First of all, I respect your self-awareness. I’ve been in a similar rut.
I disagree with some suggestions here that you should watch things like Startup Schoo. Those videos, while well-intentioned, can make you feel even more inadequate and “behind” when you feel stuck.
If you’re losing a game of basketball, it’s not terribly fun to watch somebody else make dunk after dunk.
I currently run one of the largest newsletters in tech (https://techloaf.io), which I started purely as tiny side project to force me into action while in a similar rut. It started with just me, writing up satirical jokes and sending out and email to a few friends each week, to now a project with about a dozen writers and a wide following.
As unhelpful or vague as this might sound, I’ve found that just doing something can have a snowball effect. Pick the smallest possible task for the easiest possible side project and start doing. For me, that was literally just telling a few people that I’d send them a funny email each week.
Best of luck, you’ll look back on this and smile once you’ve got your next project off the ground.
Back when this first started Meredith built a "prototype" in a couple of days which, to a layperson, would appear impressive. There was a function generator with an amplifier sending out ultrasound via an array of transmitters and about a meter away there was an array of receiving transducers that picked up the utlrasound. Then the output from those receiving transducers was rectified with a few diodes to get DC. In this demonstration she had a multimeter showing the voltage at the receiving side, and when she tweaked things just right, she received 5 volts on the receiving side. 5 volts is the standard voltage you'd use to charge a phone, or any other USB powered device, so it was reasoned that she had created a viable system that could charge phones wirelessly.
The problem is that any idiot can get 5 volts out of thin air. You can literally hang up a long bare wire and rectify ambient radio waves and get 5 volts. The trick is getting 5 volts and _being able to supply significant amounts of current at the same time_ i.e. receiving useful amounts of _power_. Power = Volts x Amps and Meredith and her investors simply did not understand the importance of this equation that a freshman in engineering would understand.
There are really two questions. One is what is a reasonable profit margin for a software distributor. Before there was a app store there was boxed software in brick and mortar stores so there is a reference there. The other issue is that Apple imposes a monopoly on software distribution in their devices. Because of the monopoly no one can really be sure what a fair cut is in the app age because there is no competition.
Thanks, Tom! If you could go back and make the decision over again, would you have done enterprise sooner, or later? Do you think GitHub would still have been very successful if you stuck only with SaaS?
The only reason that those "repair fraud gangs" are worth while is that iPhone parts are difficult and expensive the obtain.
If they produced enough spare parts and sold them at reasonable cost it wouldn't be as worthwhile for those "gangs" to try to abuse the warranty system for parts.
Yeah, I was aware of the redirects, they're very helpful! It would've been okay to rely on redirects on a temporary basis if my long-term plan was to move everything to the new username. But I wanted the repos to keep their old URL permanently, so that's why I moved them.
Because the Apple Stores do not offer electronic circuit diagnosis services. The quote would have been based on an educated guess, as backlight failure plus triggered moisture sensors often points to a corroded motherboard as the underlying fault. In this case it wasn't, it was a bent pin presumably caused by incompetent handling by some third party.
I'd be very surprised if there was one you couldn't (and would be worth noting in the database.) Most of these boards expect you to be fairly literate both from a hardware and software standpoint.
On this note, without mentioning names, I'm going to share two real world examples of people I know turning businesses into profitable side projects in very very crowded markets.
One is so profitable in fact that the side project is about to become his full time business. He built a tool to do link tracking using social media pixels. I mean that's a suuuuuper crowded market, but he fine tuned it enough to serve a particular customer base of small to medium businesses and with a primary focus on managing retargeting pixels in one place.
The second business I know of was built in the market of checking cron job success/uptime and doing alerting on failures. Again, there are other products that do exactly this thing. But humans being humans don't connect purely with the feature sheet. From pricing to overall experience his product and customer service was different enough that people are paying for it. And while it was a slog to get his first 10 paying customers, his next 10 took only 1/3rd of the time that it did for the first 10.
This is just a supporting statement for the above comment. Have courage in yourself. Go forth! :)
Not sure how much it could add to the conversation, but I implemented a library to find almost minimal superpermutations in go a while back. Uses a technique I didn't see anywhere else.
To be fair they were totally right that going to war would be a terrible idea but they did it anyway - given that World War 1 pretty much killed off the ruling aristocracy, lead to countless suffering, and stagnation. If they were smart it would have prevented the war but as Bismark predicted it all blew up over a fool thing in the Balkans.
It is like MAD - the assumptions are based upon rational actors which is why they are terrified of proliferation beyond just others getting in their clubhouse.
Calling for quotes is how buyers (patients) force prices down in the long run.
For example, I got a quote this summer for an outpatient MRI that was 20% the cost of a hospital MRI, faster, and would accomplish the same thing. Now I tell everyone I know about this. If enough people do this, the hospital will not be as free to increase the cost and might even lower it (or at least start providing quotes!)
This price-shopping process is slowed by all the shenanigans that keep prices and services provided confusing, and demand to improve this is hampered by insistence that patients are never in a state of mind to shop for the best healthcare provider. It’s simply untrue—and there are workarounds in the worst cases like healthcare POAs and family members donating time.
There actually is another company doing something similar to that called Wi-Charge, except they use an IR laser beam. It's still got quite a lot of fundamental physical limitations (especially with regard to the safety of having an automatically targeted high-power laser beam in the room with you), but it's more practical than uBeam at least.
"Lous Rossman, on his own reddit account in a comment, says that he commissioned the batteries from a factory in China that was no longer authorized to make those batteries, because likely they lost the bid/contract to do so."
> stdint.h is nearing 20 years old now, I don't think it counts as a "newfangled thing" anymore.
In the world of C, it is. Custom compilers for particular embedded systems, such as MCUs, often only speak C89 and nothing else. C99 still hasn't found complete and widespread acceptance.
