olofsj

Booli | Stockholm, Sweden | ONSITE | Full-Time | https://www.booli.se

Booli is a search engine for housing in Sweden making the housing market more open and transparent and helping consumers better understand their household economy. We build products tailored for different customers on top of a common foundation built by collecting and organizing data from a lot of different sources.

Nice things about working at Booli:

- the housing market is engaging and has interesting data sets

- we're solving real problems for real people

- we're in the middle of some exciting technical shifts where we are not afraid to challenge ourselves

- we have a healthy work culture

- we're seeing some exciting growth right now.

We are now looking for more developers to join us, especially fullstack developers comfortable with React, node.js and graphql, but also devops and other roles. At least some understanding of Swedish is required to understand and communicate with our users.

Read more at https://jobb.booli.se or email olof@booli.se if you want to know more!

Booli | Stockholm, Sweden | ONSITE | Full-Time | https://www.booli.se

Booli is a search engine for housing in Sweden making the housing market more open and transparent and helping consumers better understand their household economy. We build products tailored for different customers on top of a foundation of collecting and organizing data from a lot of different sources.

It's a nice place to work since:

- the housing market is engaging and has interesting data sets

- we're solving real problems for real people

- we're in the middle of some exciting technical shifts where we are not afraid to challenge ourselves

- we have a healthy work culture

- we're seeing some exciting growth right now.

We are now looking for more developers to join us, both frontend, backend and devops. At least some understanding of Swedish is required to understand and communicate with our users.

Read more at https://jobb.booli.se or email olof@booli.se if you have any questions!

Booli | Stockholm, Sweden | ONSITE | Full-Time | https://www.booli.se

Booli is a search engine for housing in Sweden aiming to make the housing market more open and transparent and help consumers better understand their household economy. We build products tailored for different customers on top of a foundation collecting and organizing data from a lot of different sources.

It's a nice place to work since:

- the housing market is engaging and has interesting data sets

- we're solving real problems for real people

- we're in the middle of some exciting technical shifts where we are not afraid to challenge ourselves

- we have a healthy work culture

- we're seeing some exciting growth right now.

We are now looking for more developers to join us, both frontend, backend and devops. At least some understanding of Swedish is required to understand and communicate with our users.

Read more at https://www.booli.se/kunskap/kom-och-jobba-med-oss/ or email olof@booli.se if you have any questions!

Booli | Stockholm, Sweden | ONSITE | Full-Time | https://www.booli.se

Booli is a search engine for housing in Sweden striving to make the housing market more open and transparent and help consumers understand their household economy. Our foundation is to collect and organize data from a lot of sources and build products tailored for different customers on top. We are working towards a good cause that is worth doing, are in the middle of some exciting technical work where we are not afraid to challenge ourselves, have a healthy work culture and are seeing some exciting growth right now. We are now looking for more developers to join us, both frontend, backend and devops. At least some understanding of Swedish is required to communicate with our users.

Read more at https://www.booli.se/kunskap/kom-och-jobba-med-oss/ or email olof@booli.se if you have any questions!

Booli | Stockholm, Sweden | ONSITE | Full-Time | https://www.booli.se

Booli is a search engine for housing in Sweden striving to make the housing market more open and transparent and help consumers understand their household economy. We collect and organize a lot of data and build products tailored for different customers on top of it. We are now looking for a full-stack developer who loves visalizing and presenting complex data to work with our product Booli Pro where we publish statistics for professionals working at construction companies, banks etc. At least some understanding of Swedish is required to communicate with our users.

Read more at https://jobb.booli.se/jobs/1071398-utvecklare-som-gillar-dat... or email olof@booli.se if you have any questions!

A small single-page info-site I made in a day or two some time ago started picking up traffic and now makes around $500/month from adsense ads. Quite nice for the work put into it, but of course if you take into account all my sites and apps that made nothing it's not much for the total effort. But now that it's getting traffic I have some ideas for building it out into a larger site, but I haven't found the time yet.

Unfortunately, too long has passed and any misconduct in the investigations has been prescribed so noone will be prosecuted or even get a slap on the wrist. Most people involved have already retired as well after building their careers on the case.

However, on the bright side there will be investigations to see how the current system can be improved to reduce the chances of repeating it in the future. For example, in important cases there may be appointed a secondary prosecutor whose role is to be critical of the investigation.

On the other hand, assuming it is true because it's messy would be just as naive.

Thank you for a very thoughtful post. A politically radical prosecutor stepping in to push her own agenda in a case with exceptionally high media coverage sounds much more likely than a conspiracy involving the CIA.

Apparently, the reason anyone in Sweden can't give any guarantee about an extradition is that any such extradition has to be tried in the courts, and the Swedish constitution doesn't grant anyone the power to decide the result without a trial.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Stockholm, Sweden)

I do native mobile apps for Android and backends in Django, and have experience in tying them together with RESTful apis. I can handled the full experience from backend to frontend, with knowledge in Python, Javascript and JQuery, HTML, CSS etc for the web and Java, C, C++ and graphics & layouts for Android.

Github: http://github.com/olofsj

Website & portfolio: http://www.tokotoko.se

Contact info in profile.

Clickable:

Full version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.japanska.an...

Free one-week trial here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.japanska.an...

Another new thing you didn't mention is the new list filter framework for the admin. I've found it really useful in my projects.

Actually, in most cases 4G (LTE) data should use less energy per bit to transfer your data than 3G. This may not be true for some of the early radios released since they are not as mature as 3G chipsets yet. It'll also take some time until the networks start using all power saving features available. But when devices and networks mature a little 4G should in general be more efficient.

