If any of this looks like fun (it is so very much fun), dropping by your friendly local soaring club on a weekend is a good place to start! The Soaring Society of America has a club map here: https://www.ssa.org/where-to-fly-map-2/
Super affordable for an aviation thing. I'll often fly 4-5 hours from a $50 tow. My previous club charged about $500/yr with no hourly fees for glider use. I bought my own mid-performance glider for $15k and a $200 annual inspection. Occasionally you do land out in a field and need to buy dinner for the club-members that come pick you up!
I wouldn't decode them like this, it's fragile, and global node IDs are supposed to be opaque in GraphQL.
I see that GitHub exposes a `databaseId` field on many of their types (like PullRequest) - is that what you're looking for? [1]
Most GraphQL APIs that serve objects that implement the Node interface just base-64-encode the type name and the database ID, but I definitely wouldn't rely on that always being the case. You can read more about global IDs in GraphQL in the spec in [2].
Also, as pointed out below, Github's GraphQL types also include fields like `permalink` and `url` (and interfaces like `UniformResourceLocatable`) that probably save you from needing to construct it yourself.
If you want to store metadata in identifiers, an easy fix to preventing users from depending on arbitrary characteristics is to encrypt the data. You see this a lot with pagination tokens.
+1, these type of behaviors are really likely to change/break in time. There's a reason the API tends to include permalink URLs... new Id's and the link pattern may very well change dramatically over time.
There are plenty of different definitions of the word "bubble" out there, but most of them relate in some way to asset prices coming untethered from fundamentals. For example, here's Schiller's from 2015:
> A situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others’ successes and partly through a gambler’s excitement.
You can find more academic definitions, but this one seems pretty spot-on when you hold it up next to the famous manias throughout history. Price increases drive further price increases, because the draw of future price increases is strong and the concept of "overpaying" for an asset ceases to exist.
The author, on the other hand, attempts to define a bubble as:
> ... an objectively irrational shared belief in a better potential future
While it's true that innovation/invention (and sure yes marriage too!) do require optimism and some degree of irrationality, it's a far cry from the "animal spirits" that cause investors to abandon any notion of a fair price in favor of momentum.
Sure, in some way bubble-era investors "believe in a better potential future", but it usually seems to be a future of further price increases, and any narrative required to support those prices becomes thinner as the price rises. This can be a lot of fun! However, it is neither sustainable nor a clear net positive.
One of the reasons that (certain!) bubbles are so damaging is that the least sophisticated investors with the most to lose get pulled in last. A series of investors are holding the assets through the entire post-bubble price decline - someone "cashing out" at the peak means that someone else is "buying in". It's a little uncomfortable to claim the following benefit to the 2008 financial crisis:
> It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made it great training data for “iBuying” algorithms
On the other hand, some bubbles do create useful infrastructure - the Dotcom bubble laid a lot of fiber (mentioned in the article), and the railway mania of the 1840s laid a lot of track - although the latter was pretty "inefficient" due to high construction costs, parallel routes, and etc.
I'm not really sure what the author is trying to justify here. Bubbles are what they are, we basically know how they work, and we appear to be living in one today! They'd probably be getting a lot less push-back if they avoided trying to re-define the word "bubble".
I've been consulting full-time since my early 20s - it's been an adventure!
You could talk to your current employer about switching to a part-time contract - it seems like in the last couple of years, more companies (especially startups) are comfortable with this + remote. If you can get them at 20/wk, that will give you some good security while you work to fill the other 20 (sounds like you may already have a jump on that).
Have a lot of meetings with friends and past coworkers, and let them know you're striking out on your own with a particular skillset. All of my best projects have come from connections, and my worst ones have been anonymous inbounds/etc. If you're in-demand, you should be able to line something up before reducing your FTE hours or quitting your job. It might take some time to find a good set of clients + rhythm, and you want to avoid "burning savings" during that period as much as possible.
Do good work. It's good for your clients, good for referrals, and good for your soul. You're a craftsman, and your name is attached to your work in a new way as a consultant.
I charge a reasonably high hourly rate for my work, and my clients are usually around 15-20 hours a week. I've found two clients to be the right number for me. For them, it's a way to get senior experience on the team for the yearly price of a more junior dev, and for me it's a way to make a good salary, while getting to work with startups and enjoying some freedom and flexibility to do the things I love (traveling and learning to fly!).
I try to keep a bit of "slush time" (like 5 hrs/wk or so) to work on interesting one-off client projects that come along. They're fun and stimulating, and they keep me sharp at selling my skills to completely fresh clients. I normally work on the frontend/backend, so getting to work with things like Swift or ARKit is great. These projects are also really low-pressure, because my main stream of income comes from steady long-term engagements. This is my "blogging".
I jumped in feet-first, but I was a broke college student (and self-taught developer) when I started so my burn rate was ridiculously low. It took me a long time to find a good pace and to build a good network, and I started a few companies along the way. I'd only recommend doing it this way if you're young and resilient - in retrospect, I could have been doing many of the things I needed to do (getting experience, finding clients, making friends) with a more stable salary. I don't know if I would have, though - so the pressure was helpful in some ways. I was also lucky to be in a stage of life where stability was less important than adventure.
Hope some of that is useful, and best of luck striking out on your own!
1. The experience of using a native app is substantially superior to web/electron.
2. Figma has done an amazing job of building features to support teams and organizations.
I used to use Sketch, and now I use Figma. Do I wish Figma had a native macOS app? Absolutely. Would it be better than the web/electron app? Definitely.
Native vs web isn't a feature differentiation - it's a matter of user experience (responsiveness), platform integration (filesystem, native controls, accessibility, iCloud), and delivery (App Store vs download). As a company, the choice boils down to: "Are you going to spend more resources supporting multiple platforms but delivering the best possible experience? Or are you going to spend fewer resources to ship an inferior experience faster?".
I do enjoy Figma, but it's worth calling out that they're compromising on user experience by going the Electron route. Yes, I know that maintaining a Swift version of Figma alongside the web version would be tough, but they're not an under-resourced team and I believe they could make it happen.
In my admittedly limited testing I cannot fault the Figma web app in terms of responsiveness. Maybe it struggles with larger projects?
I think the web generally has these kind of use cases covered, although it would be nice to have the other things you mention (file system/iCloud integration, better accessibility [based on my understanding of Canvas' limitations in this area] etc.).
On the other hand, applications like Logic or Final Cut would be pretty much impossible to build in the browser.
Thanks! METARs [1] are standardized weather reports that pilots use to evaluate current conditions. They're often reported from stations located at airports, and include (among other things) wind direction, cloud bases, temperature/dewpoint, current altimeter setting, etc. They look like this in raw text form:
KMDS 150935Z AUTO 30009KT 10SM CLR M02/M06 A3007 RMK AO2
This app parses METARs into a visual representation, and displays it in a widget on your home screen. Useful for keeping tabs on current conditions!
Good callout. I've got a feature coming to show age on the widget face, but for now you can tap the widget to view the full version, which includes the age and timestamp.
