Globality (https://www.globality.com): Menlo Park | Palo Alto | London | Tel Aviv | Full-Time
Globality builds an online marketplace for companies to buy and sell professional services (think marketing, consulting, legal, HR, and IT).
We enable talented small businesses to bid on the same projects as multinational corporations, allowing for richer competition and an even playing field in world commerce.
At the heart of the network is our ML recommendation engine that surfaces the best-fit providers for each given project.
There are open positions for senior engineers across our FE, BE, SRE, and AI organizations.
We work primarily with python and JS (Flask, GraphQL, express), we have everything as infrastructure-as-code and we have ~200 micro-services running in production.
On the AI side - we focus on core research for NLP processing and developing recommender systems. If DL transformer networks, reinforcement learning, and large scale web crawling interests you then get in touch!
I've never done it for myself. I did, however, do it for screencasting (Twitch and YouTube).
There are a couple of things here:
1. Talking to yourself is extremely useful. You'll be surprised by how effective it is.
2. A recording is not very useful because discovery is awful.
Even though all my content is on YouTube, There's no way I can find that one time I fixed an interesting bug or implemented something complicated.
Without proper logging of what you did and indexing in the video, it will just be like any other video you take with your GoPro, hours of nothing.
What I found to be really effective with my teams is this:
1. Draw your thoughts.
2. Write up a mini-plan of how you want to "attack" this
3. Talk through it, even if it's only to yourself.
4. Pseudo Code and Pseudo Flows of data
Globality builds an online marketplace for companies to buy and sell professional services (think marketing, consulting, legal, HR, and IT).
We enable talented small businesses bid on the same projects as multinational corporations, allowing for richer competition and an even playing field in world commerce.
At the heart of the network is our ML recommendation engine that surfaces the best-fit providers for each given project.
There are open positions for senior engineers across our FE, BE, SRE, and AI organizations.
We work primarily with python and JS (Flask, GraphQL, express), we have everything as infrastructure-as-code and we have ~200 micro-services running in production.
On the AI side - we focus on core research for NLP processing and developing recommender systems. If DL transformer networks, reinforcement learning, and large scale web crawling interests you then get in touch!
I realize my comment hit a sensitive spot but it's really not meant to be negative.
It is 100% legit to give that up, it is 100% legit to go with the clear winner in your mind (it is the same in my mind too), but the technical reasoning is weak IMHO.
if you wanted to support both, you can, but you clearly don't (and that's ok too).
We are very heavy users of terraform. We have thousands of lines of HCL and our own providers etc...
Terraform 0.x before 0.12 was heavily limited due to the syntax, you just worked around so many limitations. We are actively ignoring those limitations and we started working without our own templates using jinja that just generate vanilla terraform. No counts and no if/else needed.
Maybe with .12 we can move some of these back to plain terraform.
Upgrade so far is not smooth though, there are a lot of pains with the type system vs the plain old “I’ll figure it out for you”.
ALL of this being said, I really appreciate Hashicorp’s work on this, we could not imagine our life without terraform.
I don't know if I would call it that but I have a few:
1. I live 20mi from my office, I prefer to use my bike (bicycle) over any other means of transportation. I hate riding Lyft/Uber, driving is insanely stressful at times. I like the time on the bike and it adds a ton of value in my life in general. It is quirky because I never really take the 20mi route and often prefer the longer routes.
2. I wake up at the same time every single day. 4:45 am. Wether it's the weekend, weekday, doesn't matter, I wake up and I just get up of bed.
Again, I don't know if I would call these quirky but those are the ones I can think of.
My goal was to create a toolchain that is battle-tested production-ready and pluggable to help companies deliver code faster and worry less about operations.
I started it in my spare time and worked on it for about 3-4 months.
I still believe there is a HUGE need for this and that many companies are solving the same problem over and over again. It's super expensive to build.
The challenge is catching companies at the right time. It needs to be as easy to start as it is with Heroku and a Rails application BUT you should be able to grow and scale up with batteries includes (unlike AWS).
Another challenge is the fragmentation of development tools/frameworks/configurations and cycles.
We hired multiple bootcampers. I can definitely say the experience this time was good and the employees are successful.
It does take time and patience (and a path), it includes quite a bit of mentoring and guidance.
It's also about expectations. You can't expect them to be "in the know" of everything and it requires more management resources in the beginning. If the company is committed to it and not doing it as a means to save money, it can most definitely work.
I spent a good chunk of the last 10 years in a travel startup that targeted consumers.
I am unsure of the business model here but I can only imagine it's a pay-per-click from the big OTAs, mainly for hotels.
The main problem with consumer travel is the fierce competition you are facing, Google is absolutely annihilating the search results in their favor, disgustingly so in the US and even worse in US on mobile.
This leaves a startup like this in a tough spot, how do you acquire users?
If you think about paying for them, you are in for a world of hurt, you can spend 1.8$ to get .8$ back for a hotel booking and it's absolutely an uphill battle to scale that up.
I searched the name on Google and I saw the HN page, you two seem to have built a travel business before, you likely know a lot of the difficulties, but in my experience, trip planning scaling is a lot harder than what it seems, especially if you want to monetize it.
If you don't mind sharing, what is the revenue model for TravelChime?
> “But you cross an ethical line when you copy an idea without any meaningful differentiation and attempt to call it your own, let alone attribute the source of your inspiration.
This, to me, is complete BS. I mean, yes, it would be nice if PMs would actually attribute it and then in companies press release it would mention that but that's just a very naive expectation.
Companies use this jargon of `breakthrough in the space`, it has been nonsense since Apple introduced FaceTime as a breakthrough in the space even though you had video chat for ages before that.
You are being downvoted but I think it's a pretty legitimate question and the answer to it is: Yes.
If you want to have a united interface to multiple services behind the scenes and incorporate ACL or any kind of top-level resource management, GraphQL is a great way to go about doing that.
