I wrote this answer to a similar question a few months ago:
"I'm not dead" probably ranks highly. I am sometimes cast into a tournament against a patient, relentless salesman for death. The problem is, he knows everything about me. Everything. Every thought, every recollection, every secret shame, every regret. Everyone I've ever hurt, how I hurt them, how I let them down, how I failed them.
And he can, in a moment of pain, turn all of those into an impulse that I have to remind myself is just a feeling and even while I do that he's whispering "is it?".
Most of the time I am OK. But I know that I my emotions can just overwhelm me so suddenly and completely that it scares me. I am still learning how to live with me.
For what it's worth, I'm very glad you're alive and thinking about this stuff friend :) I heavily relate to that overwhelming feeling stemming from meta-emotions.
The Bible describes that salesman as a liar and a thief. Remember that. He's a liar! Don't buy what he's selling, because it's a lie.
And he's a thief. He wants to steal everything your future could be, will be, and replace it with nothing.
As a Christian, I can look at those moments of shame and regret, and say "Yes, that was wrong. I failed. I hurt people. But it's forgiven. Paid for. Totally, completely, willingly paid for." And then I can remember, once again, to forgive myself.
But I don't wrestle with the salesman like you do, so I can't claim that it will help you. I think it will, but I can't really say.
If we keep thinking about the past we will never move forward. Shit happens in our life and a lot of it some it we can control some of it and we can't. It is called destiny my friend. It is not easy to let go of the past but learn to come to understanding that everything happened for a reason. I am sure there are people that loves you and want to share countless moments with you so stay strong fight hard and never give up
After years of R&D, heartache, and rough decisions --- I finally turned my hardware company (http://pavlok.com) profitable! We make technology to break bad habits, wake up earlier, and reduce cravings.
I decided to try to build a hardware company without raising VC --- which is probably one of the hardest decisions you can make. And required about 30 people to make a reality.
But now that we have finally got our manufacturing and supply chain working, I've been building our sales & marketing team --- and I can't wait to see how 2017 progresses :)
Just wondering, do you dropship or sell to webshops? Seems quite nice usage of a watch. I also have another proposition which i would like to share / ask.
We manufacture in Massachusetts and we sell on our own site, Amazon, and as of last week in retail(!!!). We are certainly open to wholesale, whitelabeling, and partnering --- we have a totally open API as well! (http://pavlok.com/api)
Does this have sensors on it? Does it support variable power shocks? Does it support "no shocks for 5 minutes"?
I could see something like this being useful for things like anger management....detect rising heart rate (or some other physiological changes) and give some small warning "calm down, be mindful" shocks.
Another thing I'd like to see on vendor websites like this: a "remind me in <x> months" email signup - I'd like to buy a future version of this with more features, but I don't want to get an annoying email every week advertising other things I'm not interested in.
Awesome! You should go through our intro course (in the app) to see the power --- and we now have a new integration with Pavlok Coaches for the New Year! Let me know if you're interested and I can help you make 2017 your best yet :)
Looks like a great product! I'm not a designer the design feels a bit confused between extremely durable, male focused and mass market (lightning bolt, yellow on black) and very tech focused (thin fonts, use of icons.)
I'd love to see an a-b test or a landing page which is more female/fashion focused. I hope you don't take this is an insult, its a very good landing page!
I would LOVE to get your advice on this! We NEED a female-friendly page, and honestly we are just kinda figuring out what we are doing. Any resources, design firms, contacts you might recommend?
Awesome idea and the website looks great too! Congratulations for bootstrapping a 30 man team!
Does Pavlok have any other automated detection capacities other than wrist to mouth? You might consider making a video on how that works and how to temporarily disable it when eating: if that's the only "magic" feature, I for one would definitely want to see it in action before committing. If you have more magic, I think those features could use more exposure
Yes! We integrate with chrome, rescuetime, and todoist to be a productivity trainer (http://pavlok.com/productivity). We integrate with slack as a team haptic conversation device (http://pavlok.com/slack). We integrate with IFTTT so it zaps me when I text my ex girlfriend, walk into a mcdonalds, or do other trackable stupid stuff (http://pavlok.com/ifttt).
