joelm

I want fast answers to questions like:

"Why is Zoom lagging?"

"Is the issue my WiFi?"

"What's going on with the Internet?"

So, I built a local Mac utility that runs in the menubar to give at-a-glance visibility into live network and application issues. It's free (for typical uses), battery-efficient, and gives fast and reliable answers.

https://breakdown.live/

Been using Claude Code (4 Opus) fairly successfully in a large Rust codebase, but sometimes frustrated by it with complex tasks. Tried Gemini CLI today (easy to get working, which was nice) and it was pretty much a failure. It did a notably worse job than Claude at having the Rust code modifications compile successfully.

However, Gemini at one point output what will probably be the highlight of my day:

"I have made a complete mess of the code. I will now revert all changes I have made to the codebase and start over."

What great self-awareness and willingness to scrap the work! :)

I don't recall exactly (it's been a while since I was handling the colo contracts directly). I just remember that it was really good value.

You're probably going to have to contact folks for quotes for most colo providers. They're doing "enterprise sales", so they want to talk to you, see what the needs and opportunities are, then quote you based on your needs.

What are your goals?

If budget is a factor, there are local/regional providers you can find good deals with. E.g. I've had good experiences with https://www.opticfusion.com/ in Seattle.

If low-latency across the US is a factor then...doing that with one will be sub-optimal, however I'd either start in a specific market you want to chase (e.g. LA or NYC), or go more central like Chicago.

If connectivity flexibility and peering are key for you then you might consider locating in a "carrier hotel". The best locations for those vary by geography (e.g. in Chicago that would be at Equinix, but in LA it's Coresite). You'll pay more, but can readily access the peering exchange.

This has been an intense journey building CompanyCraft as a solo dev (and I was never a full-time dev by background). Thanks to CoPilot and ChatGPT I was able to learn a decent level of React through the project. I look forward to your feedback!

Congrats on jumping into this adventure! Here are my thoughts on your concerns:

1. If you communicate that you're in the early stages of building an exciting new business and wanting to get feedback from early-access customers, there should be businesses that are OK with you being solo. They will adapt to that risk, and you won't be able to sell to everyone, but it shouldn't exclude you from everyone either. You might just not be talking to the right customers yet.

2. For milestones (and fundraising) you should think about your goals - what are you trying to get out of this? Do you want to build and scale a big team, serve giant amounts of customers, etc. Or do you just want to augment or replace your income? Or something in-between? You can think about this from different angles: team size, revenue, geographic scope, your personal exit or income, etc.

Here are a couple of examples from my journey in case they're helpful:

In my prior business (https://www.bigleaf.net) my first milestone was to get a working product. I didn't feel as though just talking about it would be convincing enough (and it wasn't), but once I could demo an MVP then it really wow'd customers. Along the way I added a milestone to get a technical co-founder since I got burnt out doing it myself. Those 2 major steps took just over a year. The next milestone was getting our first revenue (took just a month or so after the MVP), then milestones just kept being added from there logically based on the strategic path we chose to be on at that moment.

In my current business (https://www.companycraft.ai) I had a mix of some early milestones. I wanted to talk to potential customers (entrepreneurs) to ensure the problems I wanted to solve matched up with pain they had, and I also wanted to build an MVP ASAP. I completed those in about 3 months, with many other smaller steps and goals along the way. My current milestone is to do a full "v1" public launch in November.

So you just set some milestones that are logical based on where you are and where you want to be in the coming months and years, then hold yourself accountable to them (or ideally be connected with a peer or mentor who can be an accountability partner of sorts).

3. On location, I go back to your team goals. If you're going to stay solo then no, location shouldn't matter. If you want to build a fully remote team then it shouldn't matter much (though being near-ish to a decent airport would be valuable for visiting the team and customers). If you want any local team members then you should think about where you'll gather and what the talent pool is like in your area.

