ravibhatt

Hi HN,

I built BrickCheck because I got tired of having 20 tabs open every time I found a house I liked. I wanted to see the actual data (crime rates, internet speeds, school ratings) right next to the listing, without jumping between different government websites.

The Problem: Rightmove and Zoopla give you the sales pitch, but they don't easily show you the "red flags" or the raw financial reality (like true monthly cost vs. yield).

The Solution: BrickCheck is a dashboard that aggregates data from the Land Registry, Ofsted, Police.uk, and Ofcom.

Key Features:

Deep Data: Instantly pulls crime rates, broadband speeds, and school ratings for any postcode.

Smart Stats: Calculates Price/sq ft and calculates stamp duty.

Floorplans: Uses vision analysis to break down room sizes and flag "box rooms" that are listed as double bedrooms.

Financials: You can set your custom Deposit & Mortgage Rate preferences to see the real monthly cost for every property.

Tech Stack: It’s a React/Next.js app wrapped with Capacitor for mobile.

It’s currently in v1. I’d love feedback on which data points you find most critical when comparing homes!

Link: https://brickcheck.io/

http://www.xmsxmx.com - blog on things I find interesting and do.

None of his previous work is on the subject of freedom and democracy btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumit_Ganguly

You seem to know more about the natives it seems; where are you quoting this from?

"Indian nationalism is all about bringing back the "varna system" " ---- You have done a Phd in the subject-- any links?

Previous govt had huge concerns as well. PM Singh said "The atomic energy programme has gone into difficulties because these NGOs [non-governmental organisations], mostly I think based in the United States, don't appreciate the need for our country to increase the energy supply."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17150953

Also, Important to note that some of the changes to laws for NGOs were done during congress led UPA govt as well. It is just that changes to laws have now been highlighted more by mainstream media.

Every provider has their own walled garden. Several offerings just tie companies to the vendor. For example, with AWS - services like ECS, EKS or even Redshift go very well with the AWS ecosystem. Try getting data into Redshift for example.

There is no doubt that AWS is more mature. You make few points: - poor documentation - no security auditing tool - API limits.

In my experience 1 and 3 are true for AWS as well. AWS has automated tools to detect things but to say that GCP does not have any such offering is not true. It may not be automated and that goes to the larger point of AWS being more mature.

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/firewall-rules-logging https://cloud.google.com/network-telemetry

Developer experience and User education is where GCP needs a lot of catch up to do.

It is amazing to see how we declare something as too obvious or natural. Like trunk based development, so obvious that questioning it makes one a fool :-)

Git and its model was the best thing few years back. Now since google is doing all its dev in the main trunk/master, it must be correct and more intelligent.

Wouldn't it be a case that they went with what they had at a certain time and continue to use it as everyone is used to it and it still works? Not sure if google analysed if branching was bad and then chose trunk based development?

I cannot understand how a company that has a well defined process doing branches, is doing it wrong? or how it is so not optimal etc. I guess it is a matter of processes and culture. None of the great companies are great because their source control strategy (or code) was excellent.

We developers always over analyse everything and come up with excellent logic and some of us are gifted with words more than others.

At least on two occasions i have seen configuration as literal code (like in config as java, scala, python code). While config as code could be beneficial, using it as literal code is not optimal.

Interesting discussion here. Excellent post.

If coding is such an art and so important to the industry, why are all people at the top do not have a git hub account to show? They must still be "passionate" about coding, no? Or is it a function of how much money you have?

Facebook worked not because of some guy wrote great, highly maintainable code. It worked because of the idea. Same with others great companies.

If there were these unicorn people who did not write "unmaintainable junk" there would be no security bugs, hacks, leaks etc.

All big companies have recruited "the best" for forever. Can any one of them guarantee a bug free software. They can't. Suddenly, all these passionate people with their github account do not look sexy.

Insisting on a side project is similar to people insisting on TDD and i am sure TDD does not solve the problem of bugs in code.

