I'm curious what you perceive as the reasons _to_ go into management? What do you enjoy about it?

While I have been extremely privileged in my life, I have also suffered through some personal tragedies and lived with things I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, and those were things that were and are beyond my control. So in many ways, I crave control over my life and my destiny, and that's something I'll never have if I'm on the receiving end of a to-do list. The higher up I go in an organization, the more control I have over my destiny. I can choose which projects I want to work on, and I can delegate the things I don't. (In reality, I often find myself taking the projects that others do not want to do, but since it's my choice to do so, I still satisfy my objective.)

I am not interested in micromanagement. I do not rule by iron fist. I believe that I cannot make you do anything you do not want to do. I operate by consensus and collaboration, by radical candor, and by building trust with my teams so that when I ask them to do something, they want to do it because they trust that I have their best interests at heart, and that I'm not going to screw them over. In many ways, this is the reward for me.

I've been a loner my entire life. I don't have many friends. The friends that I do have all moved away over the years, and so now my social life is almost entirely online. But having a team that I can talk to at work, that trust me and believe in me and whom I can trust and believe in, that root for me and my success just as much as I root for them and theirs... That fills a lot of that void in my life, and it helps a lot in my quality of life. You don't need to be a manager to have this, but it helps. Most engineers operate in very small silos, but as a Director-level, I get to interact with a larger team of dozens of people per day. It helps.

In many ways, the reasons I wanted to go into management have to do with filling the voids in my own life: my feeling of lack of control, my lack of great social skills and close friends, my imposter syndrome, my desire to make a difference in the world, my disabilities and my weaknesses.

A computer will exactly what I ask it to do, without question and without deviation, for better or for worse. It doesn't talk back, it doesn't get excited when a problem is solved, it doesn't invite me to its weddings or birthday parties, it doesn't want to talk about the latest Bridgerton/The Expanse episode, it doesn't do anything except execute on its own code.

But a human? That's a whole different ballgame. Humans are challenging and frustrating, addicting and rewarding. And I hope that at the end of the day, when my employees sign off and go spend time with their friends and family, that they've contributed something to themselves or to the world around them. Kind of cheesy, but it's how I feel on my good days.

Hope that helps.

I went into massive debt attending CMU, when I could have probably gone to a perfectly good university for free, but I've seen first hand (and been told by recruiters) how much just having THAT university on my resume has affected my prospects, and so I still think it was worth it. That's not to mention the other experiences afforded by attending a world class university like research opportunities, internships, etc. which all sort of serve as a positive feedback loop for improving the prestige of the university and it's alumni.

Google famously said they didn't really observe correlation between alma mater and performance BUT it only applied to folks they actually hired.

Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.

But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.

One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.

Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.

All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.

Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!

Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.

I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.

Really appreciate the feedback!

- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.

Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.

I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.

I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page.

I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!

- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)

- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).

So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.

The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?

It generally costs more to gain a new customer.

At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.

As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.

I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.

As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.

This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.

Good luck!

Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".

Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.

  function groupByOddEven(ll) {
    var odds = ll.filter(isOdd);
    var evens = ll.filter(isEven);

    return odds.concat(evens)
  }

I had two job offers one time. One where the interviewer asked me how I solved real world problems and my experience and one where they wanted me to write a merge sort on the board.

Guess which job I took? I’m not going to be writing a merge sort in real life and I don’t waste my time learning algorithms and studying leet code. I solve real world problems using existing frameworks from the front end to cloud and on prem infrastructure.

Yes I have my geek credentials - started programming almost 35 years ago in 65C02 assembly, did bit twiddling in C for 12 years, etc. but I am way past wanting to reinvent the wheel.

One simple problem was given a list of users objects, create a list of the target object and generate a userid from the first initial, first four of the last name.

Then we had an algorithm for how to handle ID clashes. We had failing unit tests for all of the corner cases.

We were hiring contractors and paying them well so we made one of the requirements that you had to know LINQ and EF. Even though we weren’t using EF that often, Linq is Linq and linq queries work the same with in memory lists, EF, and the C# Mongo driver.

It was a requirement that they used Linq instead of foreach loops since Linq gets translated to Sql and MongoQuery instead of doing the processing in memory.

  def groupByOddThenEvens(someList):

	odds = []
	evens = []

	for x in someList:
	  print x
	  if x % 2 == 0:
	     # Even
	     evens.append(x)
	  else:
	     odds.append(x)

	odds.extend(evens)
	return odds

    list = getOddsToTheFront(list)
    list = sortOdds(list)
    list = sortEvens(list)

  def order_list_by_predicate(l, &blk)
    l.partition{|i| blk.call(i)}.flatten
  end

  part(1..6) do |i|
    i % 2 == 1
  end

    oddsBeforeEvens = uncurry (++) . Data.List.partition odd

Even if you did something like implementing the square's size as an average of the underlying rectangle's width and height, which would apparently support both classes correctly, you will get in trouble with the semantics or with other, less "fakeable" properties of these objects.

That's not really true though. Definition is a quadrilateral w/ 4 right angles. Width and height can be dependent or not

Given an address such as "123 Main St, Boston, MA 00215", break it up into its component parts of: street number, street name, city, state, zip.

