I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
Very impressive from a technical perspective. I should know, since I worked on a startup for 3 years who attempted to productize a similar system. If this can scale, I think you have a very valuable foundation.
Did you build Nino Meets using AWS Chime? I'm curious.
Now for the feedback:
Because the use cases are so broad and all-encompassing, marketing and onboarding into your system will be a huge challenge. Do not underestimate it. At my startup, we hired onboarding specialists since most small business owners we were attracting were not exactly engineers. They needed a lot of hand holding to understand how all the parts went together.
Take notion as an example, they have a huge community dedicated to showcasing things you can build. Even then, I don't really like notion because it is such a blank canvas. It's a hard hurdle to overcome!
I think a valuable next step would be to partner with people from different industries to create custom templates that are built on top of your more general purpose foundation. Those templates should reliably solve specific work flows that those users would be familiar with, and they should have no trouble getting up and running right away.
If you can solve that, you will really have something!
Your current website looks like docs for other engineers, so I'd strongly suggest creating a few more websites, each one branded and showcasing specific workflows for the target audience you are looking to convert.
Honestly, it's so offbeat compared to the sensationalist headlines that have been optimized over the last 20 years that it feels refreshing. I would probably read it just for that fact alone!
Well that's the rub ain't it? Punishment, at its root, is just a method for control. The more brutal the punishment, the more fear is created, and fearful people will then obey commands (laws).
It's such an infantile mindset, I'm frankly surprised it has stuck around this long.
We all just want to live, and enjoy the fruits of our lives, our friends, our families, our work. When a social break happens due to anti-evolutionary behavior, that situation needs to be corrected. Threat of punishment never needs to come into it.
Somehow the lack of sales are the product teams fault? Let's start messing with the product to figure out why sales aren't happening. Haha, it's so sad it's almost funny!
A lot of founders hire a product team way too prematurely. A lot of founders who have experience making product think that the product sells itself....
Just curious if you'd include alcohol in that list? What about prescription pain-killers? Just curious where you draw the line on what's criminal, and what's not.
Personally, I'd rather criminalize the negative behavior, rather than the drugs themselves. Like DUI laws, for example.
I've been waiting for this. Seems like it is a self-contained cellular device requiring a subscription, which makes sense. I guess I am curious how I can be in communication with it. Will my contacts be texted from a new phone number? That seems like the biggest hurdle for me, as I'd just like to use my pre-existing cellular service that I already pay for.
I also find it curious that a former Apple exec formed this company. I'd assume Apple itself would want to pursue this internally, as such a device would be yet another killer addition to the iron grip of the Apple ecosystem.
I disagree. My best ideas come in the presence of others. Something about the collective energy evokes new perspectives I did not have alone.
I think its a waste to get 10 engineers in the room to decide how to build a single module. That would be stupid.
But it likely makes sense to get a designer, an architect, and a product manager in a room. It might also make sense to get an embedded systems engineer, a cloud engineer, and a web engineer in a room to architect something.
Collaboration is absolutely required when the product is undefined. You as an engineer would not be able to do your job correctly unless you could communicate with a designer, a UX-researcher, a product manager, etc (unless of course you are talented enough to fulfill all of those roles by yourself).
Quite typically, communication between all of the above parties is required quite often, as snags are discovered along the way and they constantly require re-working and tweaking the original concept.
"A study conducted by Fisher found humour-orientated individuals likely to identify their mothers as demanding, unsympathetic and distant. They were seen as avoiding the nurturant role, commonly falling on the father to fulfil this role for the family.[21] "
Wow I didn't expect to read a wikipedia page written explicitly about my life today. Except in my case, my father didn't nurture either.
I never thought of my tendency towards humor as a tool for disarming family conflict, but it feels very accurate
I still find it hard to believe that fully-async working style is more productive in the long run. My experience with it was that the pace of synchronous collaboration and decision making is about 5X faster than async. A group of engineers or a product team standing around a whiteboard in physical space is going to win the day every time IMO.
Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation.
I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.
You've outlined it so well! "you're stuck between... and you're just doing your best to make it all work."
Couple that with the fact that the whole front-end world has gone completely bonkers, reinventing the wheel so many times in the last 10 years I'm surprised my head hasn't separated from my body.
It's funny that things have come full-circle these days, going back to server-rendered views. My career literally witnessed the entire move from HTML -> SPA -> HTML again. It only took roughly 16 years.
I remember the same. I visited Alcatraz as a kid in the early '90's, and then later returned in 2010 for my tech career. 2010 was pretty great honestly, but by 2014 I realized I was just one of the hollowed out tech workers too busy and drained from work to contribute anything of value to the city.
That's one of the big issues with tech: it isn't really tied to place. It has global reach via cyberspace, with entire decades of work existing purely as bits and bytes in the cloud. Only a software engineer would even have the slightest clue of the vastness of various compute systems composed of millions upon millions of lines of code. People work day and night on this stuff, and the general public only sees the tip of the iceberg.
I think this makes for a challenging recipe to balance in a local economy
Agreed. I think NX is a big powerhouse of a tool that should only be used in mature engineering orgs with complex codebases and deployments. A seed-stage company is not the right fit.
Thanks! Yes, pnpm workspaces and turborepo are both far superior to NX IMO. They hit that sweet spot of providing the nice aspects of a monorepo without all the nightmarish configurations and complexities.
Next.js has saddened me since the move to SSR. I think remix is light-years ahead to be honest.
NX with a Nest.js backend, and Next.js front-end. These tools just aren't very nice to jam together into a fullstack app. I'm really not a fan of NX itself. Lots of people love it, but I think it's way too much for most use-cases.
Furthermore, in our case, the front-end and backend are really coupled, so having these as separate systems is just a big headache. All of the web app's views are tied into specific backend functionality, and our API doesn't really stand on it's own without the front-end.
Yes this is poor architecture. I'm just pointing out a case where JAMStack was a mistake. Rails (or similar) would have been a smarter choice.