This is cool, do you think this would work as a phone application?
Does it do any kind of sound identification or matching? So if I sneeze around the device around the same time another system picks up a firework sound, will it be able to figure that out or is that a post process thing?
Would be interesting for you and your friends to pick a very exact point on GPS somewhere in the middle of all you and light off a big firework, then go back and see how close the system thought it was to the actual location. I know that kind of defeats the purpose of not launching illegal fireworks, but it’s better than shooting a gun in the air I guess.
Yes, people cheat all the time. Usually this happens in the form of either paying for upvotes from bots or soliciting votes from friends / colleagues that wouldn’t have given an upvote if it weren’t for some personal connection.
Product Hunt tries their best to detect when bots are upvoting, and responds by removing those upvotes (you can see this happen on many hunts by looking at the upvote rate graph, if it takes a sharp almost impulse like decline that usually means PH is removing upvotes based on some kind of fraud protection they have)
I’m not sure why people still feel the need to cheat to get to number one on PH, it really doesn’t mean anything close to what it once did. Speaking from personal experience, a startup company I used to work for put great time and effort into their debut on PH, ended up in the top spot for the day, and got exactly 0 press, 0 new registrations that didn’t instantly churn, and 0 feedback on the product that was actually worthwhile. The only thing we did get on a daily basis was, you guessed it, emails from people also launching on PH asking for upvotes!
GraphQL has its place, but IMHO it is at either side of the bell curve of project complexity. It will be great for trivial projects, and it can help simplify things in really complex large projects with multiple clients and services, but it just isn’t worth it for everything in between these two extremes.
Significant engineering time will need to be spent ironing out important things that just work with REST (like caching).
The best analogy I have for what working with GraphQL on the backend is like is the “If you give a mouse a cookie” story [1].
You try to set up an API but end up being asked to implement three different caching layers, using the data loader pattern to batch requests to the DB to improve performance, discovering that custom error handling code is needed to get non 200 status codes back from your API, using persisted queries now that your frontend is asking for a lot of data in the body of the request which is taking up too much bandwidth, etc…
The code as you can imagine after doing all this is very hard to follow, even without doing any of the optimizations I listed above there are things like reference resolvers that make tracking down bugs or just finding where the data is being collected from a nightmare.
What do you do now that involves C++ if you don’t mind me asking? I too have a EE degree but have been doing web dev for the last few years, I would like to get back into maybe doing lower level software development or work on something I can use my degree somewhat on.
A couple people have asked what complexities I’m referring to and mainly what I mean is just how much bloat goes into making anything, and at a higher level the general course of action seems to be to just keep adding to the system until you get what you want out of it instead of trying to fix or improve underlying problems with the web.
I know we can’t just pause the internet while everyone comes to a consensus on how we want to make it more interactive and fix underlying problems, but at least to me it seems like all the effort that could be spent working towards that is instead being spent figuring out ways to just avoid as much of the underlying pieces as possible by jamming your own implementation on top of it.
I agree that getting setup and using things like React or Node for a backend is easy, but the number of dependencies, size of the app, tooling needed, memory used are all going to grow exponentially as soon as you start trying to do something non trivial, and the solution to fix these problems is yet again to add more complexity, where you will need to learn a lot more about how all of those nice tools that just worked for you out of the box are actually working
This isn’t a React or a frontend specific example entirely, but I’ve seen many people jump into creating a simple app and right off the bat implementing a federated GraphQL design because of all the great things they heard about GraphQL from the community, which is fine but a very simple REST design would have worked just as well if not better and would be in my opinion much simpler to maintain and manage complex things like caching.
Thanks very much for this thoughtful reply! I didn’t think about the possibility of transferring over the stock if possible instead of cashing them out and paying tax. I will talk to vanguard just out of curiosity as well to see what they can offer
It takes a lot of self reflection and maturity to realize mistakes we’ve made in the past, so thank you for sharing this about your career.
I’m wondering if you felt forced out of the company where your reputation was a brilliant hard to work with jerk?
I’ve worked with people like this before and unless the company culture is set up to reward this kind of behavior from the top down, this always ends in said person being worked around and given less and less responsibility and slowly managed out no matter how brilliant they are.
This almost always happens in the polite Silicon Valley way of getting rid of people where no one gets fired and everyone just smiles and works around you until you leave due to “incompetent team members” or “work not challenging anymore”, especially at start up’s who really don’t have the time or money to deal with wrongful termination lawsuits.
Not implying that this is what happened to you, but more so wondering if you felt this at all or it was just self realization that prompted your move and behavior change?
Does it do any kind of sound identification or matching? So if I sneeze around the device around the same time another system picks up a firework sound, will it be able to figure that out or is that a post process thing?
Would be interesting for you and your friends to pick a very exact point on GPS somewhere in the middle of all you and light off a big firework, then go back and see how close the system thought it was to the actual location. I know that kind of defeats the purpose of not launching illegal fireworks, but it’s better than shooting a gun in the air I guess.