Hey I've been a follower for awhile, both you and your brother have been huge influences on my growth mindset. It's amazing to see you posting on HN and I will leave it at this: thank you.
It was an accomplishment for me but then it became a frustration.
I always hated mathematics but I always loved programming, making appls but cool things like algorithms design, data structures are the base of real cool things e.g. programming languages, RDBMS, artificial intelligence, etc. are all mathematics
So I enrolled to Mathematics on my local university just to see how it was and I fell in love, I never saw so much perfection with just paper and pencil. I loved calculus it was really funny solving problems, making proofs, etc. I got good scores the first half of the year and I really wanted to continue but then frustration began, the need of money, so I started working and I couldn't go to lectures anymore. Of course I try to keep reading books and solving some excercies but help from professors or extra tips they used to gave us is what I really miss.
I also did the same thing several years ago (defended my PhD thesis and got married within the same month), and it was insanely harder than it looks. I don't recommend anybody go through the dual stresses of writing their dissertation while simultaneously planning a wedding.
I married my wife within a month of her receiving her MD. I believe I was more stressed about wedding planning than she was about medicine at the time. That said, surgical residency is no picnic.
What I did was (not intended) becoming friends with a extremely proficient meeting booker, and through a lot of talks and some coaching he learned me his brilliant techniques.
That is half of it, the rest is understanding (yourself and) people, psychology and being a balanced person.
I learned that putting more pressure on myself wasn't working, that there isn't a linear relationship between pressure and results. Instead, there is what I call a sweet spot, beyond which more pressure decreases results instead of increasing them.
This. Elon Musk is quoted (?) as saying "If you work 100 hours while others work 40 per week, you can do in 3 months what they do in a year." But the truth is that overwork leads to unproductive work, burnout, and loss of passion.
I'm definitely most effective when I'm happy. If I overwork myself, I quickly get into a negative feedback loop of "never being caught up and satisfied with work."
I learned to internalize the idea of keeping myself happy (stable work/life) first, as in the long run this is the most effective situation.
Casual acquaintance became a friend and almost immediately turned to me for help with 20+ years of drug and alcohol addiction (they were an often-functioning addict, on whom it didn't physically show).
9+ months later, they are still sober.
Unfortunately, the friendship didn't survive. They really pushed my own boundaries, early on, but I hung in there, hoping and waiting per advice for their circumstances and perspective to settle down.
But, while they are no longer using substances, they are still, in my now more informed perspective, using people. Once they had other means of support, they didn't have time for me.
Still hope it all proves to be of benefit to their kids.
As for me, things I really needed to do, this year, nonetheless got placed on hold. This may even have contributed towards negative judgment towards me -- despite my circumstances making all the time I committed to them possible, in the first place.
Lesson learned: Take care of yourself, first. As also observed, ultimately, in the activity and choices of the person I was helping. They certainly took care of themselves -- sometimes at the expense of those around them who were willing to help.
I feel compassion for your situation because I've gone through something similar with a past relationship, and IMO your takeaways are spot on. "Take care of yourself" -- reminds me of a quote from an old man to his wife. "You take care of you for me, and I'll take care of me for you." The best gift we can offer the world is a well-cared for self.
I published a book, and I've read 171 books so far this year. I think all the reading has made me more confident in daily life. A nice side effect of the confidence is I'm more okay with making mistakes.
The course has an average rating of 4.62 and over 200 students. To date (since end of June), it has made $1182 for me.
This was quite a learning experience - aside from putting the course content together, I found out a lot about recording audio. I tried doing this in Thailand and quickly learnt that I was in a very noisy environment. First there were the echoes of the room itself which I fixed by cramming my microphone in the cupboard in-between blankets and pillows. Then there were the scooters, neighbours, air-conditioning, airplanes! This was a very frustrating experience.