4. It sounds like you're already on a good track here - talking to people who have the pain you're solving and gathering their emails. If that has you on the right track I'd just keep doing that. However you mentioned below that you're selling this B2B...so in that case you may want to consider if you're actually talking to the buyer of your product. Are the people you've met the people who would approve the purchase of your solution? If not, try to connect with those people. Identifying a list of them on LinkedIn and cold reaching out could be one method.

5. Fundraising goes back to your goals as an entrepreneur :) If you want to grow this to IPO or a really big exit, have a team of hundreds, and build a market-changing or world-impacting offering, then you probably need to raise outside funds at some point. However, if your desired scale is smaller and/or you see a path to profitability without fundraising then you get to keep control of your destiny, which is great. If you can afford it and you don't sense the market is going to run away without you, I'd advise continue building, talking to customers, and close your first deals; don't rush into raising money. If/when you know that you can't succeed at your goals without raising money, then dive into that path.

Yea, that is probably a better solution. Not an easy one to refactor into at the moment though.

I've seen more errors lately I think, but no the latency has been an issue for months. I think it has grown some over the last few months, but not a dramatic change.

Latency has been the biggest challenge for me.

They cite "two to 15+ seconds" in this blog post for responses. Via the OpenAI API I've been seeing more like 45-60 seconds for responses (using GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4 in chat mode). Note, this is using ~3500 tokens total.

I've had to extensively adapt to that latency in the UI of our product. Maybe I should start showing funny messages while the user is waiting (like I've seen porkbun do when you pay for domain names).

I thought this was an interesting thread. I'm curious if folks here agree with his assessment:

"predictive AI will seem stuck while generative AI accelerates in 2023. Most high-value AI will still be predictive- so there will significant frustrations around AI ROI."

Shameless plug - if you're using Starlink and want to fix the dropouts, plus get a static public IPv4 address that works over any ISP, get our SD-WAN service: https://www.bigleaf.net/. With a 2nd internet connection, our platform will auto-ID your sensitive traffic and route it over the best performing connection (e.g. aware of jitter, dropouts, etc), plus your bulk data traffic (e.g. Netflix) will route over your highest-throughput connection. 30-day money-back guarantee, so no risk to try.

As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.

Bigleaf Networks | Portland, OR area | Full-Time ONSITE | $60k-$150k plus stock options

Bigleaf is what we call "Cloud-first SD-WAN" - we use a software-based network to optimize the connection from businesses to their key cloud applications. For example, grocery stores use us to ensure their credit card transactions are successful and law firms use us to ensure their VoIP calls always sound good.

We're hiring for a number of roles right now:

  * Software Development Manager
  * Sr. Front-End SW Engineer
  * Linux-focused SW Engineer (firmware and Linux networking subsystem)
  * Software Engineer (general role with focus on back-end and networking)
  * DevOps Engineer
  * Director of Network Engineering and Operations
  * Network Support Specialist

Bigleaf Networks | Beaverton, OR (Portland suburb) | ONSITE | http://www.bigleaf.net

Bigleaf is an SD-WAN platform that provides reliability and performance for Cloud applications over commodity broadband. We're a small team but we've got an established business with hundreds of paying mid-market customers, and we're growing quickly.

Our interview process entails some initial email discussions, 1-2 in-person or phone-based interviews (no crazy technical algorithm memorization tests), and often a brief (~1 hr) coding challenge for you to do from home.

We're hiring for the following technical roles right now: * Front-end Developer * Sr. Software Engineer (Linux networking focus) * Network Operations Engineer * Network Integration Engineer

Check out more details here: http://www.bigleaf.net/careers and feel free to email me (Founder and CEO) at joelm@bigleaf.net (no recruiters please).

Bigleaf Networks | Beaverton, OR (near Portland) | ONSITE full-time

Bigleaf is an SD-WAN provider delivering internet redundancy and optimization, keeping businesses connected to the cloud. Our proprietary platform uses Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) technologies to provide seamless failover and dynamic application prioritization.

We have a reliable and high-performance service that’s growing quickly, so we're looking for a Network Operations Engineer to join the team.

The Role

• Network Operations

• Technical Support

• Device and Service Provisioning

• Software Engineering / DevOps

Fit Check

• Do you love serving customers with outstanding support?

