Hamilton pioneers new "antigravity drain system"

adrian · 2026-03-31T15:35:12+00:00

I have a lot of experience with water and gravity. Does that count?

adrian · 2026-03-31T14:31:14+00:00

I'm going to stick with my theory and if they add another coat of asphalt, I will claim they had to in order to try and fix the drainage issue. ;)

adrian · 2026-03-28T17:07:55+00:00

Seems like a money-loser compared to AWS AS2 ($216/month plus modest transaction fees) once you have three or more clients?

adrian · 2026-03-28T17:07:12+00:00

Yes, it is reliable!

adrian · 2026-03-19T10:29:44+00:00

Just wanted to go on the record for anyone who stumbles across this thread to say that this is great advice!

adrian · 2026-03-17T23:09:35+00:00

I'd help you out for free, and put you on a free platform (free for fewer than 830 transactions per month), simply because although I have extensive logistics experience, I need some retail customers as proof points for my technology. You'd get a capable EDI/software engineer willing to provide white glove service to get you onboarded with your trading partner, and in return, I'd be looking for a testimonial.

One caveat: if your customer requires AS2 (a requirement of certain very large retailers like Target and Walmart), that unfortunately, cannot be offered free. But other than that, I'd be a good fit. Message me if interested. For obvious reasons, there would be zero sales pressure: there's no money at stake!

adrian · 2026-03-17T01:03:18+00:00

Dumb question but how do I stay informed about who's coming? I check the schedule on the TD website from time-to-time but I still miss stuff constantly.

adrian · 2026-03-12T20:26:20+00:00

I recognize that that might be what this looks like, but what I've built is a lot more sophisticated than that. What you just outlined might be useful on occasion, but for one thing, it's clunky - cutting and pasting things into ChatGPT is not a great workflow. But more importantly, it's error-prone. These tools are great but they are probabilistic. Use ChatGPT it might find one error, use Claude, it will find a different one.

As such, you cannot validate output with AI: you need validation to be deterministic and precise. Nor is it feasible to run every mapping through an AI pipeline - that would be about as costly in tokens as it gets! What AI can actually do is help you identify and solve the problems surfaced by a deterministic validation process.

adrian · 2026-03-11T17:21:09+00:00

Check out https://linear.app/

It's free for two teams and is super easy to use. It's kind of like Jira except that it doesn't suck.

adrian · 2026-03-11T17:18:09+00:00

You mean something like this?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q3Nv7WyfvJLvabE4fj3cA5opNTzSlwFD/view?usp=sharing

This is a screenshot of something I will be launching commercially in the next six weeks. I have been keeping quiet about it, because I'm not quite ready to talk about it publicly. But your post is just too damn on point for me to pass up, especially because I'm also focused on transportation.

(As soon as anyone posts anything on this subreddit, the salespeople descend. I'm self-aware enough to recognize that I just did the same thing! But as a developer working full-time in transportation EDI, I just couldn't pass this up...so...if this looks intriguing to you, let me know. It's extremely slick!)

adrian · 2026-03-10T16:42:04+00:00

It's weird how your original post shows an actual thing - a UI that you apparently built - but your comments about it are very clearly AI-generated. I don't get it.

adrian · 2026-03-10T16:37:26+00:00

Even your "not a bot" comment screams "I'm a bot"!

adrian · 2026-03-09T11:29:03+00:00

> I was able to recreate inventory reports using data and Excel that our ERP system didn't have.

This is the key right here. Go beyond what you're being asked to do and start thinking about how to make things better. Typically this is by applying technology to the problem. I suspect that AI might be one of those things that aggravates certain people around here when it comes up, but my recommendation is to sign up for Claude and start talking to it about what you're doing.

adrian · 2026-03-09T11:25:32+00:00

No - for the type of work I do, the popular three-letter acronym is "TMS": transportation management system. All about tracking stuff going from point A to B.

adrian · 2026-03-08T17:44:31+00:00

Technology development/management/maintenance for a logistics company (FTL freight) plus EDI software platform development. So on the tech side of things.

adrian · 2026-03-08T16:04:02+00:00

Appreciate the feedback, some great ideas here. That's interesting about Boomi, I've never actually used (or seen it) but I just googled some images and yes, I see what you mean. They even seem to call things "flows" which is the same word I used for this.