If you ever make a course, make sure you have a nice, quiet recording environment!
I've also learnt that you can make a bit of money from having Udemy promote you, but if you want to make any decent money, you have to promote yourself.
I also believe from this experience that making one online course just isn't worth doing. If you're going to do it, you have to keep doing it. There is a learning curve at the start, and I believe the trick to being successful is to really work on promotion, and do up-sells to other relevant courses from your existing student base.
Maybe you can give some more insights. What would you say is the ratio on "How much Udemy helps to promote your content" and "How do you have to do yourself to promote the content"? Did or Do (maybe they came up in the same time as your course) you have competitors in that topic?
There are courses on the same topic for sure. What I did was I took all the courses out there on Neo4j myself, learnt from all of them, and then created my course based on everything I learnt, and the pitfalls that I personally had come across that weren't detailed in other courses.
With Udemy your revenue breaks down as follows:
* Your promotions
* Udemy organic
* Ad program
* Affiliate program
* Corporate subscriptions (if your course makes it into this bucket)
90% of my sales so far have come from Udemy's marketing - I have put very little effort into doing promotion myself. With some affiliates (ones Udemy has set up), I get as little as 25% of the revenue generated - and they'll be at heavily discounted amounts anyway - so maybe $2.50 on a $10 sale, others I might get up to 50% of the sale.
So basically, with me doing next to nothing (apart from the odd question - which I get hardly any of), I'm getting about $200 a month on average.
This might seem pretty good, but keep in mind this course took me a seriously long time to build out (like 6 months, with prob half of that working full-time on it), and I can get the equivalent of about $400+ per day contracting.
To learn and teach React and Redux were my greatest accomplishments in 2016.
Very late in 2015 I started to learn React. I did a lot of JavaScript before, read a lot about React, but never used it before. Early in 2016 I wrote my first application in React and Redux - a SoundCloud Client (source: https://github.com/rwieruch/favesound-redux , live: http://www.favesound.de).
I didn't expect the enormous positive feedback. I continued to share my learnings. Eventually I found myself in the position to teach a bit about React and its ecosystem on my website.
Finally I wrote an eBook: The Road to learn React (http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/). Again the feedback of the community was overwhelming. In the end I very much hope that it helps people to get started in React like I did. At this moment I improve the material whenever I can.
Besides of programming, I learned a lot about writing and teaching itself during the process. Still I try to improve my skills by reading books like "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
Yep, ditto. I went from learning about React and Redux myself, to trying to share what I've learned, to actually being something of an expert on them. (The fact that some people actually want to know what I have to say is still _really_ amusing to me :) )
I've spent the last year+ hanging out in the Reactiflux chat rooms, and apparently have consistently been the top contributor by message volume every month - and not by small margins, either ([0]). At a conservative estimate of 3 people helped a night, that's somewhere over 1000 people I've helped there, which is pretty cool.
In March-ish, I created a links list for tutorials, articles, and other resources related to React and Redux ([1]). I've continued to add links on a weekly basis, and that list recently hit 5500 stars. I've also maintained a Redux addons catalog ([2]), which just hit 1500 stars.
I wrote two major sections for the Redux docs: the FAQ page ([3]), and the "Structuring Reducers" how-to/recipe section ([4]). Those have been very well received. As a result, Dan Abramov added me as a contributor to the Redux repo, and eventually handed the keys to me and Tim Dorr as the official maintainers. I also helped offer advice and critiques for Jim Bolla as he built the new React-Redux v5 implementation ([5])
Finally, I started up a dev blog, where I've been writing about use of React and Redux ([6]). In particular, I've been writing a tutorial series called "Practical Redux" ([7]), which is intended to demonstrate some useful techniques I've come up with in the context of a sample app that's _not_ yet another TodoMVC clone :) I also wrote a recap of how I got involved in Redux in the first place ([8]).
