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Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#131

Post by maneesh »

jackgolding wrote: post #117
maneesh wrote: post #3

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 ma…

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?

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#132

Post by spinlock »

morsmodr wrote: post #31

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.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#133

Post by maneesh »

za_creature wrote: post #123
maneesh wrote: post #3

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 ma…

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 th…

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).

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...)

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#136

Post by kevan »

I achieved one of my long-term career goals, getting a job at a Big 4 tech company. In the process I learned that a growth mindset is one of the most powerful assets you can have. I also handed off my pet open source project after taking it from 30k to 7 million downloads.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#137

Post by spinlock »

jrs235 wrote: post #105

I didn't quit my job.

My biggest accomplishment is that I did quit mine :)

I had to take a vacation to interview full time. That finally did the trick and got me the offer that let me jump ship. Also, practice not shitting on your current company. It's really hard to dial in the story about why your leaving without making yourself sound disgruntled.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#138

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

I wrote some code that solved a problem I had.

Sure, it was small, and far from the biggest thing I've written, but it was really and legitimately useful, and actually helped me with a real problem that I had. Most of my code is just oddball projects and weird experiments. It felt good to make something and see the effect right away.

It taught me that in the future I'd need to make my projects more immidiately applicable to Real Life. It makes them more interesting, even if the actual code is fairly banal.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#139

Post by jefflinwood »

Finished a multiple-year quest to complete a marathon or longer distance in all 50 US states by finishing in Hawaii in January.

Oddly enough, what I learned is that the type of shape I was in to run/walk a marathon slowly on back-to-back weekends (or even back-to-back days) was actually not all that great.

I switched my exercise focus to building up muscle mass, and getting faster at shorter running distances, and started running with some free running groups in Austin. Much faster now, and in much better shape. I was able to drop 55 pounds (210->155) and keep it off.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#140

Post by techbubble »

Launched the public beta for WhenHub https://www.whenhub.com and mobile app. It's a SAAS app that lets you tell stories with time. You create a rich-media schedule of events and then embed it as a visualization on web or FB where it can be viewed, then optionally time-shifted and added to calendar. The mobile app uses geostreaming to answer the question "when will each person arrive" for any scenario where multiple people are meeting up.

It has been an interesting journey grappling with creating a responsive, embeddable, interactive JS player on front-end while dealing with the idiosyncracies of iCal and Google calendar synch on the backend.

I learned how to work well with a distributed remote team and get a product released.

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