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joshsharp

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Co-founder Hello Code (the web developer half) in Melbourne, Australia. Working on Exist, a hub to track and understand of all the data you create about your life.

Hello Code: http://hellocode.co Exist: https://exist.io

Mastodon: @joshsharp@aus.social

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press.asimov.com 11mo ago

What Makes a Mature Science

joshsharp
2pts0
changemap.co 3y ago

Show HN: Changemap, roadmaps for teams working in public

joshsharp
5pts0
exist.io 4y ago

Show HN: My personal analytics service Exist now lets you track any custom value

joshsharp
14pts0
slimemoldtimemold.com 4y ago

Newsletter (Platform) Natural Selection

joshsharp
1pts0
www.noemamag.com 5y ago

Exit to community – what if startups could be owned by their users?

joshsharp
3pts0
blog.hellocode.co 6y ago

What I've learned building an indie SaaS business

joshsharp
1pts0
joshsharp.com.au 6y ago

What I've learned building an indie SaaS business

joshsharp
2pts1
www.indiehackers.com 6y ago

I grew my Quantified Self app to $14k/mo

joshsharp
2pts0
rileytestut.com 6y ago

An Alternative App Store for iOS

joshsharp
1pts0
blog.rescuetime.com 7y ago

Permission changes stop RescueTime logging calls on Android

joshsharp
1pts0
gotham.rs 7y ago

Announcing Gotham 0.3

joshsharp
1pts0
larder.io 7y ago

A round-up of Rust web frameworks

joshsharp
3pts0
andrewpekler.com 8y ago

Phantom Islands

joshsharp
7pts1
mobile.abc.net.au 8y ago

Debunking the myth that people died young before modern medicine

joshsharp
1pts0
blog.hellocode.co 8y ago

After four years, our bootstrapped business can now pay my co-founder too

joshsharp
1pts0
blog.hellocode.co 8y ago

A bizarre “403 Forbidden” bug-hunting adventure

joshsharp
137pts42
exist.io 8y ago

Show HN: Track anything with Exist (custom tags update)

joshsharp
6pts1
www.w3.org 8y ago

W3C TAG finding: distributed and syndicated content

joshsharp
1pts0
m.nautil.us 9y ago

How a kids' cartoon led to wild raccoons in Japan

joshsharp
1pts0
larder.io 9y ago

Why I blog about code even though I'm not an expert

joshsharp
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larder.io 9y ago

What it's like to be a junior dev in charge of half a company's development

joshsharp
2pts0
larder.io 9y ago

Things that make me feel unwelcome online as a junior developer

joshsharp
2pts0
www.smh.com.au 9y ago

Night vision glasses: nanocrystals allow direct vision into infrared

joshsharp
116pts25
larder.io 9y ago

Show HN: Get weekly release notes for your starred GitHub repos

joshsharp
3pts0
larder.io 9y ago

Why we chose content marketing for our products

joshsharp
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larder.io 9y ago

Making It: an interview with indie developer of HabitChamp

joshsharp
3pts0
resources.workable.com 9y ago

Employee monitoring: to track or not to track?

joshsharp
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larder.io 9y ago

I got more done when I started working at 1pm

joshsharp
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larder.io 10y ago

Show HN: Larder, bookmarking for developers

joshsharp
52pts32
blog.bellebethcooper.com 10y ago

Tracking down a Swift compiler bug in Xcode

joshsharp
2pts0

Still working on https://exist.io, a platform for quantifying and tracking data about your life. We've been around for about a decade now and seen many competitors come and go — this niche is definitely not at the peak of the hype cycle any more. On the other hand, Apple Watches have normalised tracking body stats like activity (and sleep to a degree), and yet we think there's still so much more that can be done with that data. We're still (always) working on improving our insights and correlations to find better ways to use the data to optimise your health, mood, productivity, and so on. But not with "AI" :)

We do not need to honour cookies when making requests to the API as we use token authentication. Even if we wanted to keep users logged in within the web view, which we don't because the web view is just for static help pages, we wouldn't want to send those to the API.

Sure, the cookies expire (in two weeks I think, in this case) but that doesn't invalidate the issue that the wkwebview silently shares cookies with nsurlsession, nor does it negate the confusing journey of tracking down the bug. Sheesh.

They shouldn't be logging in via the webview within the app anyway, so that's moot.

We are using cookies, as the post says, as a fallback authentication so devs can browse the API from a browser if they're logged in to the site.

For context: Exist is a personal analytics platform where we import data from sources like fitness trackers, Apple Health, productivity trackers, email and calendars, social media etc. and find insights and correlations in the data. We've been doing this for about 3 years now, and we've just added the ability to track your own tags, probably our biggest feature release so far. These are just binary yes/no tags you can add to a day for context, like "coffee", "sex", "meditation", or whatever you like. We can then use those alongside your other data to find correlations like "you have a worse day when you track 'nootropic'" (which was the case for me), or "your weight is higher when you track 'eating out'".

