Hacker News: renierbotha

New comment by renierbotha in "The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama"

renierbotha — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:52:21 +0000

Thank you, I needed to read this.

New comment by renierbotha in "Show HN: Rebrain.gg – Doom learn, don't doom scroll"

renierbotha — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:51:44 +0000

I clicked on that link, saw clashing colours and a general lack of UX design principles and immediately closed it.

New comment by renierbotha in "Show HN: Eyesite - experimental website combining computer vision and web design"

renierbotha — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:46:07 +0000

This is very cool!! Have you considered making a WebGL game that uses eye tracking for things like aiming? Could be very cool and one of the very few accessible games

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

renierbotha — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:14:44 +0000

Dude this is SICK! Well done, it must have taken a lot of determination to get here.

New comment by renierbotha in "I recreated Shazam’s algorithm with Go"

renierbotha — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:18:19 +0000

Haven't crawled through the repo (yet) but quick question - where does the data that is being searched over come from? Are you loading a library or searching some large library acquired from somewhere else?

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?"

renierbotha — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 21:40:17 +0000

In my experience, teams getting laid off are generally (not always) experimental, high risk / high reward, horizon 2 type bets. Ie not the main function of the company or one of the major bets the company needs to succeed for their current strategy.

So one way to avoid being hired into a team like this is to ask a many questions centered around the impact of the team.

For example, - “what are some of the main accomplishments this team has had in the past?” - “what is the mission & vision of the team, and how is it aligned to the business operational plan?” - “what will happen to the company if this team fails on its biggest bets?”

This is naturally aimed towards bigger companies.

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: Recommended reading for IC transitioning to Manager track"

renierbotha — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:26:27 +0000

Thanks, will put that one on the list :D

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: Recommended reading for IC transitioning to Manager track"

renierbotha — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:26:03 +0000

Thanks, putting The Culture Map on the list ^_^

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: Recommended reading for IC transitioning to Manager track"

renierbotha — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:25:40 +0000

Thanks for the input!!

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: Recommended reading for IC transitioning to Manager track"

renierbotha — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:25:23 +0000

Thanks, really appreciate this input! Finding a mentor is easier said than done but agree that it's an important step.

Ask HN: Recommended reading for IC transitioning to Manager track

renierbotha — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 11:33:48 +0000

Some context:

I'm a Software Engineer turned Data Engineer working in big tech (not MAANG) who has recently committed to (as in agreed with my manager) transition to being a manager next year.

The motivation for the change (which I think is important to share) is twofold: 1. The team needs it. We're growing ito ICs and we need to grow our managers to scale sustainably. 2. My core strengths are better aligned to a strategic role than an IC one. I tend to step back and ask "why", get clear on needs, think a couple steps ahead and look for reasons to say no, which often lands me into deep conversations with my manager which inevitably distracts me from getting really stuck into the technical details.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050956

Points: 15

# Comments: 14

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: Which jobs will survive and which will disappear in 50 years?"

renierbotha — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:52:23 +0000

Well, the _entire stock image industry_ has surely been disrupted. If you relied on stock imagery last year as your primary source of income, you may be out of work come next year.

https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435

New comment by renierbotha in "Show HN: Recycle your old Spotify playlists into new ones"

renierbotha — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:14:31 +0000

Good job! I've had a number of spotify API side projects that never got this far. +1 for access to source ^_^

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?"

renierbotha — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:33:09 +0000

A data dictionary of 200+ business metrics used in a large water utility company, listing clear explanations, pseudo SQL and source data lineage.

Before this there were 5 different ways to calculate specific things like “minimum night flow”.

Plus we then built the data product which calculates all that stuff and serves it to the business in a self-serve query interface.

But by far the most impactful was bringing together different teams to align on how actually to calculate core business terms.

New comment by renierbotha in "[dead]"

renierbotha — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 10:47:35 +0000

I'm having loads of issues with Notion this morning bu downdetector and the official Notion status page says there are no issues.

Even the Notion website fails to load some times...

New comment by renierbotha in "Real Time Speech Recognition with Gradio"

renierbotha — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 06:41:40 +0000

Yeah not really working as expected.

Was interested in this as I'm looking to build a "swearing detector" to help me swear less in video calls but this could not pick up one sentence properly out of a couple and then it started throwing errors.

Think it needs some time back in the lab tbh.

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: What Happened to Larry Page?"

renierbotha — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 23:54:25 +0000

So many cans of worms

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?"

renierbotha — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 07:14:45 +0000

I have a similar situation - although my gap is much smaller (~4 months) it still is big enough to raise questions. But it hasn't. In the last 3-4 months I've interviewed with over 10 companies (multiple stages) and not one hiring manager was interested in the gap.

However, that doesn't mean the recruiters who rejected my CV didn't care about it. And that's why, to avoid any confusion about the gap I added an item on my resume which indicates what I was up to. In my case, I travelled to India to do my yoga teachers training course. So I added the course certificate with the date clearly on my CV.

So to summarize: the best thing to do IMO is to remove the possibility of confusion by adding any descriptive piece of information on your resume.

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?"

renierbotha — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 19:14:40 +0000

PS - If anyone feels like notion is a vibe and want to try it out, I wouldn't be against you signing up using this link:

https://www.notion.so/?r=f5b9c5492da44f55bedb473d92a0bfb1

The free tier is pretty extensive, and I'm most def gonna upgrade soon, but every bit helps :)

New comment by renierbotha in "Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?"

renierbotha — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 19:12:24 +0000

I've recently discovered Notion (www.notion.so) and it's changed A LOT for me.

The main selling point is that it's all the other tools - Trello, Kanban, Asana, Google Sheets (to an extent) in one place, with a planned release of an API.

I've been loving it so much that I've started helping my brother organize some of his company's projects using Notion to showcase the value of having your content organized in one place with the tools that make you feel like your living in 2019.