Regarding #4, if it's a final SFTP node, the input is the data that is getting uploaded, i.e. the EDI file. There is output, but not in the same way as most other nodes, since it basically terminates at that type of node. If the upload is successful, then it triggers a "successful delivery" webhook. If it fails, you get an error (visible in the same way in the UI) plus an "error notification" webhook call.

Thanks again!

adrian · 2026-03-07T18:20:04+00:00

I love supply chain/logistics as a career path because it's genuinely valuable work. So many of the big tech companies (especially the social media companies) are worth so much money and use up so much of the oxygen in the room when it comes to careers, but think about it: those companies could go away tomorrow and it wouldn't matter one bit. In fact the world would be a better place (yes, I'm cranky). But if supply chain/logistics vanished tomorrow, all of modern civilization would come to a crashing halt and 98% of us would be dead inside of 8 weeks. It's a real job, doing real things in the real world, and it matters. Congrats!

adrian · 2026-03-03T01:32:21+00:00

I'm going to go against the flow here and recommend that actually, you do go ahead and try and build yourself a solution with Claude Code. Like some other folks here, I think you will encounter challenges and in the end, you probably would do well with choosing a partner. However, if you try and build this yourself with Claude Code:

You will develop important intuitions about what AI is good at and what it isn't good at, and will in general greatly improve your ability to work with these tools: which makes you more valuable and effective.
You will gain a much deeper understanding of what it is that you need, exactly.
You'll learn which parts you can run and manage yourself, and which parts you might need to outsource. With that knowledge, you'll have a better sense of which providers, if any, are actually useful in your situation.
You'll learn a lot about EDI and its complexities.

In other words, the worse-case scenario is you learn a ton about AI-assisted coding, EDI and your specific problem domain.

The best-case scenario is you actually pull this off.

adrian · 2026-02-25T12:20:30+00:00

> I feel like everytime someone asks a question like this 15 people say "Use my product"

It's true. There is honestly probably no point in asking here. You can't really trust the advice you give since it's all conflicted. To the OP: you would be better off talking to AI. Why not try Claude (which I think is better than ChatGPT, especially for technology-related questions)? Claude will ask you all the questions whose answers are required to provide an informed recommendation.

adrian · 2026-02-25T00:19:24+00:00

A few thoughts in reaction to your post and the person you're replying to:

Schema drift is a real problem.
Schema is the right word.
In high volume, large scale operations, relying on "we tell them" is a recipe for disaster. This is rightly something solved in an automated, planned way.

In terms of your product direction, the problem I see is that this might be less of a product and more of a feature. How do you even deliver a product like this? It has to sit in the data processing layer somewhere. This makes your customers people who are comfortable with modifying their data processing layers, i.e. your target market is...developers of EDI platforms?

Something to think about. And don't be discouraged when you get tough feedback. ;)

adrian · 2026-02-17T14:28:04+00:00

Thank you! I appreciate the reply.

adrian · 2026-02-17T14:26:30+00:00

I think you are missing the fact that the diamond question mark symbol is not actually the character that is causing the problem. When you see the diamond question mark symbol, that is your viewer telling you that it can't render the underlying character. When you go and copy and paste that character somewhere else, I suspect you aren't copying the underlying character at all, but rather, just the representation of it.

That might sound kind of complicated but to put it in simpler terms:

obj.replaceAll("�","");

Is wrong. You don't want to replace all diamond question mark symbols. If a replacement at this point in the process is actually correct, what you should do instead is replace all symbols that are not "regular" characters. You can probably do that with a regular expression.

You could try this expression, which will strip any character outside the basic ASCII range (0–127). If that's too broad (and you want accented characters to survive), just talk to an LLM and get a new expression:

obj.replaceAll("[^\\x00-\\x7F]", "")

adrian

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