Posted by u/arikr

Anything about leverage. Here are the ones I read that were helpful. The second two are engineering-specific, but Principles is domain agnostic.

* Principles: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150...

* The Effective Engineer: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...

* High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...

cmonaghan · 4 years ago

+100 to The Effective Engineer. This is the best practical book on how to improve individual engineering effectiveness that I've ever read.

cmonaghan commented on Show HN: I built a gift recommendation engine gowishbone.com/discover... · Posted by u/cmonaghan

jfengel · 5 years ago

I know a lot of people buy gifts that way, but I try to avoid getting people gifts for their hobbies and interests. If it's their expertise and not yours, there's a very good chance that it's going to be something they either already have or chose not to have.

It's not impossible to find that "Oh, I always wanted one of these" gifts, but even when I get such a gift, it feels oddly disconnected if the giver doesn't know why it's important to me.

The best gifts are the ones that you get because they share something with you. "I picked this up because it reminded me of that trip we took", or "The net time we go golfing together, I know you'll like this putter because it worked so well for me."

There are still uses for such a list: even when you share things it helps to have something jog your memory and spark ideas. But I'd be worry about finding a fishing lure for a fishing-obsessed friend no matter how many fishing aficionadoes recommended it. I'll do that if I have no other ideas, but it would feel desperate.

So thanks for creating it, and good luck.

cmonaghan · 5 years ago

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that the best gifts emphasize connection with the individual and it's difficult to replicate that insight through an app. Perhaps using this as a tool to simply "jog the memory" is its most effective use case.

I was inspired by Spotify's "Discovered Weekly" algorithm which recommends songs based on other users with similar music tastes. It's uncanny how effective the Spotify algorithm is at suggesting new songs that I like. My hypothesis is that this can be harnessed and applied to gift recommendations, but right now it's only that, a hypothesis, and indeed all the gift recommendations are currently hardcoded.

Thanks for the feedback!

cmonaghan commented on Show HN: I built a gift recommendation engine gowishbone.com/discover... · Posted by u/cmonaghan

sharemywin · 5 years ago

I like the design.

cmonaghan · 5 years ago

Thanks! <3

cmonaghan commented on Show HN: I built a gift recommendation engine gowishbone.com/discover... · Posted by u/cmonaghan

cmonaghan · 5 years ago

I struggle to think of good gifts for friends and family, so I tried creating a simple gift recommendation engine.

Right now the suggestions are hardcoded based on my own experience with these hobbies, but I intend to crowdsource future hobby additions and gift recommendations from users who build a personal wishlist on the site.

This is my first time building a product idea of my own and sharing it with the world. I built it over the course of a few months. Tech stack is react, node, serverless framework, and a few AWS services (DynamoDB, Cognito, Amplify). It also uses Cloudinary (serving images), Mailchimp (email), and Mixpanel (event analytics).

This is still experimental so I'd be very happy for any feedback. Thank you!