I have friends in the Abingdon area and the primary objection, from what they've told me, is that locals objected to a reservoir that would mainly be used to supply London. Little Englanders at their worst.
I invested in Small Robots Co (https://smallrobotco.com/) who were doing something similar. They had a good product, good brand, raised some funding, and were starting to get traction, with robots in trials on a number of farms, but at the end of the day they ran out of funding before they reached default-alive.
It's a tough space - convincing farmers to give it a go and running trials takes time and the UK isn't a very startup-friendly environment - investors are too often looking for a quick return.
This is such an important area - it's only going to become more critical to be able to grow more food whilst using less fertiliser and weed killer - so I wish you the very best of luck!
Completely agree. An infinite canvas sounds great until you need to find anything, then you end up with having to create a structure to it, and you rapidly end up grouping stuff into "pages" - Miro's "frames".
4 year old Lenovo laptop here, 16GB RAM and SSD. Bootup from cold is around 5-seconds, everything is pretty snappy even with lots of browser tabs open and VSCode running. Never had the start menu lag other people have reported. Definitely faster than it was when Windows 10 was installed.
Have you checked for viruses? Last time I saw a machine that slow booting up, even with a spinning disk, it was riddled with viruses.
It checks your website for the kind of things that get missed when you go from dev to production or can go wrong later - expired domains and SSL certs, broken links, robot options blocking search engine crawlers, etc. Adding more checks all the time and always keen to hear suggestions.
Every proposal I have seen kicks in after $100m. That's a level of wealth where even paying a 5% tax is likely to result in an annual net increase in wealth, as when you have that amount of money to invest achieving 5%+ returns is not unusual. The net result is that wealth would still increase, just at a slower rate.
Additionally, even amongst the general population, let alone startup founders, the number of people with wealth in excess of $100m is tiny. Numbers are hard to come by but I've seen estimates of 5,000 people in the US. What this means is that people arguing against a wealth tax are happy to disadvantage 330m people to protect the wealth of a low number of thousands.
It's not free because I want it to be sustainable, but also because it does more than just capture form data and send you an email. You might not need more than that, but if you do then it's probably even more important that it's a sustainable business.
Exponent, a weekly podcast covering a topic from Stratechery, Ben Thompson and James Allworth on business and technology strategy.
Friday Night Comedy from the BBC. If you like satirical comedy and an English sense of humour then The News Quiz and The Now Show are the best there is.
The Art of Product , Build Your SaaS and Out of Beta are great if following along as people build bootstrapped start-ups is your thing.
Startups for the Rest of Us is the OG bootstrapped start-up podcast.
Planet Money and The Indicator, both from PBS, cover business, economics and society and make it interesting.
Flash Forward, by Rose Eveleth, a trip to a possible future then a walk through how we get there.
I'm hosting on Microsoft Azure, so Application Insights gives me most of the server monitoring, but you make a good point about checking 3rd party services that I have dependencies on and tracking license expiration dates, which I have no process for at the moment. I'll check in to that.
That post makes really interesting reading. I'm hosting on Microsoft Azure, so I'm hoping they have a lot of that stuff covered, but I guess I need to dive in and make sure.
Depending on the nature of the application, you may be able to sign up for Microsoft's BizSpark program. That includes $160 of credit for Azure per month for three years. That would be more than enough to host your application on either an Azure website or Azure Cloud Service.
I've been running applications on Azure Web Sites and Cloud Services for several years now and have found it to be much more reliable and better performng than the cheap shared hosting option I'd been using previously.
I like this idea in principle but I struggle with the idea of charging someone to use an experiment. My personal feeling is that once you take someone's money you have an obligation but, until you hit some level of scale, you may not be able to commit the time and effort to meet that obligation. With creative endeavours there is really a once-off transaction whereas for a SAAS application the customer expects an ongoing service.
My concern is that whilst they think they are doing their job, the people paying them don't think they are doing it well enough or doing enough of it to value it. I'm seeing more and more development jobs off-shored or out-sourced not because that results in better work, but simply because it results in the same work being done more cheaply. That's great for the companies and countries that are picking up that work, but it's leaving a swathe of developers who are "mid-career" who are at risk of becoming unemployed and whilst they may get new jobs, they may not earn the kind of money they are used to.
I agree, curiosity and passion are something you either have or you don't. As an industry we need to improve our capabilities and continuously demonstrate our value and a subset who are lacking or have outdated skills risks influencing the perception of the value of the whole.
That said, if we can't make people want to be interested we need to find another way to reach them.
Some industries require formal certification and demonstration of ongoing professional development, but IT generally doesn't (although there are pockets which do). Some of the best developers I have worked with have had no formal training, however, just passion, curiosity and a willingness to put in the hours to learn and excluding them would be a mistake. So how do we do it?
I totally agree with you - for many programmers, programming is just a job. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but I work with a lot of these developers and my issue / concern is that they are not actually very good at their job - they get by only because expectations of IT in their organisations are low, something which is true in most large corporations and many smaller ones.
When the people paying the IT bills have low expectations to begin with, and are often disappointed with the applications they are given, IT becomes devalued.
I'm working with a team at the moment where we have introduced a structured data access architecture (.NET shop, so Entity Framework underpinning a repository model) and it has transformed the productivity of the team. They are no longer writing the same data access code in 5 different places, testing it 5 times and finding 5 different sets of bugs. They are now writing the code once, testing it once and re-using it.
The team hadn't even heard of Entity Framework, despite being a dedicated Microsoft/.NET shop and Entity Framework being around for several years. Getting them to move from their hand-coded approach, which was what they learnt for .NET 1.0 was a challenge but, having done it, they wouldn't go back and love the flexibility and power the new approach gives them.
This isn't a discussion about technologies though. I'm sure that there are many other teams just like this team and I'm interested in how to get to them to introduce new technologies and ways of working. The more productive we are as developers, and the more "delight" the applications we develop are, the more valued we will all be as an industry.