ux4's comments

You can get a general idea with free backlink checkers, just won't be able to deep dive and do various filters.

Ignore all the spammy websites that usually regurgitate random links. Focus on the sites with high DR that don't have the "NoFollow" attribute. These are the hard-hitting websites that boost your domain for SEO purposes and can be good places to get feedback on your own product.

>At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing.

Market validation - especially for online products and services - is indeed incredibly important, but not many people like to write about it because it is actually very drab and a tiny bit audacious.

His market validation - you are seeing it. It is a submission to Hacker News.

Ok ok, that is a given, but the author alludes to other various ways he gets feedback and validation for his products. He also talks about how well his products were received on Product Hunt and you can also follow him on Twitter.

My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.

Building for fun vs building for profit are very different and it's important to set your intention for a project, even though the line often gets blurred.

When you are building for fun, it is for yourself. When you are building for profit, it is for other people. When you are building for fun, you get to decide what to work on and when to stop - usually when it is no longer fun. When you are building for profit, other people decide what you work on and when you are done - usually when no new features are requested, you have no competition, and you have absolutely saturated your market. This rarely ever happens so you always have something propelling you.

The biggest failure most engineers encounter is they build things nobody asked for. They build products without customers lined up, for markets that do not currently exist, with only feedback from themselves. This is because they built the product for fun thinking they were building it for profit.

The line between the two is very easy to blur - especially when reading OP's blog where he genuinely sounds like he had fun building his projects, but I guarantee there was also a lot of very unfun background work done in the name of profit.

Edit: Don't just take my guarantee for it, read about his challenges for One Item Store https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store

Breaking down monolithic databases into microservices.

Containerism and modern devops practices become borderline impossible when you're working with a monolithic database that's encumbered in complex business processes. Ideally you're working with independent, decoupled microservices, but that's far from the reality that most admins face.

Talk to a recruiter, reach out to a staffing agency, or occupational therapist.

Receiving career advice online isn't very useful unless you live in the bay area or know the credibility of the person giving advice. Odds are your local labor market has a completely different landscape with different skill requirements.

I'd say working for an employer is making less sense in general, especially if you're a developer. It's becoming way easier to make money through other means, and you can devote your time to pursuits that are actually meaningful to you.

Ideas aren't worth much, execution is everything.

I would like to encourage you to act on those ideas because the real art is in translating those ideas into practical solutions. Everyone has their own ideas of what would solve a problem, but 99% of those ideas will not work because they are not grounded on reality.

I don't know much about the heavy equipment industry, but from the outside looking in, it doesn't appear to have the conditions to support "disruption." First of all, the majority of consumers in the heavy equipment industry are price insensitive. Heavy equipment is mostly sold to other businesses, agriculture, construction and engineering firms, military, and government. Those companies will buy the equipment regardless of price or any other improvement.

Secondly, there isn't really any scalability in the market for heavy equipment. Even if firms made a big change to the heavy equipment design/mfg industry, they most likely won't capture any new markets. Even a substantial change won't make the average Joe say "Hey I should buy a 400 ton dump truck." The only benefactors of the disruption would be the consumers listed above, who again are pretty indifferent.

Finally, it's also heavily burdened by bureaucracy and regulations. I imagine the biggest bottlenecks to the industry are all the requirements for safety and quality. If someone gets hurt with your equipment, you are in for a multi-million dollar lawsuit. You need approvals, permits, inspections, and QA, each of them slowing the process down further. It's also possible the industry can experience a drastic change from a breakthrough in technology, some kind of mass adoption of a new process, or some sudden increase in demand for heavy equipment, but I see that being dependent on changes outside of the industry.

The biggest one that hasn't been mentioned yet:

Practice gratitude. Get a pen and paper and start writing down things in your life that you're grateful for. It can be something as simple as being grateful for food, water, and shelter (which gets taken for granted so often).

Do this for 15 minutes a day (preferably as soon you wake up) and you will notice your outlook on life improve. Religious people do this in the form of prayer, and it has been scientifically proven to increase your happiness.

I do wish we had the wild and free festivals they had in the 70s and 80s, but that's pretty much impossible now with all the regulations for legal festivals and the fact that organizers are legally responsible for any accidents that happen. An example of this is EDC Los Angeles 2010 where a 15 year old girl died (after sneaking into the festival and taking pills of ecstasy):

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/30/local/la-me-rave-dea...

Lawyers made a case of negligence against the organizers, they had a lengthy trial, the organizers settled with the parents outside of court, and the festival was never held in Los Angeles again. As a result of this tragedy and similar events, tight security is introduced, rules are put into place, and we get sterilized events in an attempt to tame the beast. But where do we draw the line?

Reading this article felt like the typical Coachella-hate circlejerk because it was more about Coachella than any other music festival, but a good point they brought up was the RFID chips on wristbands that allow them to track your location 24/7. Sure it helps with logistics, but it also lets them track you back to your hotel, where you ate for breakfast, what vendor booths you visited, who you were with, etc. This in combination with the required Coachella phone app would allow them to accrue a pretty large amount of personal data.

Sad how this technology is being used for tyrannical surveillance when it could be used to improve the mental health and emotional well-being of people instead. I imagine using this to improve the emotional well-being of your employees would boost productivity much more.

