This could also be an anti-pattern for hiring - getting people with Amazing Web Service (tm) certification and missing out on candidates with a solid understanding of the foundational principles these services are built on
I agree, though the industry does this all the time by hiring someone with a degree vs someone who built key infrastructure and has no degree, solely because they have a degree. Remember, the creator of brew couldn't get past a Google interview because they asked him to hand craft some algorithm, I probably would have not done well with those either. Does that make him or me worse developers? Doubtful. Does it mean Google missed out on hiring someone who loves his craft? Yes.
I've switched to running any and all python projects in Docker as a way to ensure that low effort supply chain attacks doesn't easily get everything in my home dir. So even if I use uv, I'd only do that in a Docker image for now
Docker images are a productivity killer. I don’t want to waste even 1 second building an image. And all the hoops you have to jump through to enable rapid iteration aren’t worth it.
Docker Images are fine - I guess - for deployment. But for development I absolutely hate them.
They replaced a $500/mo bill with a $55/mo server. And at the same time increased what they could do before - run 5 extra staging environments!
While saving $445/mo isn't nothing, in my book enabling teams to freely run the staging environments they need is the real win here! Limiting testing resources can be a real drag on momentum in a project!
I've been using Docker containers for quite some time to do web dev work. The one thing I haven't yet set up is doing mobile dev in a docker environment.
Does devbox support mobile development - Flutter or ReactNative?
Would you say you do things you'd normally do 3 times faster? Or does it help you move past the things you'd get stuck on or avoid in the past, resulting in an overall 3x speedup?
Things I'd normally do 3x faster. That 3x is me focusing explicitly on the precise things I did before - the PR rate on a specific work project - because I tie those PR's back to specific tasks the same as I did before I used claude code. I haven't looked at lines of code, total commits, etc. Qualitatively I write more tests and abstract more components than I used to, but those get lumped in to the PRs as I normally try to limit pure refactoring work, and instead tie it into ticketed feature requests or bugs.
I don't count the things I'm doing now that I would have avoided or never finished in the past. For those, of course to me personally those are worth much more psychologically than 3x, but who knows if it's an actual boost. I.e. I took a partially scripted task the other day and fully automated it, and also had it output to the CLI in a kind of dorky sci-fi way because it makes it fun to run it. It didn't take long - 30 minutes? But I certainly didn't _gain_ time doing that, just a little more satisfaction. TBH I'm surprised 3x is so controversial, I thought it was a really cool and far more practical assessment than some of these 10x claims I'm seeing.
Type hints and/or stronger typing in other languages are not good substitutes for testing. I sometimes worry that teams with strong preferences for strong typing have a false sense of security.
I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!
But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.
Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!
My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.
Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.
But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.
One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...
> But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
In the moment, notifying people who know CPR and may be nearby and able to get to a nearby location and start CPR before emergency services arrives is the base of PulsePoint [1], which seems like a useful public service.
As a digest, yeah, I don't think any usefulness outweighs the invasion of privacy. Maybe just a count of health emergencies responded to for observing trends.
The privacy concern is real and not something I'd want to think about too hard myself. One night I heard sirens and checked one of the local scanner type sites. I could hear enough about the call, and that combined with a record of previous calls to that address made me wonder if I really wanted that information. Maybe some obfuscation of the previous codes to the address would have been enough to reduce the feeling of knowing too much.
None of that is to say it isn't a good idea. I appreciate the ability to see roughly what is going on when I hear sirens. Even if the sites aren't always able to show the calls. I think highway patrol doesn't show up for me.
Many metro police are moving towards encrypted communications but it varies by location.
Regarding medical emergencies, I'm pretty sure EMS just says "medical emergency" and gives the address. I've never heard them say specific patient conditions, although sometimes the ambulance can forward that to the ER.
If there were any risk, it would be making it too easy for criminals to monitor and allow them to commit crime more effectively.
I’d encourage you to pursue it.
I remember the old @breakingnews on Twitter when it first started, people listening to police scanners and typing info-dense one liners on what they heard. To this day the best news service of my life (until someone bought it).
A real time, AI snips version for my area in a running feed would be amazing. There are lots of formats and use cases; and the info is already out there.
It’s a great idea. Don’t let citizen sway you away from it.
> I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
This is very good advice: we often give up on "great ideas" once we find that they have already been done.
But the vast majority of people we consider successful did not invent anything completely new, they just made a better kind of XYZ, sometimes not even that dramatically different. If you think about it, it's a much more logical path to success than expecting to be the next DaVinci.
The good news is that with durable queues and workflows, you get all the observability you need to make debugging even long running workflows pretty straightforward!
Also, check out the sibling comment for more information about durability.
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