So yeah, it's been a pretty crazy last year, but I love being able to help people learn how to use React and Redux.
I wrote a concatenative Donald Trump text to speech engine [1]. It kind of sounds like garbage right now since I rushed to complete it before the election--I had no idea he'd win. I read lots of literature on speech and linguistics, synthesis algorithms, and more. I also had to curate a large sample of Trump speech.
I wrote the backend in Rust, so I was able to learn quite a bit more about Rust in the process.
Since Trump won the election, I'll devote some time in Q1 2017 to improving the voice quality. I'm especially interested in applying deep learning techniques to generating a larger n-phone data set.
My second largest accomplishment will be what I'm going to pull off for New Year's, but that's a surprise. It involves multiple watts of lasers, though. :)
It never fails to amaze me that if you can prove you gave the FAA the legally required minimum 30 days warning you can do anything up to death star experiments and they can't say boo about it, but skipping the paperwork and trying to beg forgiveness after the fact is like a dozen separate felonies, so be careful. Assuming you're doing what I'd do with many watts of lasers, LOL.
Created a beer bread recipe blog in the hopes that I get big enough that breweries will send me beer. Last month, a brewery decided to send me beers to "play around with". Mission accomplished.
Digging a natural pond was probably the best project of 2016, turning a boring corner of the garden into an incredibly popular area for birds and wildlife with a lot of new visitors. Grafting some trees, making hoshigaki for the first time, and also a relatively decent home brew helped also to deal with an, otherwise, complicated and unstable year.
I learned A LOT in the process, main one being that you should keep meticulous and separate records for anything that has the chance of being spun off. The company I sold grew out of my freelancing but was separate with a separate name. Unwiring the financials as well as the logins and everything else was a headache. It also looks better to your buyer if you can quickly produce accurate records on sales. I had to back-track and re-calculate several times, leading to more back-and-forth than was necessary.
Pretty small fish compared to everyone else in the thread, but outside of work, I'm pretty happy I published my first actually useful open source project: https://github.com/underyx/structlog-pretty
Mine biggest accomplishment (probably of my life) was turning our almost bankrupted company into profit just in 4 short months [0].
I learned many great things, but the most important lesson is that if you treat your employees with respect and you don't hide things from them, they will stick around and help you to push through. Without them, I would have nothing today.
I landed my dream job 20 years after I decided what and where I wanted.
It took me a lot of time. Battling low self-esteem, giving it up for a while, following the wrong path, surviving after being fired for the first and only time.
I learned perseverance. Once I set my mind on it and worked around distractions, people and my own mind, I got what I truly wanted and I'm loving and learning every single day.
That would be interesting to read about this journey. I am pretty much starting my first steps in the same direction, don't know where I'll be but I don't have any other plans or choice.
Worked on a 3 month rapid product development with a team of 4 using Scrum methodology. Technologies used: React-Redux-TypeScript
Learning: Was in product development first time. Scrum is tiring in nature but good when used for rapid development. React-Redux-TypeScript is a great combo. Still not sure on using inline styles for react components
Check out the webpack style loader if you don't want to go full inline with the styles. We had to monkey patch Module.prototype.require to get mocha happy with "requiring" sass files but it was only half a days work. Now, styles don't leak outside of the component we want them in. Stylesheets are absolutely my least favorite part of development and having one stylesheet per component actually makes it tractable for me.
Realizing that I couldn't have a day job + a real passionate side project. Quit that day job, realized while contracting that I was probably undercharging for compensation, and currently bootstrapping that side project into a startup. Wish me luck, etc.
316 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] thread"I'm not dead" probably ranks highly. I am sometimes cast into a tournament against a patient, relentless salesman for death. The problem is, he knows everything about me. Everything. Every thought, every recollection, every secret shame, every regret. Everyone I've ever hurt, how I hurt them, how I let them down, how I failed them.
