"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."

I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.

My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.

My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.

I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:

1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.

2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.

3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.

I ended up winding it down and moving on.

I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.

Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.

Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.

Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.

Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.

In the business world, the time of highly motivated, talented engineers is extremely valuable. It doesn't make sense to dedicate any more of their time than necessary for the average internal webapp. Adding automated builds/tests is usually time that's not being spent on more impactful initiatives for the business.

"This past October, a federal judge placed major limitations on his Moyer’s role while also criticizing Amazon’s non-compete policies. Moyer was not allowed to work on any financial services projects, his area of expertise at AWS, for Google Cloud. He was also barred from contacting any AWS customers and any potential financial services customers. The conditions were to stay in place until the lawsuit was fully resolved, or until his non-compete expired in November 2020."

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-settles-non-compete-law...

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

That and the small wheels don't inspire confidence dealing with the typical curbs & potholes that one is likely to encounter in an urban environment.

What's the use-case for folding bikes like this? Is there a pervasive lack of bike racks in certain places that would necessitate stowing a bike in such small quarters?

- Roughly 10% of golfers in the US maintain a handicap rating.

- "Today, the 2,417,905 who have a handicap included 2,051,675 “active posters,” meaning they posted at least one score in 2020. However, the average number of posted scores was 38, almost double the average number of rounds played by golfers overall last year—so it’s pretty clear that those who get a handicap are among the game’s most engaged participants." [0]

- "it has been found that on a given day the average golfer would be expected to post a score of approximately 100 strokes when following all the rules of golf" [1] which is 28 strokes over par. A 28 handicap is around the 5%-ile of golfers with a handicap [2]

- As such, those 10% of golfers with a handicap should overlap pretty heavily with the top 10-20% of all golfers. The 50%-ile of golfers with a handicap is 13 [2], so by extrapolation that should be 90-95%-ile of all golfers.

- 13 is still a solid handicap. That's someone who is breaking 90 (better than bogey golf) pretty much every round and likely has years of practice. Saying it "isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do" would be an incorrect statement in my opinion.

- (as a sanity check, the 90%-ile of golfers with a handicap is a handicap of 5. Most D1 golfers will have a handicap right around 0, and D3 will be maybe 2. Given the number of casual golfers, it seems likely that only about 1 or 2 out of 100 are nearing that level.)

[0] https://www.linksmagazine.com/how-do-you-match-up-against-th...

[1] https://golftips.golfweek.usatoday.com/average-golf-handicap...

[2] https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/handicapping/han...

But it's worth noting that ad networks are more interconnected than most people realize. You can go to Facebook and see the "off-Facebook activity" they have received about you from partners, many of which are retailers. I imagine purchase-history is part of what's shared if you make purchases with those retailers using a email/phone number that's also associated with your Facebook account.

https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity

Texas is actually not one of the more permissive states when it comes to firearm laws. Everyone just thinks it is because of the "don't mess with texas," "wild west" image they like to maintain.

I'm curious if you've tested what it would cost to just host on EC2 (or something potentially even cheaper in AWS like ECS Fargate) with a savings plan. At a glance, it looks like AWS would be cheaper than DO if you can commit to 1-yr reserved instances.

That would seem like an easier (and possibly more effective) way to get around costly AWS outbound data costs compared to running a separate cache and sending data across the internet between cloud providers just to save $200/mo.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/apple-will-let-you-port-go...