Work backwards. Envision the future you would like to live in 10 years and notice the details of that vision. For example, maybe you'd like to be living in a custom-built estate on Malé in the Maldive Islands, where you run your travel data business. Work backwards and decide what actions will lead you to this dream. Once you figure out those appropriate actions, decide what you can do in 2hr bursts. The hardest part will be finding what's "meaningful" to you, which will require some soul-searching.

I think this becomes true when any programming website becomes popular. Just look at reddit.

Highly technical programming articles can be hard to digest and don't appeal to a wide audience so they get less upvotes, especially if it's about a specialized language. If you really wanted to read those articles, you could still find them in abundance on other programming/hacking/specialized forums.

I agree. I was recently in the market for a car and I think the best bang for your buck would be a certified pre-owned Honda, 3-5 years old, less than 50k mileage, and last year of its body style. A CPO 2015 Honda Civic with ~35k miles could be had for $11-14k in California. 31/41MPG, cheap to repair, extremely reliable.

Practicing meditation and giving all my effort for an achievement I thought was unreachable.

Before I learned how to meditate, I thought of everything logically and incorrectly applied that to relationships as well. I found it incredibly hard to understand other people, their motivations, and why they acted certain ways. I wondered why so many of my relationships failed out of no where and why it was so hard to connect with other people. After I observed my background processes with the help of meditation, I realized that people act primarily out of emotion, not logic.

This is where I made leaps in emotional growth. I realized that I had many emotional processes running in the background, like daemons of an operating system. The majority of these processes were subconscious and unaware to me, yet they were impacting every decision I've ever made! Subconscious sensations of fear, sadness, and anger that were influencing my conscious mind. Before someone even considers the logic of a question, they've already made an emotional answer. I could write a book on this, but Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman explains this so much better. Once I realized this and confronted my inner demons, the behavior of other people was much more manageable.

Reaching an achievement that I thought was unreachable was life changing as well. On my final semester of college, I had a senior project that was out of my skill level, but it was required for my degree. Without any background in development, I had to develop a web application for a customer, with an entire LAMP stack behind it. I came from a Windows background so I had to learn Linux administration as well as 3 new programming languages within 2 months. I worked extremely hard on it, but did not receive any input from the customer. The due date rolled around and the project inevitably did not meet the his expectations, so he pleaded with the professor to fail me so I would have to retake the class (and he would get more free labor). Despite all that work, the professor gave me a big fat F and I was unable to graduate. The night I got that email I felt so crushed and defeated, I couldn't sleep and developed a stomach ulcer.

But I didn't give up. I petitioned for a grade revision, I had no other choice. I made an 8-page report explaining that I completed everything the customer agreed to in the project proposal. I presented it to the department head, but he said there was no case. I presented it to the grading committee, and to my luck, they accepted my case. They gave me a second chance to complete a revision of the project and I would receive a passing grade in return. The only problem was that the customer was asking for a task that was not possible with the application and I had 2 weeks, Christmas vacation. Despite that I was determined. I developed an extension for the application that accomplished his goal. After turning that project in, the professor awarded me an A in the class, I got my degree cum laude, and I realized the limits I can push my mind and body. Anything you want in life can be achieved, despite the obstacles, you just need to spend enough time and effort on it.

Did you already have another offer or did you resign to just continue the job search?

This is awesome. I've been looking for a Docker project to play with, thanks for sharing.

The biggest impact meditation has had on me is that it's improved my introverted intuition; my ability to recognize myself, recognize what makes me happy, define my goals, and step back when my feelings are getting the best of me.

I just concentrate on my breath for 10-20 minutes at a time. Take in a diaphragmatic inhale, hold for 4 seconds, release for 6 seconds (technique used by Navy SEALS). Repeat this and focus on the sensations going on in your body such as the feeling of air rushing through your nose, the life of oxygen in your lungs, the dissipation of stress as you exhale through your mouth. Inhale, hold, exhale, repeat. Your mind will naturally try to distract you and chew on problems going on in your life, but it's important to recognize that it's only a fruitless thought and your immediate purpose is to focus on your breath and survive.

After ~15 minutes of this, I stop consciously breathing and just observe the sensations going through my body. Most immediately, you will notice you continue breathing, even though you're no longer consciously doing it. This is a subconscious activity, what other subconscious activities are going on in your body? Start recognizing the sensations in your toes and move up your body, it feels like a body scan that relaxes whatever body part your conscious of.

Once you feel satisfied, wake up, notice your surroundings, and feel the refreshing glow of calm happiness.

I agree with you, but I wouldn't call it schizophrenia or say any values were lost, they were just reprioritized. Describing it as schizophrenia implies a disconnection with reality, but the feelings and sensations we have are true, just not easily quantified or explained. Since we have a greater recognition of the sensations going through our body, we place a higher importance on those instead of the social values everyone else is working towards in the hopes that it will make them happy.

One example is working at a bad job. The average person will sacrifice their happiness to work at this bad job, because it pays the bills, because it would look bad on you to quit, etc. They live their life in fear and misery, but will suppress it until it becomes too much and they explode. When a person has the experience of observing the sensations in their body, they will be able to recognize unhappiness early on and are more likely to move on before they explode.

It does make it a little tougher to fit in with "normal" people because we have completely different priorities, but I would say we have a greater grasp on our own happiness, which is way more important in the grand scheme of things.

For clarification, this study says that a cup of coffee is more effective than HVMN's SPRINT which contains the following:

Caffeine 100 mg

L-Theanine 200 mg

Vitamin B6 20 mg

Vitamin B12 60 mcg

Vinpocetine 40 mg

L-Tyrosine 400 mg