• Do you know what ARP is and how it works?

• Have you troubleshot BGP or OSPF issues?

• Do you know what jitter does to a VoIP call?

If you think this might be a good fit for you, please check out more info below and get in touch:

http://www.bigleaf.net/careers/

Bigleaf founder and CEO here, glad to answer questions.

Portland, OR - Onsite - Bigleaf Networks

Bigleaf provides internet redundancy and optimization, keeping businesses connected to the cloud across multiple ISPs. Bigleaf's cloud-based routing service helps ensure that critical apps like VoIP, web conferencing, and virtual desktop always work properly, even over commodity internet connections like Cable and DSL.

We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our team. You'll be our senior-most on-site engineer, so you'll get to drive the direction of our technical projects. For details please check out: http://www.bigleaf.net/careers

If you're interested please email joelm@bigleaf.net

Bigleaf Networks | Portland, OR | Lead Software Engineer

We provide internet redundancy and optimization, keeping businesses connected to the cloud across multiple ISP connections. Our proprietary platform uses Software-Defined-Networking technologies to provide seamless failover and dynamic application prioritization.

We need someone to join our team to handle:

• Software Projects: You'll be responsible for driving the development of new systems, features, and bug-fixes; coordinating people and resources to ensure projects are done excellently and on-time. You’ll lead the technical development of our software and systems forward, navigating challenging projects and complex decisions.

• High-availability software design, development and deployment: Our customers purchase our service to improve their network reliability and performance. In this role you'll carefully brainstorm, design, build, and deploy systems that are fault-tolerant, efficient, fail gracefully, and solve problems in creative ways. You should have the ability and vision to solve challenging business needs through artful and scalable software and system designs.

• Troubleshooting: Our software has to run efficiently, and our network has to run almost flawlessly. You'll spend time diagnosing problems in code and with Linux system integration, testing code updates, and helping with network operations, all to ensure our customer's don't have to think about their internet (because it always works).

• Linux Systems Development: We run a software-based network that relies extensively on Linux. You will help ensure that these systems are designed and implemented in a scalable and reliable manner, with appropriate security measures in place.

For more details see http://www.bigleaf.net/careers/

If this sounds of interest to you, please email me at joelm@bigleaf.net

Bigleaf Networks, Portland OR - Lead Software Engineer

Bigleaf provides internet redundancy and optimization, keeping businesses connected to their internet-based applications by leveraging diverse ISP connections.

Our proprietary platform uses Software-Defined-Networking technologies to provide seamless failover and dynamic application prioritization. We have a reliable and high-performance service offering that’s been proven regionally and is in the midst of nationwide expansion. We’re looking for a lead software engineer to join our team to help make that a success.

Here's a summary of what you'll be doing:

• Software Projects: You’ll be responsible for driving the development of new systems, features, and bug-fixes; coordinating people and resources to ensure projects are done excellently and on-time.

• High-availability software design, development and deployment: Our customers purchase our service to improve their network reliability and performance. In this role you’ll carefully brainstorm, design, build, and deploy systems that are fault-tolerant, efficient, fail gracefully, and solve problems in creative ways.

• Troubleshooting: Our software has to run efficiently, and our network has to run almost flawlessly. You’ll spend time diagnosing problems in code and with Linux system integration, testing code updates, and helping with network operations, all to ensure our customer’s don’t have to think about their internet (because it always works).

• Linux Systems Development: We run a software-based network that relies extensively on Linux. You will help ensure that these systems are designed and implemented in a scalable and reliable manner, with appropriate security measures in place.

Bigleaf is a well-funded fast-growing startup, so your day-to-day tasks will vary a bit and morph over time. You’ll be an early team member, so you’ll have the chance to help shape company culture and make a huge difference. We plan to extensively promote from within, so you’ll have the opportunity to shape and grow your career over time.

If this sounds of interest, feel free to check out this page for a bit more info: http://www.bigleaf.net/careers/ and contact me at joelm@bigleaf.net.

Joel Mulkey, Founder and CEO