And he can, in a moment of pain, turn all of those into an impulse that I have to remind myself is just a feeling and even while I do that he's whispering "is it?".
Most of the time I am OK. But I know that I my emotions can just overwhelm me so suddenly and completely that it scares me. I am still learning how to live with me.
He'll probably make his sale in the end.
But I'm alive.
Also: your profile text is hilariously out of date.
I can relate to it, and just remember that salesman is a fucking arsehole who is trying to cheat you out of some pretty awesome moments.
And he's a thief. He wants to steal everything your future could be, will be, and replace it with nothing.
As a Christian, I can look at those moments of shame and regret, and say "Yes, that was wrong. I failed. I hurt people. But it's forgiven. Paid for. Totally, completely, willingly paid for." And then I can remember, once again, to forgive myself.
But I don't wrestle with the salesman like you do, so I can't claim that it will help you. I think it will, but I can't really say.
Stay alive, friend. Stay alive (and well).
Tell that fucker to fuck off. You don't have to listen to him. Focus on here and now. The past is gone. Enjoy your life right here right now.
I decided to try to build a hardware company without raising VC --- which is probably one of the hardest decisions you can make. And required about 30 people to make a reality.
But now that we have finally got our manufacturing and supply chain working, I've been building our sales & marketing team --- and I can't wait to see how 2017 progresses :)
Just wondering, do you dropship or sell to webshops? Seems quite nice usage of a watch. I also have another proposition which i would like to share / ask.
Is there an email where i can contact you?
We manufacture in Massachusetts and we sell on our own site, Amazon, and as of last week in retail(!!!). We are certainly open to wholesale, whitelabeling, and partnering --- we have a totally open API as well! (http://pavlok.com/api)
Thanks
I could see something like this being useful for things like anger management....detect rising heart rate (or some other physiological changes) and give some small warning "calm down, be mindful" shocks.
Another thing I'd like to see on vendor websites like this: a "remind me in <x> months" email signup - I'd like to buy a future version of this with more features, but I don't want to get an annoying email every week advertising other things I'm not interested in.
Congratulations, looks great.
I'd love to see an a-b test or a landing page which is more female/fashion focused. I hope you don't take this is an insult, its a very good landing page!
Does Pavlok have any other automated detection capacities other than wrist to mouth? You might consider making a video on how that works and how to temporarily disable it when eating: if that's the only "magic" feature, I for one would definitely want to see it in action before committing. If you have more magic, I think those features could use more exposure
You are right -- we need to make more videos. You can see a lot of our users' stories on our site, or read about it in the NYTimes (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/a-shocking-way-real...)
Technically speaking I learned a few things, like Ray marching and distance field stuff, but nothing much I can point to and say "I did that."
I'm still here though, I made a few friends, I made and drunk some cider.
If I am on a good enough footing to make 2017 better, I'll take that.
… I started to keep a paper journal this year. Maybe that is my greatest accomplishment?
I also did the same thing several years ago (defended my PhD thesis and got married within the same month), and it was insanely harder than it looks. I don't recommend anybody go through the dual stresses of writing their dissertation while simultaneously planning a wedding.
Launched my first webshop ( which is actually quite fun) in a niche ( 500 € / month profits), which is nice.
Otherwhise, work overload made me quite agitated on the end of the year. But i'll get through it.
- Understanding prolog/non determinism.
ps: I hope you all can enjoy prolog extreme beauty and concision one day if not the case already. It's not at all perfect but so tiny yet so grand.
I the process I embraced the fact that I am much better at sales than at programming, I even learned to love to do cold canvas calling!
That is half of it, the rest is understanding (yourself and) people, psychology and being a balanced person.
Feel free to mail me for tips and tricks :)
I'm definitely most effective when I'm happy. If I overwork myself, I quickly get into a negative feedback loop of "never being caught up and satisfied with work."
