travisfischer

Founding engineer here if there are any questions about the team, tech, company, etc...

Hoop | Full Stack Senior Engineer | REMOTE US | https://hoop.app

Hoop is a venture backed (Index Ventures, Wade Foster, Job van der Voort, Annie Duke, etc…) seed stage startup with a 6 person team (ex-Trello founding team) hiring engineer #3 to build AI task management for busy professionals.

We collaborate fully remote (80% async / 20% sync) and believe in doing more with less. We have a flexible work week with 4 work days worth of intense, focused and efficient hours.

Our product is using LLMs to detect, prioritize and manage tasks and projects. This is an opportunity to work in AI on a real use case that goes deeper than a thin wrapper.

We are an early stage company of passionate builders with paying customers who love the product.

Tech Stack is: typescript, next.js, tailwind, node.js, react, postgres.

Job description + application instructions: https://hoopapp.notion.site/Full-Stack-Engineer-Hoop-cd324e5...

We built hoop.app which uses LLMs to detect your tasks and work priorities from your chat messages, meeting transcripts and emails.

The goal is to take all of the busy work out of task management so you can always know what your focus should be on and not waste brain power worrying about missing something important.

Founding engineer here if you have questions on the engineering side of things.

Completely sincere question, how would you personally define a reasonable wage?

I spent a couple hours the other night lying awake in bed dreaming of spending one year trying to help someone new every day. I was thinking it would be cool to dedicate each work day of the year to meeting someone new and offering my hours that day to help them in whatever way I could. The help could range from washing their car, running an errand, to picking up garbage on their street, to writing some code or spinning up a website for them.

I thought it would have a really nice dual effect of pushing me to get to know a bunch of people and also teach me something about serving and helping others.

Then I started thinking about how to leverage social media to pivot it into meeting more and more interesting/important people and monetizing it. Quickly realized that would undermine the original intent of the project and make it into something else entirely that I did not like.

I don’t understand the appeal of meeting 10,000 different people as that sounds like too much quantity and not enough quality time but to each his own.

It is super interesting to see someone else living out a version of an idea that at 2am sounded like a pretty original concept.

Trello | New York, NY or REMOTE

Trello ( https://trello.com ) is a visual collaboration tool that creates a shared perspective on any project. We're a remote-friendly, venture-backed startup headquartered in NYC.

We're growing quickly, not the kind of quickly where you're hiring just for headcount numbers, we're hiring for quality. We're currently 98 employees total. Joining us at this stage empowers you to help define our future processes, what it means to be on the team, and lends itself to lots of exciting career growth.

The interview process includes an initial phone screen followed by several video chat interviews with relevant team members. There is no onsite interview.

We’ve got four roles open right now that might be of special interest to the HN crowd:

Front-End Developer ( https://trello.com/jobs/details?gh_jid=478513 )

Internal Tools Developer ( https://trello.com/jobs/details?gh_jid=480058 )

Junior Developer (2 year program) ( https://trello.com/jobs/details?gh_jid=523941 )

IT Specialist (based in NYC) ( https://trello.com/jobs/details?gh_jid=269417 )

Some other jobs and some of our perks can be seen at https://trello.com/jobs .

A large Python project that I haven't seen mentioned by others but that I find to be particularly well written and designed is the Pyramid web framework.

* https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid/

There is an occasional event that happens to me while on HN where I see a title that catches my eye because it rings a certain bell in my mind. I click through the link and as the page loads my stomach fills with butterflies as I experience the strange sensation of finding another person has implemented an idea of "mine", at times with frightening accuracy with regards to how I conceived of it.

I use "mine" because obviously the idea is not mine. It's an idea I'm sure hundreds of us of have had.

This particular site/product was one I "dreamed up" immediately after a very disappointing interview performance. The sting of that experience made me want to fix it for other people by giving them a clear path for being prepared for "Google-esque" interviews. This particular implementation looks to be fairly well executed. I signed up and hope it works out because I think it could be useful.

What these experiences confirm for me is something we all already know. There are really no new ideas under the sun. Or at least they are very, very rare. Just pick a problem you know you can solve and then solve it the best way you possibly know how and if your best is better than anyone elses best, and it's a good idea, and the timing is right, you'll probably be successful.

