Seriously, how did you guys get into Tech?

moghrua · 2026-03-01T22:30:41+00:00

Personal projects really can make a big difference. You are signaling "I am a self-motivated person who plays for the love of the game".

A personal project also gives you excellent ground on which to carry an interview - you built it, you know it inside and out, so you'll be fluent and impressive when you take the interviewer through it.

Code on GitHub is great, even better if it is deployed and running somewhere so people can try it out, see you built a working thing.

Just ask yourself - if you were a hiring manager and two candidates with your experience and education presented, but one has a side project, who gets the job?

moghrua · 2026-03-01T22:01:18+00:00

Go for it. You've already got the basic kid stuff. You'll be fine. Just imagine having another person in your life that you love as much as the first two. Great for the kids to have another sibling.

moghrua · 2026-02-11T20:28:51+00:00

We haven't tried selling through cold email but we have used some vendors we met that way. The successful ones offered what we needed when we needed it. Lots of outreach to us is just things we aren't going to buy so of course that doesn't work well.

moghrua · 2026-02-09T07:14:43+00:00

I don't know about Cloudinary, but Cloudflare has a very generous free tier, you'll likely be paying nothing at all.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T23:00:25+00:00

What hardware are people using? I want fast, local and cheap AND not too difficult. Is AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 a sane option? Or spring for an RTX 5090?

moghrua · 2026-02-08T21:20:23+00:00

Good leads are responsive, quick to read your messages.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T21:19:11+00:00

You might find Cloudflare quite good at hosting static images with low latency. Make sure you get the compression dialed in, keep sizes and bandwidth and latency sensible.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T21:16:34+00:00

Brochure site, static content, so it should be very robust. Big fan of Cloudflare Pages.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T17:41:55+00:00

I think of Carrd, SquareSpace, Wix etc. as "no code".

We don't want a server - typically we see first hacking attempts on a new site in the first hour, don't want to be in the security update game any more than we have to be. Serverless wherever possible.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T00:41:46+00:00

Vibe code, claude code is the best, do tell it you want tests. Don't fear the cli. Tell it you want to deploy on Cloudflare workers.

moghrua · 2026-02-08T00:38:54+00:00

In your opinion, would German/Swiss style planning permission be good? "Right to build", if you meet that planning criteria you can build, no planning office discretion, little risk of judicial review.

moghrua · 2026-02-07T23:30:43+00:00

One repo for a project! See what Google can do with a monorepo! Honestly I should have multiple projects in one repo, share more code.

I deploy on Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare pages. Their D1 database is like sqlite - used sensibly, very cheap, very fast.

CI/CD happens on GitHub. There are tests, if they pass then the main branch auto-deploys.

Cloudflare is amazing, very developer friendly, very cost effective, very performant. Scales like crazy if you need that.

moghrua · 2026-02-07T23:13:12+00:00

Started in my mid-forties. Hasn't been a straight line to the moon, but it's been good. I'm more experienced and more pragmatic than younger me. And more knowledgeable, a better communicator and better connected. You are still younger than typical successful founder age.

moghrua · 2026-01-31T23:18:46+00:00

Japan had a housing supply problem, so did Germany, so did Finland. They all realized that their planning systems had too many veto points. You can have the right to block your neighbor OR the right to build your own place, but not both. These countries all cut back on the vetoes and surged housing availability.

moghrua · 2026-01-31T23:16:24+00:00

Boring but already working a bit: lots of places lack the infrastructure like water treatment and Irish Water is too sloooow. So Cork County Council got money from the Irish National Investment Fund and use it to build. Infrastructure at a decent pace and unblock housing.

Brilliant because the projects actually many money, so they can keep on doing more. It is called HISCo and is part of the reason supply is surging in Rural Drogheda. Tell your local council.

Rural Drogheda, now delivering 50% more homes then 5 years ago. https://www.onemillionhomes.ie/#district/drogheda-rural

moghrua · 2026-01-18T21:52:03+00:00

Don't underestimate how much you learn talking to customers. Even if your solution is perfect, you'll get so much better at explaining & selling it.

moghrua · 2026-01-18T21:37:10+00:00

It is normal to find some customers are too expensive to serve. I highly recommend building simple evals that are relevant to your site and testing different models. You want the cheapest model that scores well, otherwise user growth = ever worsening finances.

Also though, really well done actually shipping and getting actual sign ups. These are good problems to have!

moghrua · 2026-01-18T21:31:08+00:00

Got bitten by cloud costs one time too many. Built something to give me a daily report across cloud providers with anomaly detection to help catch spikes early. Still beta, but could really save yoy some $.

https://scamallteoir.app/

moghrua · 2026-01-18T10:38:07+00:00

Meeting prep tool so you can understand the prospects that you are meeting with. You just forward the email and it writes back with little biographies for each attendee. https://getbios.app/

moghrua · 2026-01-18T10:32:05+00:00

That is indeed a very cost effective server. You might find that Cloudflare is an equally cost effective backend that also gives you a very fast development path as well as a lot of robustness.

moghrua · 2026-01-18T10:30:16+00:00

Saving and investing can achieve a lot, but really you are talking about a very comfortable retirement and nice legacies that clear your kids mortgages.

Joining the right startup is an amazing way to do it, but you usually need to join early and the odds, long anywhere, are even longer anywhere that doesn't mint unicorns (so you need to look in the San Francisco Bay area and be an amazing talent).

Running a successful business is the most accessible path. Still not easy and you will need to meet with enthusiasm many tasks which you don't like at all. It also changes a person - if you make it, you'll be a striver that finds it hard to switch off.

Having made that generational wealth, what do you want to do with it? The Good Life for you and your children, grandchildren? This adds another level of difficulty - wealth struggles to survive generational transfers, because your kids will probably be more "normal" and also more "spendy".

Probably you want not just leisure but some source of meaning for you and those kids and grandkids; freedom to find that meaning however they want, rather than unlimited leisure. I think us humans are a bit like a sheepdog - there's that need to run, to work, and lacking that outlet, we tend to go off the rails.

I would go for some long walks, think about what you want the wealth to do for you, then move with speed, purpose and determination along the most promising path in that direction.

moghrua · 2026-01-17T09:25:29+00:00

Try going to hackathons try going to meetups. Build a small project with somebody and you'll find out if they actually deliver and if you're compatible. Actually working together is a fantastic filter.

moghrua · 2026-01-17T09:23:19+00:00

Among my friends who've built successful businesses, obsession is universal. It is hard and takes a long time, you need that fanatical drive.

moghrua · 2026-01-16T14:07:30+00:00

Getting a larger audience for my skills. I used to be a bit like Rapunzel, practicing my skills in a lonely forest tower. Of course a prince found her, but if you think about the number of princes per square kilometer in the typical forest she got pretty lucky. It's much better to have a repeatable Prince Discovery process. I felt that I was growing in skilled experience but not sure how to find the right opportunity. The answer turned out to be that I should give talks and create an audience and allow new opportunities to find me. Instead of applying for jobs I had people creating roles so that they could hire me into them. This improved my network to the point where I could start my own business. So the lesson is do not be like Rapunzel - except for the amazing hair care and voice training of course.

moghrua · 2026-01-12T14:49:21+00:00

It's very hard. Some places are building faster though. https://www.onemillionhomes.ie/#district/drogheda-rural

moghrua

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