Perhaps still a big enough space for a bootstrapped indie business, for lack of VC scale.
NMEA is quite interesting, though. Coupled with Czone for digital switching and power readings, I bet there is some interesting insight waiting to be discovered, one that can be monetized.
I haven't noticed many startups working on bringing modern tech to recreational sailing and cruising.
Systems aboard a typical 35-50 foot sailboat produce interesting data streams, but the data don't seem to be used innovatively or interestingly.
This makes me wonder if the market is too small compared to the unicorn-level valuations most seem to aim/hope for.
Kind of putting this out there because I'm a liveaboard sailor looking out for startup ideas and it would be amazing if it were in the marine-tech space. So any feedback/suggestions would be more than welcome.
Okra is on a mission to connect 1 billion Africans to the global economy. We are here to enable innovative companies to create better and fairer financial services for everyone through the power of Open Finance.
We make it super easy for people to securely connect their financial accounts to the business apps and services they choose. Our developer-friendly infrastructure supports over 100 financial institutions so the over 500 digital financial services built on Okra can be accessible to everyone.
We are looking for highly motivated and experienced people to join us in solving the toughest technical challenges in financial inclusion.
Runa is on a mission to revamp payroll and HR in Latin America.
We are moving from our legacy Rails monolith to polyglot microservices on Node.js and .NET Core to build the next version of our SaaS product with API-first principles.
I am leading and hiring for the Platform and Tools group where we have two separate, autonomous teams focusing on Developer Experience (DevX) and Business Efficiency (BFF).
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Tech Lead:
We need a strong technical leader for DevX where we are building libraries, services, capabilities and tooling for our product engineers. Our most immediate challenges are in authz/authn, i18n, and event driven systems.
Experience with library and interface design, microservice communication patterns, API design, authn/authz, security and an uncompromising eye for best practices along with a passion to support other engineers will help you succeed in this role.
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Senior Developers:
We are also hiring frontend, backend and fullstack developers for both DevX and BFF.
At BFF, the main focus is our business. We are building tools, dashboards, integrations that our customer support, operations, marketing, product, sales teams leverage. We are also revamping our internal dashboard capabilities to allow any team at Runa build and deploy for our internal users.
You will succeed in these roles if you are comfortable working directly with stakeholders, exploring uncharted depths of legacy codebases, are not held back by unknowns.
Remote: Preferred. I'm highly experienced in starting and scaling cross-functional, autonomous teams internationally and remotely.
Willing to relocate: Yes. Coastal, sub-tropic latitudes in any longitude. Availability of marina/mooring facilities for a sailing liveaboard life would be highly motivating.
Technologies: Expert in full stack JavaScript, experienced with distributed systems, comfortable across web and mobile ui's, apis, platforms and infrastructure. I'm not necessarily married to a specific technology. I care deeply about architecture and maintainability.
I am a so-called t-shaped, generalist, servant-type engineering leader, mentor, facilitator with over 20 years of experience.
My last role at Paystack (YC'W16 backed by Stripe, VISA, Tencent) reorganizing and tripling the engineering team reporting to the CEO and working together with the CTO, gave the opportunity to navigate some very unique challenges and helped me decide what I want to pursue next.
I'm looking for a hands-on, senior engineering leadership role that would be set up to facilitate communication across often misaligned executive, product and engineering teams, helping emerge common strategy and support autonomous execution.
I'd especially prefer working in an environment where cultural common denominator is critical thinking that is used to pragmatically form or let go of opinions on business, product and technology alike.
Titles don't matter. You can call me whatever you like. I'm golden with plain Serkan and a vanilla engineering title accompanied by a warm smile :)
But is that a problem with the tool, or the lack of sufficient contribution on the topic from sufficiently interested and invested people like subject matter experts?
This dates back to 2014 where Turkey was still struggling with the aftermath of widespread civil unrest. The entire nation found itself highly polarized while debates were fueled with mutual anger and disbelief.
Since you seem to be really into making yogurt and like your science, I wonder, have you ever tried using "dew" as your starter?
There's an old (unfortunately dying) tradition in Turkey where dew you collect at sunrise during late spring, early summer can be used to ferment fresh milk to make the absolute best yogurt.
I live in Turkey where yogurt is an essential part of our diet and culture and nothing beats a homemade pot with a thick layer of cream on top.
I can assure you, you'll never need to buy any more starter, ever! As long as you save some for the next batch, you're golden! If you can use unprocessed milk purchased directly from a dairy farm, that's even better as I promise your tastebuds will rejoice! :)
Fat can naturally float on water due to its density being less than that of water.
The more fat one has, the less overall average density becomes, making it harder to sink. I have a close friend who is very overwheight and she can practically sit upright floating. I must admit I'd usually envy her when I struggled staying afloat while she enjoye a cool refreshment like it were her couch :)
So in short, less fat, more muscle mass, more bone mass harder to stay afloat.
Also the diving suite (which is made from a foam-like material) and some of the hallow diving gear make it harder to sink, hence the need for weights.
> so that you get pushed to the surface with zero effort
This is not always true.
Your buoyancy decreases as you go deeper (and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure).
At a depth of 30 meters (100 feet), the pressure is 4 atmospheres, 4 times that of sea level.
Furthermore, not everyone is positively buoyant. The less fat one has, especially if not wearing diving suit, the more likely staying afloat/level to become harder.
As the depth increases, lungs and all bodily cavities shrink, further adding to one's density.
So, at 30 meters, it is actually quite a struggle to swim back up, even more so if you've lost your fins.
As for weights, I used to work out and exercise daily. During that time, I also dived few times a week spanning various sea conditions throughout the year and never have once taken weights as I was already negative.
Fast forward 2 years to today, I put on 15kg (33 lbs) and I need 10kg weight to enjoy my dive. But on the upside, I'd probably skyrocket to the surface if needed, lol :D
Your expectations are neither unreasonable, nor reasonable, without the context and environment of the business and market it operates in.
For some products, companies and their markets, the expectation from the users/customers could be so low that the mere existence of the product can be quite disruptive.
In fact, (most) startups exist to pursue an idea of disruption.
As the product, company, market and customers evolve, the expectations begin shifting.
This leads to an inevitable choice across a spectrum from leaving things as they are to rewriting entire stacks.
If the leadership can do a good job hiring the right people to both navigate the chaos and know how to get to a better place, things would then evolve, in whatever pace that can be allowed by the business, given calculated risks on engineering practices or lack thereof.
The key here is the "right people", rather than just "more people".
Based on the information shared, you sound like you are the right person to lead an engineering quality and reliability initiative.
Although, I do assume that you may not be the right person because you are failing to cope with the current chaos.
That being said, the mere fact that you're seeking counsel here tells me you are willing to manage this. I think that's a great start.
At this point, I belive there are two (and possibly more) things you can do:
- Talk to the key people in leadership to understand how they perceive the current situation and whether they are willing, if not even intent on, improving the status quo.
- Ask yourself for how long more you can navigate the chaos and whether that takes away from your mental and even physical well being.
Perhaps shifting your perspective and being intentional about it can help. This could even be the best thing that happened to you. Fast forward a few years, you'll perhaps have become an engineering leader who has had the opportunity to have experienced a huge paradigm shift and worked on solving its challenges.
Perhaps still a big enough space for a bootstrapped indie business, for lack of VC scale.
NMEA is quite interesting, though. Coupled with Czone for digital switching and power readings, I bet there is some interesting insight waiting to be discovered, one that can be monetized.