However, since you get faster speeds you tend to use more data, which of course will use up your battery faster as well. But if you'll use it the same way you do today you'll just get faster access and should see about the same battery life, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Stockholm, Sweden)

Mostly working with Android and Django but also do frontend work with jquery and lately D3.js for visualizations. If by any chance anyone is interested in radio baseband receiver design I also have experience in that (mainly LTE), though I guess not many look for that here.

Check my profile for contact details and links to portfolio.

No, for now it doesn't. I may add that later, but since there are other apps (like Anki for example) that already do that I'm not sure if it's needed.

Thanks for the comment!

Parse.com looks interesting, but I'm a bit worried about trusting someone else with the whole server side backend. And since I already implemented a backend using Django it's not really needed for now.

I'll definitely do a website where you can see more details about your progress. There a leaderboard seems like a good idea. For example showing the user with best progress this week etc could be fun.

A children's version sounds very interesting. For now it's really focused on adult or young students studying Japanese as a foreign language. I'm not sure how big the market is for children learning Japanese as a foreign language, maybe it's bigger than I think?

I know there are some kanji apps for native Japanese speakers as well, though I'm not sure if they're any good. Some things would need to be changed to sell this app in that market. For example, what should the questions be? Maybe from words written in hiragana only, with an example sentence for ambiguous words, to writing the word with kanji? There are some things to think about there.

In-app purchases is something I've thought about as well. There are IAP for Android as well, though I'm not so familiar with them. Personally, it seems a little shady to use IAP, especially marketed towards children. But on the other hand, since it's an educational app maybe parents would consider it ok?

Actually I wasn't aware that the order for 田 is different in China, I just used it as an example since I always have trouble remembering it. =) Generally, I find the stroke order hard to self evaluate, since it takes time to check stroke order diagrams each time and you tend to get lazy after a while (like in 左 and 右 where it's easy to mix up the order of the first two strokes).

I'd love to do a real study on the effectiveness. But realistically, I don't see it happening since I don't have the resources to set up a scientific study. But if you're interested or know someone who would be, let me know. =)

One plus from the algorithmic approach is that you really have to write each time. There's no way to skip it and just look at the answer even for easy ones you think you remember. Therefore you get a lot of practice writing and hopefully writing the characters sticks like "muscle memory". Of course, if you're disciplined you can do the same with for example Anki and pen and paper, but not everyone (for example me...) are that disciplined.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but you will be quizzed on the included vocab as well. For example, you'll get questions like "two (kanji)" where you answer 二, and questions like "February (n)" where the answer is 二月. Both kinds of questions are treaded the same.

However, all questions are from English to Japanese where you write the answer yourself. You won't be quizzed on the other direction (given the Japanese word, what does it mean). Does that answer your question? I'll see what I can do to make it clearer on the website.

Personally I've always found it important to use the characters in different words since that's how you will encounter them in real use, so I try to make that a big part of the quizzing.

Preferably I'd like to not host it myself, considering the amount of work and the problem of letting people know of updates etc.

How come you don't want to use the market? Do you have a device without market or is it just a personal preference?

That's right. For now it's only for the Japanese versions which in many cases are different, so it's not useful for anyone learning Chinese. I'd like to release a version (or several, both simplified and traditional) for that as well, but right now it's quite low on the priority list so don't expect it to be ready anytime soon.

Don't you think a free version is needed to so you can try it out before buying? It's my impression that most people want to be able to try out the functionality before buying. But limiting the free version some more or adding ads and having a cheap ($1-2) full hiragana and katakana version may be the way to go.

Weird, I haven't seen that. I'll look into it, thanks for letting me know.

Actually, I started studying Japanese some 10 years ago or so (time sure flies...), and I don't think Skritter was around then. And actually, I didn't find them when I was looking around lately. My app tries to be as close as possible to real handwriting on paper, so you get nothing more than a blank space to write. For me, it needs to be touchscreen based instead of mouse, but maybe you could get a similar feel with Skritter on a tablet?

The SRS algorithm is based on SM-2, but I'll probably tweak it to handle the "missed a day" problem as you say.

The main reason is the handwriting feature, yes. Maybe it could be implemented on top of Anki, but it seems more work than to write the SRS part myself. The recognition unfortunately doesn't work flawlessly, but the native Japanese who have tried it said it works well.

I haven't done any study on if it's more reliable compared to self-reporting, though it would be very interesting to do so. From my experience, with self reporting there are some subtle mistakes you can make that you won't notice yourself so you can't correct them. For example, when writing 田 it's easy to write the middle two strokes in the wrong order. But when self reporting it's hard to notice this since when written it looks the same.

I'll take a look at the forums you suggested. Thanks!

Yes, I've thought a lot of what to include in the free version and I'm still wondering if it should be changed. As you say, a lot of people quite early, so maybe the free version includes too much. How much do you think should be included?

I've also thought about adding ads to monetize it and having paid ad-free version.

There is one Japanese learning app that does rather well called Human Japanese. At least it has sold 5000-10000 copies with a current price at $9. It's not spectacular, but for me reaching similar figures would be a success.

Thanks for the great ideas. I'll think about how to add more gamification and some social aspects as well. I think you're on to something with the levels and seeing the path towards the next level.

For the moment, I'm at least planning a web interface where you can see your how you're doing and get more details about your progress than on a small phone screen.

Thanks! I'm still unsure about how to price it. Considering the time you have to commit to learn anyway, and comparing to textbooks, $9 is cheap for me. But on the other hand, since most people are used to $1-2 for apps, I'm not sure how well it will sell. I'm happy to hear that at least for you it doesn't sound too much.

That sounds like a very good idea. I agree that it's very hard to keep them all apart when you start to get into the more unusual characters. I'd love to include more information about the different radicals and the origins of the characters. However, I'm not sure how much such information is freely available, but I'll definitely look into it.