RowanH

We're getting taken to the cleaners in NZ!! I think it's $50 for a westpac chopper ride...

They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues.

Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.

Yes. Queens English countries it's the phrase used (New Zealand - that's what we use).

I don't know. Certainly the frequency and severity is just eye opening. We had 2 1 in 50's with 1 in 100 in 3 weeks (!!!).

I know you guys have also had it bad over there.

I expect the insurance companies will start removing flood cover soon. Which then becomes a bit of a shit show with mortgages. Or will raise the premiums so high that they're effectively uninsurable.

Chunks of NZ are becoming very expensive to uninsurable, and extreme impact weather events are getting more frequent.

It would be fair say a good portion of the population don't understand the maths of a weather event just how astronomically expensive a sudden flood is.

In our small town in the last 5 years, we've had 2-3 different "1 in 100 year" floods within 30km of each other (highly localised dramatic flooding and slips). To the point "1 in 100 year" is now a standing joke.

In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant.

It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.

It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it.

It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.

To be fair EV's can have some very high initial torque delivery, and are heavy = tyre shredding beasts.

I know I know, people aren't supposed to be taking off from every light at full chat, but, given the capability some people can't help themselves.

Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.

Sample size of 1

- Side hustle #1 funded my toy habit for a long time and gave me the confidence "I can build & support something from start to finish".

- Got to C Level working for 'the man' (aka the board). But regardless of level you're never in control of your destiny, especially with the eventuality of PE. For some that's okay, for others that's not...

- Which lead to Side Hustle #2. Left my day job 3 years ago....

Now have some of the best in our wee niche using our product, a number of team members, gradually growing it in bootstrapped fashion.

No investors, no funding rounds, no chasing growth targets. As "pure" as it can get - adding features, capturing more market, getting positive word of mouth, picking up new countries, finding new edge cases, adding new package upgrades. I think we're around 40% of new clients are referrals/word of mouth.....

In the first 6 months of turning billing on you're going "what the heck am I doing...." now I'm "oh I wouldn't give this up..." immensely rewarding bringing other new people into the business, and seeing that flow through to the finished product for our clients.

At least in NZ, side hustles are the genesis of a lot of tech companies.

Oooo thank you for mentioning that. Looks quite feature rich !

How does Anrok charge? is it based on a per filing basis or %age of rev? If %age can you share broadly speaking what it costs?

Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...) let's a 3rd party app do that..

Neat idea

Echoing this, loved the product feature callout diagram. Immediately 'view source' to figure out how it was done.

In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.

Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.

After this I imagine there will be an option "do you want updates immediately, or updates when released - n, or n+2, n+6, n+24, n+48 hrs?"

Given the choice I bet there's going to be surprisingly large number of orgs go "we'll take n+24hrs thanks"

That's a high bar - in my experience (New Zealand) 1/3 of candidates can't even write any form of code to retrieve a random element from an array. 1/3 have to be nudged along and asked some leading questions, and 1/3 are "what the heck are you asking me that for, I can do that in my sleep, that better not be indicative of the quality of coders... "

There is just so much misrepresentation out there it's insane.

The PT-P models (we've got and a lot of our clients use the PT-P900W) - it does a very nifty "half cut" on laminated tape labels that makes it super easy to peel and stick.

Love the API it has, aside from some quirks - we can control the printer from within our Android/iOS apps - literally can tell it to half cut the labels or not.

I run one but I don't runn one - I've met the other Rowan

Another (recently former!) Jafa. Possibly crossed paths also, given how many years in the industry :)

Wow so you work at CDK. I wouldn't wish the sh-t storm you guys must be going through on our worst enemy.

I was talking with one of your clients today (we're not competitors) and you just don't realise how far screwed some of these companies are right now.

It actually made an instant upsell today of 'here's our additional cloud sync' feature. No questions, no umming and ahhing, it's just 'yep done, add it, turn it on'. Heck we probably undersold it by 10x.

I hope you guys start getting some sense of normality soon and get systems back online.

Close to this market - ShopMonkey is doing it for general garage work, and we, GlobalWorkshop, are doing it for high end/custom vehicles (restoration/restomods/small motorsport teams).

I'm pretty sure one of our recent trialling companies have been using CDK and desperate to get away from it for their restoration work.

"It hasn't been updated in years" was the quote last week..

30+ years in the software industry. Everyone did this back in the day - then it changed for 3 reasons (1) completely unsustainable (2) people didn't upgrade, or being forced to upgrade and pay large prices got grumpy about it. (3) the money people figured out subscriptions were more profitable.