It's not really what you're after, but we're some folks trying to compete with Pinboard. I'm sure Maciej once tweeted something about it being a business that could be successful for a couple of indie devs, not a big VC-backed startup, and that's what we are... Although the successful part is still a ways off :)

Anyway, our thing is https://larder.io. Our angle is that we'll sync your github starred repos as bookmarks along with everything else you save.

You'd think so, but a bunch of users who keep happily using Larder without paying for it say otherwise! It seems like plenty of people don't hit that limit. I probably wouldn't either, actually. It's a tricky balance, because it has to be a high enough limit to still be useful (apparent tick) but low enough to encourage upgrading (uh,not enough data yet). It is a free trial and not a free tier, after all — the idea is that if you find you're using it regularly and hitting the limit, then perhaps you might be interested in paying for it.

Sorry this isn't clear. The trial restriction only kicks in after the first day, so that when you first sign up you can go nuts testing it out. I'll add that clarification to the account or upgrade page somewhere.

It's a general bookmarking tool that is focused on developer use-cases.

As I mentioned in another thread, in the future we'll be working on other developer-oriented features like an API, webhooks, maybe Stack Overflow integration or a CLI client, depending on what users want. GitHub sync is just the first big feature :)

You can select multiple by hitting "manage" and then using the checkboxes that appear. Sorry that isn't clear.

Search does partial matches for url, description, title etc., but tags are the one thing that do require a full match. If you type '#fu' into the search, for example, you'll get a '#fuck-gfw' suggestion. (I have no idea what GFW is by the way, so I cannot approve or condone this sentiment)

Well the reason we're actually charging for Larder rather than pursuing some kind of "growth" strategy is to do our best to avoid going out of business due to lack of funding. We're building a lifestyle business rather than a startup, to be honest, and it's highly unlikely we'll ever get acquired either. We just want to make a living building things and selling them (unusual, I know). So while I can't make any guarantees, what's most likely is that if Larder ever does shut down or go away, it'll be through a decision we make personally, and so we'll provide plenty of time to export your data (which is already possible from the account page, whenever you'd like it) before taking it offline.

I'm not aware of any other bookmarking services specifically tailored towards devs, so I can't speak to that. In terms of what we do differently to other general bookmarking services, our big one right now is the GitHub integration — we sync your starred repos as bookmarks, tag them by language automatically, and also sync related metadata like last release and commit date. I find it really handy to have my bookmarks and stars in one spot, because I save a lot of dev-related resources and I can never remember, did I bookmark an article about that library or did I star its repo? Now I can just look in the one spot for everything. Also, the metadata on last commit etc is very handy for keeping an eye on how active libraries are without having to watch them and wade through the full feed of their issues, etc.

In the future we'll be working on other developer-oriented features like an API, webhooks, maybe Stack Overflow integration or a CLI client, depending on what users want.

We're still quite early on in building it, but the missing things you'd expect like an API and mobile clients are in the works. If you sign up and find you'd like something else that's missing, feel free to vote or suggest things on our public Trello roadmap [1]. We want to keep adding more features that aid developer productivity, so if you have related ideas we're keen to hear them.

[1] https://trello.com/b/0gw1nPAH/larder-roadmap

One thing I found surprising on reading this is that they essentially spent $10k and two months ($5k listed as saved * 2 months) to figure out they weren't using their logging infrastructure any more. Wish I could be that gung-ho with resources!

Open Dylan 11 years ago

Hi Bruce! Good to see Open Dylan getting some attention on HN :)

April Zero v3 11 years ago

I think it's really interesting to see the divide between visualisations and "actionable insights" in the discussion here. I'm definitely more about the latter, which has been my focus when building Exist[1] — which you could say is an uglier AprilZero/Gyroscope. AprilZero looks like a magical movie interface (and I feel like Anand has said he was inspired by this sort of thing before). In contrast it's definitely obvious I'm not a designer! So while Exist aggregates a lot of the same sort of services, it's much more about trying to make it work for you — we track rolling averages for all your data points, find simple insights each day (best/worst steps for x days) and automatically correlate everything against everything else to find interesting relations. Correlation != causation, of course, but seeing things like "Your weight is higher after you check into Little Greek Souvlaki" (a genuine result of mine) feels sort of like magic to me, even though with some thought I probably could've figured that out on my own.

Where we still have a way to go is tracking things at a smaller than day-level granularity — I really want to find relations between things that happen around the same time, like checking in to a specific place vs productivity levels, but that level of smarts is still a fair way off I think. Plus the "actionable" part of "actionable insights" is a whole can of worms in terms of computers telling people what to do.

All the same, exciting times.

[1] https://exist.io