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.
Several things, but wide adoption is NOT one of them.
First and foremost, it's for my own personal use. I like to organize things and I find that the messy doc/spreadsheet way is way too messy for my liking, especially when I find a need to coordinate plans with other friends overseas. That's why I started this.
Secondly, it's for fun and for learning. I enjoy build websites and explore what browser can provide. I learned that browser have API for drag-and-drop element to pass data to a target element
So at the end of the day, I see it as a fun side project and nothing more.
The landing page very much looks like a serious product looking for adoption, though. It might mislead users into thinking that it is intended to be something more than a fun side project.
A friend of mine built a similar thing as a mobile app and also failed to get adoption.
I think what these tools miss is that it’s kinda fun to plan a trip and I don’t necessarily need an app to help. It seems hard and like something I’ll need to learn once, and relearn when I need it again
Also I don’t want to plan out every second of my trips. Seems like this is useful for big trips with many people who need to be herded around, but in my estimation that kind of trip usually isn’t even that fun to begin with.
I agree that anything that requires tripmates to make an account is going to be a hard sell for most groups. At least most people are already on Google Docs these days.
It's not clear to me how much of this requires an account, but I would encourage making as much as possible accessible without a login. Some people will want to help plan but there are also many people who just want to come along for the ride.
Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.
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.
+2, and National which is owned by Enterprise and allows you to just walk into the garage, get in a car, and drive out. It's the most painless process in the industry.
Isn't that also exactly the Hertz experience? Has been for me. Of course it isn't literally drive out. Most airports you do have to stop at an exit booth and show your ID.
Enterprise, small rental office near home--took them an hour to locate the plates for the car after I complained about and refused to accept a car with expired temporary tags.
Your experience at Amazon probably isn't due to the incompetence of others, but due to a difference in alignment.
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.
It's a shame that you're being downvoted, because there is a lot of merit to what you say. Business leaders do not always value technical craftsmanship and quality to the same extent that we do. And that creates situations where even competent developers are incentivized to cut corners, deliver work that they aren't necessarily proud of, etc. But as long as "the business" is funding the work, and it is "just good enough" to meet their needs, that's the way things are going to remain.
Do I like this state of affairs? Not at all. But it would be silly to ignore the plain, obvious truth.
Indeed. The business people often think cutting corners is not a big deal, especially to win time, while technical people who are in till their elbows simply know it is not the best strategy. But the latter should think, 'it pays the rent' .
I'll take this viewpoint into consideration, thank you.
My previous philosophy was that few projects past MVP stage are deploy and done, and it's a major long run time sink to have to deal with the problems not having the basic tooling creates.
I like to think about it like this: A project looks like y = mx + b, where b is the overhead of inital setup, y is the output, x is dev time and m is the efficiency of devtime. If you skip the setup, you lower the b to 0, but with enough required y you actually end up paying more cost (and time = money since someone is cutting devs a check) than a project with more efficient dev time (lower m).
I had thought that in general testing + automation is worth it in the long run. Thanks for your input, perhaps my previously held philosophy is based on the flawed idea that all projects have some degree of maintenance required.
Also, many businesses, products, features, etc never survive long enough to get to "the long run" specifically because people were building out automation, testing, etc.
Doing all of the best practices can mean your competitors beat you, just because they deliver "good enough" faster than you deliver perfection
Yep, for sure. I've witnessed this first-hand, too, many times. Watched many startups die from this desire to build the perfect version of a thing that no one wants to buy.
Amazon will enforce them at the exec level, but courts have ruled they aren't a total blanket ban on employment elsewhere, just a restriction on what you can do for that new employer.
"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."
I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:
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's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.
Yes this is an interesting result that I recall from my days when I was into chess.
But this result speaks to something more general that is interesting as well. It seems high levels of skill in many other fields is associated with incredible ability to recall details about a performance in that field. If I recall correctly, Bobby Fischer was able to perfectly recall positions (and his analysis of them) from games he had played years ago (and consider how many games a professional chess player might play in a career).
The question I have is, what exactly is the connection? Is this association essential? And is it the incredible memory that leads to high skill, or the it's the reverse?
Definitely agree. It’s not even super purposeful recognition. It’s a feeling like “this seems bad”, and looking for why, only to figure out your opponent’s likely plan.
It’s much better to be less intelligent and have that feeling, than be more intelligent and not even know to look for the danger.