I learned to internalize the idea of keeping myself happy (stable work/life) first, as in the long run this is the most effective situation.
9+ months later, they are still sober.
Unfortunately, the friendship didn't survive. They really pushed my own boundaries, early on, but I hung in there, hoping and waiting per advice for their circumstances and perspective to settle down.
But, while they are no longer using substances, they are still, in my now more informed perspective, using people. Once they had other means of support, they didn't have time for me.
Still hope it all proves to be of benefit to their kids.
As for me, things I really needed to do, this year, nonetheless got placed on hold. This may even have contributed towards negative judgment towards me -- despite my circumstances making all the time I committed to them possible, in the first place.
Lesson learned: Take care of yourself, first. As also observed, ultimately, in the activity and choices of the person I was helping. They certainly took care of themselves -- sometimes at the expense of those around them who were willing to help.
I actually wrote a blog post about my favorite books, I feel like HN folks would like the "math" and "relevant today" sections:
http://adit.io/posts/2016-12-10-The-Best-Books-I-Read-In-201...
The course has an average rating of 4.62 and over 200 students. To date (since end of June), it has made $1182 for me.
This was quite a learning experience - aside from putting the course content together, I found out a lot about recording audio. I tried doing this in Thailand and quickly learnt that I was in a very noisy environment. First there were the echoes of the room itself which I fixed by cramming my microphone in the cupboard in-between blankets and pillows. Then there were the scooters, neighbours, air-conditioning, airplanes! This was a very frustrating experience.
If you ever make a course, make sure you have a nice, quiet recording environment!
I've also learnt that you can make a bit of money from having Udemy promote you, but if you want to make any decent money, you have to promote yourself.
I also believe from this experience that making one online course just isn't worth doing. If you're going to do it, you have to keep doing it. There is a learning curve at the start, and I believe the trick to being successful is to really work on promotion, and do up-sells to other relevant courses from your existing student base.
Maybe you can give some more insights. What would you say is the ratio on "How much Udemy helps to promote your content" and "How do you have to do yourself to promote the content"? Did or Do (maybe they came up in the same time as your course) you have competitors in that topic?
There are courses on the same topic for sure. What I did was I took all the courses out there on Neo4j myself, learnt from all of them, and then created my course based on everything I learnt, and the pitfalls that I personally had come across that weren't detailed in other courses.
With Udemy your revenue breaks down as follows: * Your promotions * Udemy organic * Ad program * Affiliate program * Corporate subscriptions (if your course makes it into this bucket)
90% of my sales so far have come from Udemy's marketing - I have put very little effort into doing promotion myself. With some affiliates (ones Udemy has set up), I get as little as 25% of the revenue generated - and they'll be at heavily discounted amounts anyway - so maybe $2.50 on a $10 sale, others I might get up to 50% of the sale.
So basically, with me doing next to nothing (apart from the odd question - which I get hardly any of), I'm getting about $200 a month on average.
This might seem pretty good, but keep in mind this course took me a seriously long time to build out (like 6 months, with prob half of that working full-time on it), and I can get the equivalent of about $400+ per day contracting.
Very late in 2015 I started to learn React. I did a lot of JavaScript before, read a lot about React, but never used it before. Early in 2016 I wrote my first application in React and Redux - a SoundCloud Client (source: https://github.com/rwieruch/favesound-redux , live: http://www.favesound.de).
I wanted to share the joy of learning, the joy of applying the learnings, the joy of building an own application. That's why I started to write about it (http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-soundcloud-client-in-react-re...).
I didn't expect the enormous positive feedback. I continued to share my learnings. Eventually I found myself in the position to teach a bit about React and its ecosystem on my website.
Finally I wrote an eBook: The Road to learn React (http://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/). Again the feedback of the community was overwhelming. In the end I very much hope that it helps people to get started in React like I did. At this moment I improve the material whenever I can.
