iamcasen

I believe that is a special deal that apple made them which does not apply across the board.

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.

Boy, this sure sounds familiar.

Every seed stage company ever....

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

How is this not a complete and obvious no-brainer? As advanced as our culture is in some ways, it is clearly quite idiotic in many other ways.

Agreed! What can we do about this? I'm an advocate for web over app, but that has it's own downsides

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.

I will give ts-rest a look-see.

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.

Yes absolutely. I've been very impressed that Rails has managed to stay relevant all these years later.

I hope the NodeJS world can turnout something as turnkey and well-supported as Rails, but I haven't really seen it yet.

The choice of stack really just depends on the project, and the skillsets of developers in that community + the available tools in that community.

This article isn't the best, but I'm glad it is attempting to foster a conversation about the future of JAMstack.

I've been developing with React for 10ish years now. My most recent startups have been a mixture of React front-ends that call to a variety of backend services. Most recently using Vercel and Next.js to host our frontend codebase.

One of our lead engineers setup an NX monorepo. We deploy an API to AWS and our front-end to vercel. This has honestly added so much unnecessary complexity, I really regret it. Here's the main issue as I see it:

Conflating a fullstack web application, with a decoupled UI and a standalone API.

It's the same old conversation about "microservices" and knowing where to draw the boundaries. In my experience "frontend" and "backend" are not really good boundaries.

Sometimes there needs to be a high degree of coordination between frontend and backend. In this case, they should probably be part of a fullstack deployment like Rails or Django, or my personal favorite: Remix.

Personally, I think all web applications should start out with the assumption they are a monolith. Only after the product is starting to reach maturity, and weaknesses in the monolith are revealed, should a backend api or a decoupled front-end be split off.

Vercel and Netlify (among others) try and avoid the basic necessity of databases and other backend complexities as if a front-end developer can exist in some shining, pretty land free of that yucky backend stuff.

This is true, bug again, how is the company culture formed in the first place? Was there ever a company culture that formed from fully remote individuals who never ever met in person even once?

I can't think of an example to be honest.

I very much agree with your point of view, but I've seen it go sideways when the culture is not well established and rooted deeply throughout the organization.

When you remove top-down management, pay well, and "treat people like adults" then they will have to autonomously align with the greater mission and purpose of the company and work quickly towards delivering positive outcomes for the business.

What I've seen happen instead, is people just start working on things that tickle their curiosity, wandering off into left field and the team is struggling to row in the same direction.

It is my belief, that in an office, or at least in a company that has an established culture, this is less of a problem. There are more mechanisms available to our innate human biology to reach a group homeostasis.

I think the fidelity of unspoken information is so much higher in person. Over zoom and most certainly via text-based comms like slack, it's hard to tell if you are being understood, and if you are understanding.

Beyond just the technical understanding, then there is emotional understanding. I find that it's much easier to encounter apathy and malice over digital comms. In person, you have limited access to someone else's attention. On slack, you can be pestered by dozens of "very important" walls of text every day.

I think in this case, an established company with an established product and a mature org would do just fine in a remote setting.

I'm talking more about seed-stage startups and starting 100% remote companies from scratch. It's a whole different ballgame.

After iterating on this process for years now we just haven't found a solution that works.

Some orgs can do this through meticulous documentation (Amazon comes to mind), but that hasn't worked here. People have a hard time digesting huge volumes of textual information from multiple parties.

I tried this for a while, but no one would engage with my docs or collaborate with me that way.

So far the only thing that's been reliable has been regular zoom pairing sessions. But this too can be very exhausting unless you are in an IC role that has very clear directives (this doesn't really exist at seed-stage).

Indeed, it is on the company. My point is that it is hard to do this well at a fully remote and async company. Especially when collaboration needs to be tight and delivery needs to be quick.

Naturally, when in person, you sit with your team and you have opportunities to have lunch with people and get to know who they are. These opportunities don't work as well at remote companies. Especially with different timezones involved.

Not saying it can't be done, but I haven't found a way that isn't extremely contrived.

As a founding engineer for a pandemic-era company, I can see both sides of this argument.

We've had a very challenging time hiring and maintaining teams across the company. People fall through the cracks in a remote company very easily. People don't seem to bond as well or as easily. Siloes happen. Misunderstanding company vision and product requirements is very, very easy when trying to communicate over zoom and slack.

IMO Seed-stage teams should spend lots of time together so that trust and understanding is built in-person. Hiring should be done very carefully, and people should be onboarded again, in-person. Once trust is there, and good work flows are established, teams can go 100% remote, but I still think it's good to get together at least once or twice a year.

It's possible for sure, I just wouldn't call that super intelligent. There are other ways to get what you want besides ruthless domination. One could argue that ruthless domination is a last resort, and that only really primal intelligence is in play at that point.

Fair enough. I just don't see evil as particularly intelligent, or evolutionary in anything but the very short term. Nature seems to follow a balance of give and take. Too much take, and all your food runs out and there is a famine.

I personally expect any form of super-intelligence to understand this.

My step-son insisted on an Xbox S because he plays only Gamepass games. He is 11, and all his friends have Xbox's as well. Being a die-hard Playstation guy (in a former life) I was confused, since Playstation seems so much better.

I do agree that Microsoft's software is a better experience than PSN, and cloud gaming via Gamepass is quite cool.