On another note, I think it's interesting the creator choose the "2 egg problem" as the example problem. I believe it is the prime example of everything that is wrong with engineering interview culture. Not sure if that makes it ideal material for a site like this or pointless trivia.

Great point.

I'm not at all trying to detract from what they have chosen to spend their time building. I'm simply giving my perspective which can be taken as feedback for the builders or alternatively just sideline commentary on the problem space they are addressing and is interesting to a number of us who care about using our money to impact the world.

There is a fine balance in communities like HN between giving honest feedback/having honest discussions about a topic vs. everyone just being a negative critic and armchair quarterbacking anything anyone builds. I think it's often best to sandwich real feedback in some positive encouragement to avoid the negative critic spiral. On the other hand, sometimes I think that's the same sugar coating as "no offense but..." in which case I skip it.

I was hoping this would be implemented as:

- I sign up to donate at least a dollar a day.

- There is a growing list of non-profits supported.

- I get emails with newly added ones.

- For each non-profit I get to choose to either:

a) add a full additional dollar a day for that organization

or

b) add the new organization to a list of organizations that split my daily existing donation amount.

or

c) skip it.

I dislike this implementation for a number of reasons.

* From the non-profits perspective, re-occuring and emotionally invested donations are much more valuable than a one off big shot of money.

* From my perspective I will never donate to an unknown entity regardless of filtering criteria. I have limited resources and believe I can have the impact I want to have by chosen where to use those resources.

* If this system catches on I imagine it will result in many a controversy, which may just be the price dollaraday.co is willing to pay, but it sure seems like an unnecessary distraction.

Congrats Josh!

I think I like this model of investment a lot for a company like Stripe. Rather than trying to copy or buy Baremetrics and add that to the list of things Stripe would need to focus on, invest in someone who spend all day every day worrying about only how to make that thing the best it can be. Keeps all of the incentives nicely aligned for both Stripe and Baremetrics.

I would think Baremetrics probably should grow to include other payment system integrations. However, I think as long as Stripe continues focusing on being the best option available for what they provide, choosing to invest in the eco system around them like this seems like a great way to grow the business as a whole vs. spending the same money on making their own product bigger.

I also like it from Baremetrics point of view that Stripe is now invested in them for the obvious and already stated reasons.

I clicked through expecting an app that offered a nostalgic walk down memory lane with screenshots and features of the Windows operating system. I'm not sure why that is the first thing that came to mind, but it did.

While that would have been moderately amusing, the actual application is a much more useful and helpful concept.

Great job on launching something!

You mean something like http://money.stackexchange.com/? :)

This is actually pretty interesting. I think many people have thought of a product along these lines and, as mentioned by others, there have been several versions of this tried.

I think the key is in the constraints you have outlined.

Obviously it's a mobile app. You take two pics and post. You then vote on other's ABs. Every vote you make on someone else's AB earns you a vote on your own. If you want a bunch of opinions on your AB you keep voting on other's. You can post to your social networks to get your friend's opinions as well. Maybe it ties into the social APIs and reads comments to extract out votes for A or B. Maybe some viral growth potential there.

I like this. I might use actually use it. Wondering if it is important to be able to choose a target segment of voters for your own AB or if the classification of "human" is good enough in most cases.

I think it would be helpful if HN allowed an optional inclusion of author name along with title which could be displayed next to the title. The author of an article is more often than not the only additional context needed to make a link title interesting or relevant. You could simply append "by Paul Graham" after the actual title of Paul's posts.

I know HN doesn't want us to continue to discuss this issue in threads that are not directly related to talking about HN's title policy. However, there will be literally no stopping this discussion from popping up again and again because it is an actual problem for readers of the site and it will take every new reader of the site being told why things are broken in this way before they stop asking about it in unrelated threads. I find it interesting that Paul continues to hold to his position that it's an acceptable problem to have when there is a constant stream of readers signaling it is a real problem with the site. This post is one very clear example of exactly why it's a real problem.

I can see at least two ways to address it without spending more money on moderators. 1. Allow volunteer moderation and trust those moderators like Stack Overflow does. This is a solution that has been proved workable time and time again. 2. Give users a way to add some additional context to posts. Author name being included in the title is the bare minimum needed but I can think of a few other helpful pieces of contextual information as well.

