I wonder if it is because salaries were set before the pound plummetted due to brexit.
For most companies, you at least get more vacation days in London, but i think facebook US already provides 21 business days, I would imagine facebook UK is the standard 5 weeks?
In Los Angeles area, how does one get involved in these projects? I would like to volunteer at a local research lab. I am coming from a computer scientist background and would like to learn more about the medical space.
Look at the list of faculty for UCLA/USC in the Biochemistry or Bioengineering areas of focus. Find a lab or two that have a blurb that interest you, read a paper or two from those labs, then email the prof.
Much like in CS/Software, it'll help if you've read a bit of their work and/or can show some way you could contribute directly. i.e. "I specialize in CS and did a side-project analyzing <gene_dataset_x> where I found <something_cool>. I read your <paper> and found <this_thing_you_did> was very cool for <insightful_reason>. I'd love to get more involved in the field and possibly find a volunteer position where I could contribute, would you have time to chat on the phone or over coffee sometime?"
There are others, google around and if you could also look at https://www.plos.org journals to keep an eye out for new freely available articles in this and other areas of biology. Good luck! :)
Techcrunch article you refered to, mentioned Instapainting is YC Backed company. Quick look at CrunchBase says "The company is backed by Y Combinator and Start Fund (SV Angel and Yuri Milner)."
I thought the site was about self funded single developers? I am missing something?
There's no rule on the site against having external funding of some sort. It really depends on the circumstances. I wouldn't accept a company that has raised enough money to hire a bunch of people or to spend months building out a complex product full-time, because most indie hackers can't do that.
Chris, however, was working alone when he started Instapainting. His funding had dried up and he was in significant debt. And it only took him 2 days to build and launch his product. So there's a lot there that we can all learn from, and nothing that none of us could do without relying on personal savings and a lot of creativity and hustle.
I am merely asking whether Instapainting was YC Backed company as mentioned in TC Article as reading TC and looking at CrunchBase gives different picture from whats mentioned on Indie Hackers.
On this topic, I am working on an app that aggregates toddler music videos or nursery rhythms. It will help to occupy the child when parents are temporarily busy or calm them down in public areas.
However, I have no experience in the music / video industry. I am starting with the simplest solution: embed Youtube videos. What can I do to allow parents to legally download the videos for offline viewing? (willing partnership, free public content, have my own production, ...). The songs I am looking for are ABC, Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars, etc.
Would appreciate any feedbacks!
On this topic, I would like to get a book's recommendation on how to build a full stack product like this. Something more technical with war stories.
My background: I'm a very strong iOS engineer with decent Python and JS skill. However my backend skill is limited at: building a Flask app with custom end points. It will talk to a single sql instance. I'm completely oblivious to memcache, load balancer, different AWS services. My plan is (surprise surprise) to quit my day job next year to pursue my own project and I would like to gather enough best practice and understanding of a full stack app.
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." -- John Gall, 1975
If you are building a new service, and doubly so if you are new to web application, you want to build your system with a minimal set of moving pieces. Nginx as a webserver, Flask or Django for you application, and MySQL or Postgres for your database will get you very, very far, and likely remain the be the core of your stack.
Again, you can go very vary with a simple stack. Heck, I've served a very dynamic website to front page of Wired traffic off of single small physical server, PHP/MySQL with no caching. (Caching is great though!)
Avoid as the plague, Docker, unless you know why you needed it. Docker adds complexity, and unless your setup is large enough to benefit more than then costs, then your life has gotten worse and not better. And you've wasted a lot of time. Repeatable server build setups are great though - Ansible or even a good shell script.
Application/Server monitoring is a good thing. Datadog and NewRelic are good choices here.
Although you will one day hit a wall, scaling to bigger hardware is tremendously easier, (and probably cheaper) than building a big distributed system. Don't underestimate just how much more powerful a full, real, physical server can be than a $20/month cloud server.
When you do need to scale out, listen to your application and scale out just what you need too.
>Avoid as the plague, Docker, unless you know why you needed it.
Just wanted to add something here. Docker is great when you dont want to do setup work for a service or install unwanted software on your machine when you know it will only be used by that app. For eg - if your app used redis, you can just start a redis instance with 2 docker commands. Rather than downloading and installing it on your system.
You do not always need to dockerise your apps, you can use docker containers for dependencies too. I find it pretty nice.
This is almost a self-parody of an overbuilt system. Be aware that a lot of stuff you'll read war stories on is hugely overdesigned, especially in the cloud, because it's basically like playing engineering legos.
When someone else is paying for it, it's a huge amount of fun. If you're paying for it yourself, eliminate as many layers of the 'stack' as you can get away with.