(Note: I usually just ask for pseudocode, but if they want to write real code, they can.)

The reason I like The Address Problem (TM) is that it's a real problem I've solved before. I've built address verification systems for some large US companies that you've almost certainly heard of. Most companies in the consumer space deal with some sort of address input, whether it's StitchFix deliveries or Redfin for real estate. Most of those companies outsource it, but still... you store customer addresses in your database, right? :)

I also like it because the domain knowledge is already known for anyone who has spent any amount of time in the United States (where I reside). It's intuitively obvious to any American or even recent immigrant which part of the address is the street number, which part is the city, and which part is the zip code. You don't have to know anything special coming into it -- you don't need to know what a binary tree is or what a linked list is or any of the bajillion other CS concepts that I learned in college and see in interview questions and have yet to use in actual real-world use cases. All you need to know is how to read the front of an envelope or an entry on Yelp.

Another reason I like it is that there are some really obvious ways to go, and there are some really complex ways to go. Arriving at a solution that _works_ isn't really the point. Any programmer out of boot camp can do that, and there are a billion complexities to addresses that most people don't think about. What's more interesting to me is how you arrive at your solution and is that solution something that you can build upon to handle various edge cases.

For example, a lot of candidates will say "I'd use a regular expression," at which point I'll ask them to write one. They usually struggle a bit with it, but even if they do get it, I throw a curveball: "What if some inputs have no commas?" Then they have to modify their regex to handle comma and comma-less addresses.

Some candidates will start off looking at the beginning of the string and saying something like "I'll look for a substring of Street/St or Avenue/Ave or similar", to which I can throw the curveball of "123 Main Street E, Boston, MA 00215" or a more fun one, "123 St Francis Ave, Boston, MA 00215"

I really like the address question because of the endless curveballs I can throw at it. What happens if the user leaves off the ZIP code? What if they abbreviate the city to "SF" instead of "San Francisco"? What about apartment numbers? How do you handle pre-directions and post-directions? What's the city for "123 Main Street West Palm Beach FL 33409" and how do you know?

What reasonable assumptions can you make about an address? For example, there are 50 states + a handful of territories, so states should _theoretically_ be easy to parse out... What other assumptions can we make about addresses? (Gotta be careful with this one -- people often assume that street names end in "Street" or "Avenue" or their abbreviations and forget about post-directions!)

Since the domain knowledge is so simple even a 5th grader understands, the real challenge comes down to problem solving. There's no "trick" to it. You just work through the problem until you get stuck or we run out of time. Giving hints is fairly straightforward as well.

At the end of this part of the interview, I often allow them to give me some thoughts on how they did. If they could do this whole 30 minutes over again, what would they do differently? Maybe not use regex? :) How do they think the US Postal Service handles addresses? Or Google?

Again, there's no right or wrong answer for these. I'm more interested in whether they exhibit self-awareness, whether they can identify what went wrong earlier, and whether they can learn from their mistakes.

(In case you were wondering, the _real_ answer I'm hoping for is "I'd ask Google Maps." I've had exactly two people give me this response in the 8+ years I've been giving this challenge. I don't know if it's because they think it's a dumb answer, if they know that I expect a code-related answer, or if it never occurs to them... but I like to think someone who wants to see what Google says isn't the type that constantly wants to reinvent the wheel. Note that NOT giving this answer is not a deal-breaker. I generally give the benefit of the doubt to candidates here.)

If you said “here’s an address, how would you parse it?” it would feel like the purpose of the interview is to use this task to see how I could. Saying Google Maps then seems quite facile.

If you said something like “you’re writing a web app and have been asked to add a new feature that would parse the submitted address and do X with it. Delivery of this feature is urgent. How would you parse the address?” then Google Maps seems like a much more natural answer.

I think the difficulty with such tasks is that it can be hard for the candidate to know what the confines of the test environment are - what kind of response is expected etc

There is nothing worse than a developer who doesn’t know the difference between which problems are part of the business domain that they are suppose to be writing code for and problems that other people have already solved.

And for this particular use case, I happen to know about CASS certified software. SmartyPants is $1000/month for unlimited lookups. Why would I waste company resources on writing that myself? The yearly cost is less than a month’s fully allocated salary for a senior developer in a major metropolitan city.

I'm surprised that this rarely seems to be brought up as a solution. It was the first approach I had in mind since you really can't split and format all those potentially mistyped addresses reliably without looking them up in a database/directory of valid addresses.

It feels very obvious, however admittedly in an interview situation I might actually assume that the interviewer doesn't want me to use the third-party look up approach as it feels like cheating, which is somewhat absurd since it's the correct approach.

(If you're interested, we're hiring!)

A unique and very special group of people. I cannot recommend the place highly enough.

But if someone does this on occassion as a hobby, how is it weird to know, or have some projects in 10 or even 20 programming languages ?

Also many projects are programming languages in themselves (Greenspun's 10th law). Tensorflow, most scheduling packages I've seen, prolog, several things I've written ... Once a project grows beyond a certain large size, it tends to become a programming language in itself.

I definitely think your service is attractive given the price point and (presumably) quick response time. Best of luck to you!