The coast takes a sharp turn straight west just north of Santa Monica so from Venice looking north west you see Malibu and the Santa Monica mountains. Therefore during the summer the sun does in fact set behind the Santa Monica mountains as can be seen in this photo. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7369/9267881002_dc30589ab0_o.j...

For my parents and many of their friends the primary motivation was along this line of thinking. I'm not saying this is a totally fair or accurate line of thought but it is the line of thinking that leads one to decide to homeschool.

I can take my child's education into my own hands and probably make a few mistakes along the way but at least I care deeply about my child and have a trusting relationship with my child. Children are resilant and the real things a child should learn through K-12 has more to do with character, the ability to learn, follow-through, complete a problem, read for comprehension, etc... Things that don't require a degree or certificate to effectively teach.

Alternatively, I can trust their education to the State, to underfunded schools, to teachers (some of whom are great but some of whom are in place purely because of a broken system) who may care a little bit but have to split their care and attention between 20-80 other kids none of whom are their own, to an educational system which has long been optimized in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.

Personally, I don't think that public school is worthless, I just think there are plenty of benefits to homeschooling that are well worth considering. Even just removing the in-effeciencies that have to exist in a system like public school, frees up so much time and energy for self-exploration, additional time to focus on things like music and technology which are underemphasized in a school "system". Additionally, if the parents do a good job of exposing their kids to an appropriate amount of socialization it removes some of the distraction of the constant social element in a school system. AKA, it's easier to focus on learning when you aren't distracted by the bully sitting behind you or the cute girl across from you. For me, I just hung out with the bully and cute girl after I was done learning.

I do think some mix of learning with social is good but there are plenty of ways to do that, again in more ideal ratios.

As someone who was home schooled in a situation similar to that of the author (extremely beneficial, highly unstructured but with very accelerated learning pace) but who had friends & acquaintances across the spectrum of those described in the article I find this article and the respond in the comments on vice pretty troubling. There are parents who will isolate and brainwash their children regardless of where they receive their education. Yes, more hours at home means more isolation but the alternative of mandating some kind of "approved" educational process is not worth sacrificing freedom in educational choices.

While this article vividly describes a sub-culture that will be troubling to those previously un-exposed to it, it also manages to throw one of the most important and effective educational revolutions of the last 20 years under the bus. This revolution is that of parents taking their children's education back into their own hands and teaching their children at home. The internet has massively enabled parents in this revolution. Freedom in educational choices is one of the most important freedoms I can imagine especially in a country where education is as broken as it is in the United States.

The truth is that many home schooled kids are a little less socially refined in their earlier years unless their parents go to great efforts (as mine did) to involve them in social activities outside the home on a regular basis. However, of all of the home schooled kids that I knew growing up even the most isolated have managed to adjust eventually and I would argue that the majority of those I knew were receiving a superior education and went into the post K-12 years with many advantages over their public schooled counter-parts.

There is a strong anti-homeschool contingent in this country with a mix of motives and arguments against and I get very bothered by articles like this because of the misinformation and in-balanced perspective they propagate. Even though the author doesn't argue against home schooling directly or as a whole, it does reinforce stereotypes and ideas that are simply not the truth in the majority of cases. Read the comments thread on vice and you will see exactly what I'm referring to.

Congrats Danny and Audrey on the launch. I'm excited to read this. It sounds like a valuable resource.

Love the game. Thanks for sharing the details of the competition and building it. It makes a fun read.

Does the kind of deployment standards, documentation and support that you describe already exist for other web frameworks (Rails for instance)? I've only used a few frameworks and only Django in production. Just curious if we are behind the curve in the Django world or just have a chance to set the bar beyond what any other community has. As a web developer with novice dev-ops chops I'm 100% support of this idea.

SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles Area or Remote

Recently jumped off the cliff and left my job to pursue building a startup but need some bootstrapping money to keep food on the table for my wife and child.

I would love to help you build your start-up in order to make a little cash to help build my start-up.

Skills in order of mastery: Django/Python, MySQL, HTML(5), CSS(3), Javascript (& jQuery), C#, VB, Java, C, PHP, Ruby

Can do full stack sites including server config. Experience with AWS deployments.

