Edward is a webapp for writing novels. I built and launched it over the last six months as a side project. The app was made with Vue, Node, and PostgreSQL. There's an unlimited-time free trial, so give it a look and let me know if you have any feedback.
This reminded me, I keep wondering why the tamarind fruit has been left out of Western cuisine. You find trace amounts in Worcestershire sauce and the occasional Indian dish and you can get tamarind juice/candy at some Mexican places if you know what to look for, but by and large it's unheard of and unobtainable. Pity, too, it's got such a nice texture and flavor when prepared correctly.
I know tamarind trees aren't native to the Western hemisphere, but that hasn't ever stopped us before.
What part of the country are you from? I'm guessing not a big city based on the term "Oriental". No offense taken :) It can be found in many of the Asian markets in Los Angeles.
Most likely the UK. Here Asian means Indian subcontinent, and Oriental is East Asian, and supermarket will typically have Oriental in its name somewhere.
This is harsh, but true. I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich." Every dang middle-schooler in the US wants that. Companies are a means, not an end. Successful ones always start with someone who's passionate about a very specific problem.
This really comes out in corporate mission statements. Even if you're Xerox, your mission statement is something like "Improve the rate of business communications by creating the world's most excellent copy machines."
If you don't have an idea for a startup, you're missing the key ingredient. The team literally cannot exist without that visionary person who knows exactly what they're after.
> I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich."
I could not disagree more.
Companies are started by all sorts of people: some founders have a definite idea that is a perfect fit for the market(Stripe,Heroku), some go over many iterations of their original idea and may even end up abandoning it for something entirely unrelated(Reddit), the last type of founder simply wants to be in business and does not even know what his product is yet(Steve Jobs before he joined Pixar).
The only trait all founders share is drive and ambition.
Developer for 2 relatively small Saas apps (< 50k users). Not in remotely the same industry as each other. One privately held, one not. I don’t think it’s industry specific or particularly common, but I’ve had a couple of job offers and seen/heard of other places with comparable benefits. A lot of it is company culture and negotiation. If a company already provides 28 days and you interview well, you can likely get that increased.
20+ days is nothing to write home about with unlimited PTO. Many jobs in Europe have anywhere between 21-25 (or even 28) paid vacation days per year. As a standard. I'd imagine in order to justify unlimited PTO you would have to be able to take at least 30-40 days per year without any issues.
Yeah, anytime I take more than 10 days off in a year, I know that I'm pushing above the average. And that counts days around the holidays too. Every year I plan to take one vacation in the summer for a long weekend, or a full 5 days off in a row if I can.
What is around here? I ask as a (outside of DC non govt) worker with plenty of days (23-24 not including any holiday)~. Might want to avoid that area :)
I left a startup job recently. They did a stellar job handling it. They spent a day or so making offers to get me to stay, then the remainder of my last two weeks listening to my reasons for leaving, making plans to fix their problems (so nobody else would leave), expressing their appreciation for my hard work and helping me find leads for a new job. At least three people on the executive team offered to provide a glowing reference for me, should I ever need one. My last paycheck was deposited a couple of weeks after I left. One of the classiest groups of people I may ever have the pleasure of working for.
I should point out that they lost nothing by this.
An employer who sends nasty emails and withholds pay is ruining the possibility of a valuable future re-hire, causing needless guilt, turning his own employees against him, building himself a poor reputation, and begging for a lawsuit. It's a heavy price to pay for his own pettiness.
Out of curiosity, why did you leave? This has not been my experience with most founders, so it sounds like you hit the jackpot. Would you also be willing to share what company this is?
It's a Utah company called DirectScale. The company is really great, but some circumstances surrounding the product and work environment were making me feel really unproductive. Which might not be a big deal for everyone, but it was for me. I rode it out for a few months, lobbied for some changes, and eventually decided it was time to move on.
Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.
Bountysource is definitely still active, though not as utilised as it should be. The cert expiring is obviously dodgy but it's only expired by a few hours and assumedly will be fixed soon
I built a site like this a few years ago, got absolutely no traction, and shut it down.
I'm very open to the possibility that I went about it the wrong way, but I don't really know what I should have done differently. Maybe it could have worked if I had done a lot more evangelizing -- I admittedly didn't do much, but what I did do was so poorly received that I gave up.
I think something like this has to be integrated directly into github or the project's issue tracker to have a chance to gain any traction. But honestly, even then, I'm not sure it would work.
I think the point was to have a one time option limited to the scope of work instead of yet another subscription model that tries to pay for the work as a form of insurance.
Maintaining your own fork means you are taking de-facto responsibility for the maintenance of more projects in addition to your paying projects.
The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.
In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.
What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.
As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.
So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:
I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:
1) do the quality control work yourself or…
2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.
> I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:
> 1) do the quality control work yourself
I too would gladly pay one dollar for a hundred dollars bill.
When you consider the cost of having to re-merge all your work on every update, I'd be more than happy to pay some reasonable sum to have it merged into master and maintained there. Could save me a lot of work.