Intriguing design and it looks like they've sold enough to see some real-world success, but I can't help but think the headset must be under extreme torque with a 150+ lb person sitting on essentially a large lever.
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?
From a British perspective it's quite often public transport, bikes are banned on the tube afaik and taking them on trains can be hit or miss, some routes require a specific (and hard to get) cycle booking, most local buses are a non starter and even intercity buses are a big problem (they will often require your bike be dissembled / be in a hard case bike bag thing).
There are none of those nice bike racks on the front of American buses here. The whole system is fairly hostile towards active travel.
> The whole system is fairly hostile towards active travel.
And even more hostile to PLEVs. Electric scooters still illegal (beyond a few set-up-up-to-fail rental trials), a 250W limit on eBikes, and no hope whatsoever of electric skateboards, OneWheels, and so on ever being legal on roads or pavements.
Yet still people wage war on the car, without any attempt to make alternatives more viable.
And despite the roads being at breaking point, the trains being overcrowded and ludicrously priced, and road safety/bike theft/weather deterring all but the most dedicated cyclists, somehow transport isn't even a significant political issue in the UK.
(London-centric politics doesn't help. Many Londoners, particularly politicians, don't seem to have a clue about life beyond the M25)
And even on train lines that do allow bikes, like the Liverpool-Manchester line, you probably won't get a full-sized one on at rush hour, and even feel anti-social with a Brompton. At least in the past; I haven't done it for two years. They're also handy for putting in the car for riding from where you park it, like on the city outskirts.
One use case is for cruisers (sail and power). Having some kind of go-machine to get from the marina to a real market is often preferred over taxis/rideshares due to cost. Some high-end marinas may have a car or something to borrow, but that's rare.
What I've read from people who fall into this use case is the biggest requirement is a large wheel size. (This one wouldn't be great for that reason.) You'll want big wheels and fat tires to deal with, shall we say, less than optimal road conditions. The other main requirement is, of course, some kind of load carrier. Usually some sort of trailer, though several Dahons have a carrier. Dahons are the usual go-to brand.
I've been looking at folding bikes like this.. in my case, I'm a private pilot, and I'm looking for ways to solve the last mile issue of getting from my destination airport to somewhere fun to go - ie a nearby beach, or into town for dinner, etc. Size and weight are important in my use case, since general aviation aircraft don't have alot of cargo space.
This bike looks like it would be a decent fit, but I'm not sure I can convince myself to shell out 1500 bucks for it... So the search for a last mile solution continues :-)
Similarly I like to get very cheap ($40-$70) round trip flights to random town and explore around. Unfortunately my uber from the airport to the town is usually more expensive than the flight. Most small towns don't have much in the way of airport buses.
Out of Denver, and I use the date grid on google flights. Frontier and spirit fly to Miami pretty consistently for a $80 round trip, but most flights are to like bentonville, AR or similarly random places.
The key is to people able to take a flight at any time and day, so you can always take the cheapest options. But also if you book 2 months in advance you can go anywhere in the Caribbean/central America on spirit for $100 or so.
Why not take an rideshare/taxi? It seems you'd be able to even optimally schedule the rides in advance. I wouldn't want to ride this thing on car-only roads.
I live in Michigan, and especially since Covid, many of the small towns in this state have no taxi or rideshare options. Cadillac MI is one example - big enough town that there's some stuff to go do, but only a single taxicab and no rideshare. The single taxi is fairly unreliable. The saving grace at Cadillac is that the airport has a courtesy car you can arrange to borrow, but that's more and more rare.
Ground transportation at a whole lot of the places I can fly to is just nonexistent or not at all reliable. I expect much of the rest of the country probably has similar issues..
Not sure which destination you picked, but KCAD to Clam Lake Brewery is closer to 3 miles, and that's the general area that I'm usually headed to in Cadillac. I take your point about rollerblades, though, it's certainly an option!
Use cases: Traveling by train (Kwiggle fits under the seat), commuting everywhere, leaving Kwiggle in the car trunk with enough space left, because trunks are designed for handluggage size, and taking it for last mile, putting it in the camper van, in the sail boat in the sport airplane, in the boat, ...
I think people have forgotten how easy it is to set up a traditional server-rendered site with Spring Boot or Django or whatever framework. These days I see people adding a SPA as the default starting approach, which adds an entirely separate additional tech stack & deployable to the mix when it's not usually clear why.
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.