This sounds like a great story, congrats! Having the opportunity to go "all in" on a hobby in this way is enticing for sure. Would you mind telling more about how the opportunity came up to go full-time? Was it being in the right place at the right time, or what type of risk did you step into?

For sure. A bit of luck in several places: I'd been buying and selling casually during my off-hours for the past few years, mostly as a way to keep my brain moving in other areas (some people watched movies in their free time - I bought and sold coins on the internet and went to shows during my vacation time). I'd kinda sorta proven to myself that it could make money, but wasn't sure how much and if it could sustain a full-time income.

Lucky bit #1: My "normal" gig, co-founder at a software startup with some great wonderful friends, needed to cut costs, so my salary there went to $0 :) More time for coins now! (All is very amicable there - they were worried I'd be mad. Quite the opposite).

Lucky bit #2: The rare coin market is super hot right now, so it's easier than it might otherwise be to turn a profit as a relative newbie. That won't last of course, but I'm using this as a chance to learn from the guys who have been doing this for 30+ years how to succeed in all types of environments. It's lucky and I'm grateful that while my training wheels are stil on I can actually sustain a full-time living.

Onward!

Interesting approach, thanks for the good reads. Would love to support, no strings attached, if you see an opportunity. Reached out on LI, feel free to dump the request if this feels off to you.

I'll look out for the message!

Situational awareness is in fact a teachable/learnable skill and not just a "thing you have". Every professional field has one or another concept of the around it. I'd even go as far as saying it's one of my crucial (soft-)skills and has benefitted me greatly in my career, so it's great to see that I'm not alone with my interest in the topic.

> Situational awareness is in fact a teachable/learnable skill and not just a "thing you have".

It's definitely both, I don't know why you're trying to knock that some people either by birth or through their experiences are just better at something than others. I had Marines who had excellent situational awareness that could spot trouble or issues far before they became a problem and I had others that would accidentally a whole truck. They were trained, for the most part, the same way.

I also disagree that situational awareness is a "soft skill". Having situational awareness, to me, means that you know a subject deeply enough to infer things about your environment from that knowledge. That would make it a very technical skill.

As someone currently dabbling in the space, this is great reality checklist for a majority of research papers (and, unfortunately, a large majority on commercial endeavours, too) on the topic. The author makes a solid delivery on his outset promise.

It just might help to shed some light on something akin to the blockchain/machine learning hypecycle bubbles amongst startups.

This checklist would (with a few minor adaptations) also work great for many other types of "so you want to start an X company". Very thorough indeed.

In case someone finds it helpful, I created a terraform script to create all AWS resources to self-host a static site via S3 and Cloudfront: https://gist.github.com/benkoller/360019b4ad40d572bccc2875b4...

I've been using this for years at over a dozen different projects, I think it's a great way to host even commercial sites.

  Location: Munich, Germany  
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Linux, Python, Kubernetes, all the things DevOps, MLOps
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benediktkoller/ or https://benkoller.de/assets/CV-Benedikt_Koller.pdf
  Email: contact at benkoller dot de

---

I'm a DevOps guy at heart turned manager and founder of open-source MLOps tooling. I've scaled from 30 to 230, from 5 to 50 and most recently from 0 to 5. Along the way learned to love hiring/mentoring teams, building purpose-driven tech stacks, solving challenges data-driven and with a people-and-result-centered culture.

I wish you the best of luck and see a short-term need, but as someone deeply entangled into gastronomic subculture I would hate to see the experience of being hosted by a gastronomer and gastronomic team fade away. Going to your favourite restaurant or to a new, "fancy" place is just as much an experience in hospitality as it is in culinary.

Thanks! And yeah we totally agree nothing will replace the restaurant. But what about all the folks who are busy and find it hard to access the food. We're making it for them so access to nice food can be democratized.

I would love a "lite" version of this service that delivers menus and some basic recipes for the featured items on the menu to either my email or SMS.

Interesting to see that they relied on random forests for feature selection. I'd wonder if a more "classical" approach would have yielded similar/comparable results, or if these findings where only correlatable due to the use of ML.

Have you guys considered a open-core business approach? Would dramatically increase trust, and my willingness to throw money at you :)

This is a great approach to determine permission especially for service accounts - thanks for giving me another tool for my toolchain.