Besides of programming, I learned a lot about writing and teaching itself during the process. Still I try to improve my skills by reading books like "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
I've spent the last year+ hanging out in the Reactiflux chat rooms, and apparently have consistently been the top contributor by message volume every month - and not by small margins, either ([0]). At a conservative estimate of 3 people helped a night, that's somewhere over 1000 people I've helped there, which is pretty cool.
In March-ish, I created a links list for tutorials, articles, and other resources related to React and Redux ([1]). I've continued to add links on a weekly basis, and that list recently hit 5500 stars. I've also maintained a Redux addons catalog ([2]), which just hit 1500 stars.
I wrote two major sections for the Redux docs: the FAQ page ([3]), and the "Structuring Reducers" how-to/recipe section ([4]). Those have been very well received. As a result, Dan Abramov added me as a contributor to the Redux repo, and eventually handed the keys to me and Tim Dorr as the official maintainers. I also helped offer advice and critiques for Jim Bolla as he built the new React-Redux v5 implementation ([5])
Finally, I started up a dev blog, where I've been writing about use of React and Redux ([6]). In particular, I've been writing a tutorial series called "Practical Redux" ([7]), which is intended to demonstrate some useful techniques I've come up with in the context of a sample app that's _not_ yet another TodoMVC clone :) I also wrote a recap of how I got involved in Redux in the first place ([8]).
So yeah, it's been a pretty crazy last year, but I love being able to help people learn how to use React and Redux.
[0] https://twitter.com/reactiflux/status/743880425576103936
[1] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links
[2] https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem-links
[3] http://redux.js.org/docs/FAQ.html
[4] http://redux.js.org/docs/recipes/StructuringReducers.html
[5] https://github.com/reactjs/react-redux/pull/416
[6] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/
[7] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/practical-redux
[8] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/09/how-i-got-here-my-j...
I wrote the backend in Rust, so I was able to learn quite a bit more about Rust in the process.
Since Trump won the election, I'll devote some time in Q1 2017 to improving the voice quality. I'm especially interested in applying deep learning techniques to generating a larger n-phone data set.
My second largest accomplishment will be what I'm going to pull off for New Year's, but that's a surprise. It involves multiple watts of lasers, though. :)
[1] http://jungle.horse
It never fails to amaze me that if you can prove you gave the FAA the legally required minimum 30 days warning you can do anything up to death star experiments and they can't say boo about it, but skipping the paperwork and trying to beg forgiveness after the fact is like a dozen separate felonies, so be careful. Assuming you're doing what I'd do with many watts of lasers, LOL.
That is what I call motivation!
I learned A LOT in the process, main one being that you should keep meticulous and separate records for anything that has the chance of being spun off. The company I sold grew out of my freelancing but was separate with a separate name. Unwiring the financials as well as the logins and everything else was a headache. It also looks better to your buyer if you can quickly produce accurate records on sales. I had to back-track and re-calculate several times, leading to more back-and-forth than was necessary.
It was hard to let go, but had to because of personal debt. A bit more backstory here: http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bc7fdf29a4610b493fd5b278...
Mine biggest accomplishment (probably of my life) was turning our almost bankrupted company into profit just in 4 short months [0].
I learned many great things, but the most important lesson is that if you treat your employees with respect and you don't hide things from them, they will stick around and help you to push through. Without them, I would have nothing today.
[0] https://medium.com/@synopsi/from-near-bankruptcy-to-profitab...
It took me a lot of time. Battling low self-esteem, giving it up for a while, following the wrong path, surviving after being fired for the first and only time.
I learned perseverance. Once I set my mind on it and worked around distractions, people and my own mind, I got what I truly wanted and I'm loving and learning every single day.
Here it is, https://hoffmann.cx/post/after-20-years/.
Learning: Was in product development first time. Scrum is tiring in nature but good when used for rapid development. React-Redux-TypeScript is a great combo. Still not sure on using inline styles for react components
I'm looking to improve the security of potentially ~82% of websites in early 2017.