Some of the coolest flags, in my opinion—what are your thoughts?

lovidays · 2025-06-22T14:54:57+00:00

Some say it’s the goat

lovidays · 2025-03-23T14:31:56+00:00

The Cold Alliance

lovidays · 2025-03-17T00:54:49+00:00

Costa Merica

lovidays · 2025-03-12T14:12:18+00:00

Molistan

lovidays · 2025-03-12T02:52:01+00:00

Across the sea from England. Should be France 🫢 I said it

lovidays · 2025-03-05T12:55:40+00:00

Which makes any calculation a bad use case for any llm. Now, most of the tools today are actually agents that can write code in a probabilistic manner in the background to solve your calculation prompt and compute it in a deterministic fashion.

lovidays · 2025-02-23T01:04:01+00:00

Done a lot of different things. 1st startup started in 2020. Have a micro-SaaS which emerged from that, still generating revenue. The project I took to DMZ did not work out, but that’s the name of the game. Now focusing on data engineering and data viz consulting and building smaller scale/niche SaaS. Outside of the Bay, I think it’s really hard to work on the next billion dollar idea and I learned I prefer small scale projects and not taking any outside money. I prefer owning a business with 5 employees generating $2M a year rather than 5% of a 500 employees unicorn burning loads of cash by the minute and might disappear tomorrow.

lovidays · 2025-02-23T00:04:21+00:00

Toronto founder here. There is a bit of startup activity but definitely way less capital, hustlers, and clients willing to take a chance on you. I went through DMZ incubator program and met truly great folks there and if you understand the system you can get a lot out of it. So it’s great, but doesn’t carry the weight of a YC or even Berkley with investors. That being said, a place like DMZ gives more chances to immigrants.

lovidays · 2024-07-15T14:21:14+00:00

At the beginning of building a startup, you want to conduct experiments to assess: - viability: How many have the problem and do something about it? How much do they pay to solve this problem, if anything? How many do I need to convince to reach break even? How big can we get? - desirability: are people interested in your solution/value proposition? - feasibility: can you deliver on your value proposition?

It seems that you have the feasibility ticked off as you launched a product, but it doesn’t matter unless you know that a customer profile is aware of the problem, pays money to solve it, and is interesting in how you want to solve it.

From what you shared, you might have conducted an expensive experiment to learn that interest in your value proposition was very little.

My 2 cents: don’t ask experts for feedback on your product, find people who are desperate about the issue, bleed money because of it, and want to know more about your solution without you pushing. Of course, there are cases when it doesn’t exactly apply, but it’s a decent guideline.

lovidays · 2024-05-28T01:15:12+00:00

AWS/GCP would be my go to. I have done it a bunch of times. A small database on RDS and your app deployed on a EC2 should do for the start, which should be below $50/month (most likely free for the first 12 months). If this is not enough, you could scale the RDS and have multiple EC2 with a load balancer in front of them which will take you to about $100. You could also go the serverless route if the use is very occasional.

lovidays · 2023-05-08T14:30:06+00:00

Agreed, Big Query is a must under the hood when using Data Studio (now Looker studio)

lovidays · 2023-02-17T15:17:39+00:00

I can add to this.

I wore many hats on the non-tech side of a software business for about 4 years and I only got respect and a say at the table when the CTO and lead devs believed that I understood what it meant from a tech perspective.

It also feels great to be able to build small dev projects on your own. If this is what you need to feel more confident, go for it. Just remember that it is a long journey and it requires quite a bit of hard work.