5K is 5K for Americans as well, as per Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5K_run

yes, do not take a 1-2 year contract on a low rate. But mathematically:

Lets say:

Desired rate: 150 Available rate: 100 Sit idle for desired rate: 30 days (20 working days in a month)

let's say a contract is 2 months long.

with 100 day rate yo get: 100 x 40 = 4000 with 150 day rate you get: 150 x 20 = 3000 (well if you get 200 a day, you still make the same amount of money as you would working on 100 for 2 months instead of 1)

Unless you get a significantly long contract on your desired rate. And also, that long contract gets till the end. Most likely it will, but life is bitch. You never know what would happen, it is about risk assessment.

Adding my two cents. I have been a contractor for almost 3 years now. My personal opinion:

- Contracting pays a lot more than a perm role.

- You do not deal with politics, which is a major plus for me.

- You do not hear about you not getting your promised y% bonus because company did not do x% business.

- You are not worried about 'changing the world', the way you would in a startup.

- working 4-6 years your asses off at a startup may be equivalent to working as a contractor for that time. That is a big may be, your skills, confidence, market everything plays a big role.

- Always get a good accountant, go for ltd company, enroll your wife and PAY YOUR TAXES!

- I started when i had about a month's savings, and it worked out well.

- Day rates depend on your skill set. 350 is the minimum i guess for any role, max is your imagination! 800? 1000? but getting 500-550 should be the target at least.

- Getting a contract is tricky: use linkedin, recruiters, friends and whatever else. All are necessary. I would not worry too much about a recruiter getting a cut as long as i get what i had asked for.

- Get a contract before quitting your perm role. Mostly companies looking for a contractor wait for 2 weeks, if you are good and your skills are in demand they would wait for 3-4 weeks.

- Always plan your vacation at times when everyone else is on holiday. December/January and April are good times.

- HMRC website is good enough to register a company, 15 pounds and 20-30 mins.

- Getting 450 a day is always better than siting idle waiting for that 550-600 a day contract.

- There is lot of competition, be prepared for that.

- Prepared for some level of stress (specially when you are out of work), it is still worth it.

- Do not worry too much about your utilization in a contract, it is the client's worry. You are paid for your skills and not your time. Do put reasonable time, but that is not the criteria you were hired with.

- 'Doing/Completing my time' is a BS. I have had several contracts and none of the clients ever had problems with my timings. And i am particularly bad at working normal hours. Sometimes i get at work at 10 and leave at 5. At times i work whole nights.

- Recruiters are lairs, don't give too much info. Ask for a job spec and day rate before giving any info. I would help you, after you get me a contract!

- Send your CV to all who asks for it. Keeps you in the market.

- You will not necessarily get a higher day rate if you went directly with a client. Your day rate depends on your skills and negotiating skills only. If you do not ask for a good day rate, chances are, you wont get it.

- Sometimes, leave it on Luck. We can be the smartest asses on the planet, but at times need luck.

Hope this helps.

I can give some point here: (A cluster below is hadoop cluster)

- Machines reboot without any notifications. - Blob storage gets throttled ( i was told by a support staff) and at times become unreachable. - Some clusters i create, go into "Operational Mode" in that beautiful UI. and there is no way to delete that cluster! - At one instance, a cluster failed because, i was told, some internal azure tables got deleted! - Start up time (for PasS) for a cluster is 13+ mins regardless of how many machines you have in it.

Well, the world does not move on ideal conditions. I have used AWS and Azure extensively. My use case has been mainly around hadoop ecosystem. Here is what happens on azure(HDInsights Specifically):

You have a cluster running, that does some work at certain times in a day. Out of the blue, Several machine would be "re-imaged" and that means it would delete all the logs, working directories etc.Its like a snapshot restore. So when this happens, you have lost any custom changes you had done on the cluster. You lose any 3rd party jars you had placed.

Those machines, join back your cluster and your jobs would no longer run because of missing jars Unless you program to download all files on every reboot.

Most important thing though is lack of prior notifications. I have had cases when a "re-image" happend when my CPU was 100% utilised and my RAM was used 90%. So my box was working on something and azure decided to apply a patch!!

As per frequency, its once every two weeks, sometimes more.