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Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

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Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#31

Post by heuroci »

hrishi wrote: post #23
heuroci wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The domain is also ripe with algorithmically interesting problems. One issue I have seen though is the mindset of the business user may not be very tolerant of probabilistic results.

Completely agreed - and it's something we've had to work very hard at. A rule of thumb that's worked for us is that the more information you show, the more tolerant your users are. However, that's also directly in opposition to the fact that the more information you show, the less user-friendly your product becomes. Our approach has been to pyramid up the information we have. When we integrate a new source of data, w…

Are you familiar with quad keys and quad tiles? If not definitely read up. Could simplify a lot of routing and tracking: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/QuadTiles

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#32

Post by hrishi »

heuroci wrote: post #30
hrishi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most challenging aspect for us has been getting integrations with client software done and out of the way. Unlike other industries, the existing software around crew, reporting and planning are often in-house and in some disrepair, from a first-wave of digitization. This has pleasantly not been the case sometimes, but often we need to build the pipes ourselves - sometimes on both sides! Our integrations range fro…

I don’t know know your stack so take this with a grain of salt: It may be very tempting at times to skip normalizing data and to just throw stuff in a document store. The downside will be code complexity and runtime that is less than performant. I am sure you are familiar but the patterns “adapter” “strategy” and “interpreter” can be very valuable here I am sure you also use dependency injection as appropriate . I wi…

We've been using a mutated blend of our own patterns with the ones you mentioned, but you're 100% spot on.

The reason we have a product today with 100% uptime and reasonable tech debt is that we front-loaded the cost of data by making sure we normalize (which is non-trivial in maritime), along with cleaning and consolidation with other sources. We also have our own internal consensus algos that pull multiple sources where possible and pick the most likely.

And hopefully this is an anecdotal data point for anyone, but we've been running a pretty performant system that services 200,000 ports, 50,000 airports, 50,000 crew, 5000 vessels and millions of miles of GeoJSON routes in real-time with Postgres alone. In my experience a well organised relational db can outrun most document stores, in most applications.

The only caveat I'd say (if there is one) is normalization as a hard rule. We denormalize some fields when we need to squeeze performance out of a commonly accessed metric (caching essentially, but through the db which I think makes it denormalization), and it's been quite helpful. Of course you need stronger checks and balances in code to make sure things don't desync, but it can be helpful to speed up large, common queries.

I'll link some of the technical write-ups of how we use Postgres and PostGIS below in [1] and [2], if anyone's interested.

[1] - https://hrishioa.github.io/large-geospatial-queries-and-opti... [2] - https://hrishioa.github.io/subqueries-and-ctes-an-example-of...

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#33

Post by hrishi »

heuroci wrote: post #31
hrishi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agreed - and it's something we've had to work very hard at. A rule of thumb that's worked for us is that the more information you show, the more tolerant your users are. However, that's also directly in opposition to the fact that the more information you show, the less user-friendly your product becomes. Our approach has been to pyramid up the information we have. When we integrate a new source of data, w…

Are you familiar with quad keys and quad tiles? If not definitely read up. Could simplify a lot of routing and tracking: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/QuadTiles

We've been using PostGIS' internal storage mechanism for routes and tiles so far. We've attempted to build our own indexing (through quadtrees indexed similar to OSM's), but it's never crossed the performance we get by default from PostGIS.

It's not a bottleneck yet, but I'm sure we'll be revisiting this soon. Thanks for the link! I hadn't found this one yet - super helpful.

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#34

Post by the-dude »

hrishi wrote: post #3
deanebarker wrote: post #2

I remember that the main, central example in "Domain Driven Design" was basically software like this.

I agree. I forget who I'm quoting (and butchering), but it's become one of my favorite aphorisms that "Data is everything. Once you have the right data structures and relationships, the algorithms are apparent."

Isn't that quote much older and from EWD or Aristotle?

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#35

Post by hrishi »

the-dude wrote: post #34
hrishi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I forget who I'm quoting (and butchering), but it's become one of my favorite aphorisms that "Data is everything. Once you have the right data structures and relationships, the algorithms are apparent."

Isn't that quote much older and from EWD or Aristotle?

Could be! Sometimes things get stuck up there and over time weather down to something I can no longer Google or remember attribution for :)

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#36

Post by InGoldAndGreen »

hrishi wrote: post #20
TriNetra wrote: post #18

Congratulation! Looks like a quite an interesting problem and domain to build software for. How did you get your first customer? Was it easy because of Nick connections or, did the customer require lot of convincing and value demonstration?

Thanks! It's a mixture of all of these things, to be honest. We had visibility into and in the industry due to our work with maritime security, as well as the benefit of being in an uncontested space (vessel operations intelligence) which was in crisis. However, our first customers were inbound, from the demos we uploaded explaining how CRY4 could help with security and operations. So it's likely all of these things…

Congrats on the launch! Looks like an awesome product

What do you find your customers care about the most? Security, cost savings, UI? It seems like a pretty old-tech industry that you're digitalizing, so I'm curious about what the pull is from their side

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#37

Post by hiq »

hrishi wrote: post #3
deanebarker wrote: post #2

I remember that the main, central example in "Domain Driven Design" was basically software like this.

I agree. I forget who I'm quoting (and butchering), but it's become one of my favorite aphorisms that "Data is everything. Once you have the right data structures and relationships, the algorithms are apparent."

Linus Torvalds said something similar.

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#38

Post by lsllc »

ghiculescu wrote: post #5

Just gotta say, building a real time piracy database is one the coolest projects I’ve ever seen on here. It’s easy to forget that pirates still exist. Best of luck to you both!

What would be the best programming language for this?

R? (pronounced Rrrrrr)

/s

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#39

Post by smlss_sftwr »

I find it humbling to hear about how much goes on behind the scenes in different industries that we so often take for granted, I'd bet the average person probably hasn't thought much about the shipping industry until the whole Suez situation over the past week (including myself coming from a family of three generations of sailors haha). Correct me if I'm wrong but given the real-time nature of your data I'm assuming your software is meant to be accessed on board vessels in transit, so are outages/connectivity issues at sea an issue you've encountered? If so, do you have systems/protocols for handling prolonged outages (e.g. due to inclement weather or network interference) and reconciling your operational algorithms with potentially stale data?

Re: Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

#40

Post by herodoturtle »

lsllc wrote: post #38
ghiculescu wrote: post #5

Just gotta say, building a real time piracy database is one the coolest projects I’ve ever seen on here. It’s easy to forget that pirates still exist. Best of luck to you both!

What would be the best programming language for this? R? (pronounced Rrrrrr) /s

It's all about the C matey!
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