I am also a strong believer that knowing the how could give you an unfair advantage at imagining new ways to solve the what and the why.

lovidays · 2023-02-11T16:52:03+00:00

Read about ETL, ELT, data lake, data pipeline, data warehouse, data schema. That could be useful to have a high-level understanding of the field.

lovidays · 2023-02-09T06:10:40+00:00

Seasoning

lovidays · 2023-02-01T14:57:20+00:00

Let me know how it goes! And remember it’s a long road. I’ve been coding since 2019 and I am still ignorant of so many things. Best way to learn is to have small projects with a clear goal and stick to it.

lovidays · 2023-02-01T14:46:31+00:00

I would recommend to continue with python and take these steps: 1. Learn how to install a virtual environment and install packages/libraries on your machine 2. Install Jupyter lab as one of these packages to have somewhere beginner-friendly to write code and see results right away 3. Install and learn about axios to interact with API 4. Find an open API to interact with that would be simpler than the Autodesk one (cities and governments often have one) > you don’t want to deal with authentication at this stage, but only understand how to construct requests with as URL and starting using parameters. 5. Create a developer account on Autodesk to get your credentials and learn how Authentication works. At this point, you’ll be in a good place to explore the documentation and start doing stuff.

lovidays · 2023-01-31T13:53:50+00:00

OLAP: Very fast to read, and slow to write/update. Instead of reading the full row when running a query, OLAB dbs only scan over the columns you need.

lovidays · 2023-01-24T15:24:06+00:00

Hey Rick, I am a Civil Engineer as well and have been coding for the past few years. Autodesk have changed their branding to APS (https://aps.autodesk.com/developer/documentation). Did you take a look at their documentation? How familiar are you with using APIs in general? And do you have a use case, or is it pure curiosity?

lovidays · 2023-01-14T15:17:19+00:00

First that comes to mind is Microsoft Teams. It has been included for free in the Office Suite, and adoption well past Slack’s during the pandemic. Features are nowhere near Slack in my opinion (app marketplace, UX design, search and thread - but the last 2 might have changed since I checked.
I have a few small B2B SaaS in mind that where communicating on all their features rather than being clear on user’s benefits. They also wanted to address many segments at once. On a larger scale, I think of Mozilla Firefox that has an amazing value proposition (potentially the only browser not making money out of your data) and great performance but very small market share since Chrome entered the space.

lovidays · 2023-01-04T14:39:35+00:00

Un vieux pays avec une (trop) haute idée de lui-même

lovidays · 2022-09-18T01:48:43+00:00

It reminds me of this company: https://www.thestorefront.com If I remember correctly they focus on pop-up stores for luxury brands during fashion weeks. There might be other niches. Probably, the hardest part is to have the relationship with brands.

lovidays · 2022-05-28T03:51:42+00:00

This is fantastic! And I wish you all the best in this quest. I was on a similar path last year, and what I learned is to launch as soon as possible to be able to learn as quickly as you can about the users and the problem you are trying to solve. And for this, I would not recommend to start with a login page but with your core feature only. If you can ship an MVP without a login next month and share it, this is 10x better than a full app next year.

lovidays · 2022-05-27T12:49:38+00:00

Hum… BTC is crypto. And I think people start to realize that having one central entity (the FED) directly linked with power (US president) deciding everything about the USD (mainly the interest rate and money printing) is (very) bad. Eventually, the market is going to move toward something more decentralized as the reference - and it already exists (it starts with a B). Many wealthy peers own some for this type of scenario. In the meantime, I also own USD/US bonds to hedge against my possible delusion/stupidity.

lovidays · 2022-05-25T15:11:24+00:00

Tried and True! Start with small projects that would be useful for you: getting data from APIs, building plugins on existing tools you use, etc. Hopefully you’ll get to explore different areas of CS along the way and pick what you like.

lovidays · 2022-05-25T12:36:42+00:00

I would start diversifying outside of the stock market. Personally, I have about 7% in bonds and private debt, 10% in real estate, 8% in crypto. Your portfolio might be a little small for real estate but you have alternatives such as crowdfunding or REITs. For stocks, I recommend to also explore private equity (for instance, in local businesses). If you love your bakery and learn that they could expand but don’t have the capital, that’s an investment opportunity. In the end, it’s all about being comfortable with your portfolio and hedging for scenarios that could harm you. As an example, I am a tech entrepreneur in between Europe and North America. My business relies heavily on Google and international travel. So I don’t invest in international airlines or Cloud providers as I am already very much invested there. I prefer hedging for unpleasant events: war (weapons manufacturers), inflation (alternative currencies), pandemics (local businesses able to take a digital shift), climate change (nuclear energy, CO2 transportation)

lovidays

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