There's tonnes of companies that have legacy 'pay upfront' models, that hit the wall as they'd saturated their markets, then their revenue stream dropped off and all of a sudden saw the wall of transitioning to web/mobile needing to happen and didn't have the funds to pull it off.

I'd almost completely forgotten about it until I was challenged by a prospect in a meeting monday 'is this one of these new lease software systems, I want to own it!" had to educate him on the way the world worked now...

We just had ANZAC day in NZ [commemorating WWI/battle of gallipoli). A bunch of (I'm guessing younger people) are getting up in arms that it's glorification of war and whataboutism on other things going on the world "why don't we do x about y", "we shouldn't be celebrating it" etc etc.

They really missed the point that it's about not forgetting the brutality of war - to remember those who served and died under horrific circumstances. One of the key phrases is "lest we forget". However I fear we are, as each generation passes from WWI/WWII the horrors gradually get diluted.

While we don't have kids it's apparent the younger generations are not getting the stories of WWI/WWII passed down and their exposure to it is the glorification through Hollywood.

Thank you good HN'er for posting this up. It's always important to remember so we as a world don't go back there.

I was on a 32in 5k ultrawide.. trying out a 42 4k oled just now. My eyes are thanking me for the bigger screen realestate, but I did get used to the wideness of the UltraWide. Definitely better to go massive single in my view.

That OLED video look though, just can't be beaten..

closure_tree

Because Ruby and especially RoR is a strict downgrade in every dimension compared to .NET.

And that line of thinking is damaging in the tech world. There is no one ring to rule them all. Each tool, language, framework has a place - everything has tradeoffs.

I've worked with enough .NET world to know what the tradeoffs would have been.

For instance the critical library that enabled this piece of functionality, the nearest thing in .NET world looks to have 1 star on github, last updated 4 years ago. The ruby gem has 1.8k stars, tonnes of commits and upto date.

So if you were to implement that in .NET you would be (a) hitting the books (b) re-writing that library or (c) doing a hugely in-effecient/naive implementation that wouldn't scale.

In RoR land - drop in the gem and be prototyping that afternoon.

Sure if I was VC backed, and had money to burn, it might be a bit more interesting to use .NET - if were targetting more enterprise oriented clients and potentially wanted an on prem option, then yeah - .NET. Wanting more access to developers in our country - .NET, that's the predominant market. Etc etc.

In our use case RoR isn't a downgrade.

While certainly a little polarising the adage of optimise later really comes into play here. We do a lightweight industry specific system that had all the generic stuff (eg time/tasks etc) with some special sauce that makes us stand out. One of our clients said "Mate the rate you guys are adding features - the ERP company we went with they haven't done 1/10th of what you've done in the last year. Can you implement full multi-level bills of materials? "

I said "no, can't do that - that's huge".

A weekend later of experimentation (thanks to one very kick-butt gem on that has an amazing way of managing trees) "actually, we may just be able to - it's going to be a long road though - setting expectations..."

A period of time later we've now implemented a full BOM planning/tracking system, tested well upto and beyond the numbers of items these types of companies expect.

To the point they cancelled their renewal with a big/established ERP vendor and went with us instead.

There's definitely some instances where speed to market trumps everything else. We can go optimise queries later on.

What's been fascinating is I left my day job 2 years ago (to the month). We've gone from unheard of to becoming the market leader in our space. There is absolutely no way that could have been done with any other stack (without spending 5x the money - and I argue that co-ordinating a bigger developer team it almost wouldn't matter what money you throw at it, it gets exponentially harder getting everyone on the same page for delivery).

At my old workplace I couldn't convince the .NET team for love nor money to look outside the box.

Thanks! Definitely aiming to try them out

I would imagine with cutbacks on spending/investing I think people getting leaner and meaner will re-visit the sheer productivity you can get out of it.

Sure shaving the last 10/10ths of having a SPA with simple API based back end gets the ultimate user experience and speed but that cost curve goes up significantly for that last 10th (if you were to compared to an 'old school' Rails app)

I can't even fathom what it would have taken to build our startups' product in say React + Node (as an example..) vs OG Rails SSR. I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Not saying whether it’s good or bad, just the obvious bit left out.

Does really show that UBI discussion needs to be had sooner rather than later …

has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the company.

"While systematically removing the unskilled job categories at the company"

The robot missed out that sentence for some reason.