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rjegundo

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Builder of technical and human systems

http://whitesmith.co

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evolutionary argument is humans are aligned with broad spectrum radiation from the sun, but not the artificial forms which have different magnitudes in different frequencies.

Eg: you are much less likely to get sunburn if you get plenty of natural (or artificial) infrared.

SEEKING WORK, Remote or London (UK)

Product Engineer - I work towards building the right thing and building it right

About me: Based in London. Physics Engineer MSc turned into Software and Startups. Domain expertise in Energy, Supply Chain. Available part-time while working on my own thing.

Past work

- Tech Lead on a Supply-Chain pilot with Blockchain - Full-stack Developer responsible for the website, dashboards, e-commerce, tools and status on an IaaS platform

Stack

Bread and butter: Ruby on Rails, Heroku, AWS, Digital Ocean, Ops, Javascript, Ethereum Exploring: golang, rust, Substrate, Cosmos-sdk

Email: rafael.jegundo[at]gmail.com

I've been burnout sometimes, can relate to some of this. But don't underestimate the importance of your health.

My advice:

Be clear with the founders of your core feeling of burnout and _inform_ them you need to take 4 weeks+ vacations to recover. Make it non-negotiable.

Avoid as much as you can going into the details.

You are likely right about many parts of your assessment as that level of incompetence is not uncommon and likely wrong about some as your naturally in psychological pain. Between the emotional turmoil of burnout and what appears to be a fairly dysfunctional work environment I think it's unwise to make big decisions or trigger big retrospectives without the clarity that comes with a mind well rested.

If you had a really good relationship with the team, scaling the work down to 4h/day max could be good to, but I suspect it will not be effective in this case so I would avoid that too.

Thanks!

Honestly when I read this I was not expecting it to touch politics and how societies organize themselves. My point is not that capitalism is bad for happiness, is that I don't think politics are that relevant in the discussion.

Happiness is almost always defined as the opposite to something else. As a solution for a problem. Socialism and Free markets and many other structures provide slightly different manners to enable those solutions. This is what your average zen monk would perhaps call duality.

But being happy is fundamentally a game where the only winning move is not to play. Equanimity, as acceptance of the present is a much more sustainable approach to use a more common language.

If we want to talk about which system would favour this better, well, I honestly don't know. I feel this is much more deeper matter of education, philosophy and appreciation for life. Freedom of speech is probably better for it but I'm not sure it makes a significant difference and we will not be able to measure it.

Socialism might remove the struggle of life and therefore the meaning of it. Free markets fosters artificial struggles and distractions to life, making meaning artificial. You could then argue that all meaning is ultimately artificial, which I would probably agree, but I don't see how it makes it better.

Ultimately, I don't think the solution is in the society. It must be the individual, only he/she/it transcends. Any transmission of that happens via direct experience, or a lot of books and introspection, not abstract models that you can teach easily. I have no idea how to do this at scale, I suspect it is not possible.

But the closest ideal would probably be to just teach and discuss philosophy across the world for the genuine interest of leading a better life and not to project status.

I believe you are accidentally describing equanimity. Which I think it would be a much better function to optimize for than happiness, at any scale.

The article has some interesting points but I believe it lacks a reflection from the eastern point of view and a critique to capitalism as it does for socialism.

Without them the discussion seems incomplete.

Specialize is possible as someone mentioned, but I think the essential is segment.

You can still be a generalist as long as you put those skills to the service of a specific community. This could be region, vertical, domain, etc. The important part is to be clear who are you aiming at, so you can hustle and leverage the network/reference effect in there.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (London Timezone)

BACKGROUND

After building our own startup - http://unplu.gg, we turned into consulting to pay the bills, as http://whitesmith.co.

We are a small team (no managers) building MVPs and doing maintenance in mature products. Clients in UK, US & AUS, including:

http://diary.com http://nourishcare.co.uk

Additional portfolio & references on request.

STACK

Client side: HTML/CSS, Javascript, Backbone.js

Server side: Ruby on Rails, Node.js

DB: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Mysql

Server: EC2, Digital Ocean, Linode

CONTACT

Get in touch via http://whitesmith.co

This is completely focused on the financial side of the business. The innovation & marketing factors are not being considered, and those are precisely the elements that allow Apple to keep their high margin.

If a product is - or at least is perceived - to be 100% better than the others, paying just an extra 30% is a win in the mind of consumers

http://unplu.gg is hardware agnostic.

The data can be collected from a range of sensors like The Energy Detective or Current Cost. That is the current best selling point.

The rest is vision of what this service can be. And our focus in that regard seems very differente, although only a part of that vision is represented in the current state of the app.

Hopefully we will be back in a couple of months showing a couple of disruptive new features.