A few sites I have built recently: http://smacktweets.com http://askforadeal.com http://mahalo.com (the homepage)

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/travisfischerwebdeveloper AngelList: http://angel.co/travisfischer Github: http://github.com/travisfischer <- Admittedly not much there. Major resolution to fix that in 2012. Email: trav.fischer at gmail dot com

Has anyone successfully booked work from this thread in the past? Seems to be a ton of freelancers but not a lot of demand for freelancers on this thread? Are there other places online where we should promote this thread since it must be a pretty solid list of top tier engineers looking to book work?

Cool idea. Do you know anything about what percentage of Kickstarter funders come from links that the fund raiser posts vs. Kickstarter.com? Just curious if it will be harder to raise funds if not on the Kickstarter.com domain.

Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree with the your point that if spending more time coding was my number one priority outside of the other things mentioned I could make time for that. Without laying out every single detail of my life, it's not possible to paint the picture but it always comes down to priorities. Currently because of my priorities I will not spend the time building this software that I think would be super beneficial to a lot of people but if I was able to raise a reasonable amount of money, than I would be able to re-prioritize accordingly. It's not that I couldn't make time it's just that at this time in my life I won't for these projects because they don't rank in my top 3-4 most important things that I'm trying to focus on.

Kickstarter has worked for some open source projects and seems to do a decent job. I however can imagine a site that was more tailored to open source software would be able to offer a lot of useful features that Kickstarter won't provide.

Thanks for the feedback. Fun to think through these things.

Twitter Bootstrap is great tool for solo devs to do rapid development.

I have built http://smacktweets.com totally on my own in a few weekends. I'm someone who is pretty terrible at design and while smacktweets.com shows it, Bootstrap has definitely helped me maintain some level of "slickness" in my initial design.

I will probably eventually get a designer involved and wouldn't be surprised if I bailed on bootstrap at that point in favor of an entirely custom front-end but for rapid weekend development it's serving me very well.

My reaction was to the very first line of the piece.

"Swearing is a strong tool. It can be a particularly strong tool during presentations."

I get that Zach believes he is building a connection and empathy by using profanity. My argument is the same there as well. I personally believe that profanity doesn't work well as a tool for creating personal connections and empathy either.

There is a group of people that thinks: "Oh man! he used the f-word in his public talk. He's so passionate and edgy. I feel connected to his disregard for old-fashioned professionalism."

I would suspect the group of people that think along those lines is rather small. I would also suspect that even for those people that feel a connection, the net result of the use of that profanity in their overall take-away from the talk is a tiny positive.

I strongly disagree with the notion that swearing is a very strong tool for communication. In the conversations I'm a part of the in the real world I hear profanity used as a completely meaningless filler word.

In my opinion, in today's popular culture profanity doesn't hold much weight at all as an effective tool for communication. While profanity is often used by people who are communicating something passionate and emotional, it is used just as often in a completely flippant and emotionally detached manner.

For people who are offended by profanity it may evoke a negative emotional response but I find for people who are comfortable with profanity, it carries very little weight or meaning except for the fact that the speaker couldn't be bothered to come up with a more meaningful word to use.

I will acknowledge that because most of society is so lazy in their use of language, there is a strong relationship between a person who is communicating passionately and the frequency of profanity usage. This is why movie writers so often lace passages of emotionally intense dialog with profanity because it reflects what we hear in the real world. I however find that relationship to be one directional. The use of a profanity doesn't imply any kind of emotion in of itself because of how prevalent flippant usage of profanity is.

I'm aware that is a personal perspective and I may not be in the majority with these views.

I'm excited about the form states in this release as well as the bug fixes.

As a generalist developer who does a little bit of everything but has a hard time with the design side of things, I'm loving using Twitter Bootstrap on some of my personal projects. One example where I've used it is http://smacktweets.com. The header bar alone, while extremely simple, is so much better than what I probably would have done on my own.

Twitter Bootstrap gives you great looking design elements with very very little effort. If you are good with the design side of things it's probably overkill and heavier weight than you want in a boilerplate if you are going to customize everything anyways.

Skeleton (http://getskeleton.com/) is another great boiler plate that I have also enjoyed using on all kinds of projects. It is really just a boilerplate and doesn't have all the pretty design elements that bootstrap has.

Just wanted to say thanks for putting this out and for the community continuing development on it. I'm really enjoying it.

I think he's alright. Relevant link: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEn...