How I've marketed to devs successfully (former YC head of growth, currently work in paid media):
1. Paid search.
If someone is searching, give them a good product and good reason to sign up. Be relevant, be clear, and offer a no-risk way for someone to get started with your product.
2. Reddit
If there is a subreddit _already_ talking about the problem your products solves, you've got a goldmine. Keep your ad simple. Keep comments on. Respond to comments.
3. Organic Search
Have the best content on a specific topic related to your product. Add in CTA's in your content while being respectful.
4. Follow trends
Monitor keywords on Hacker News/Reddit and see what's going on. I hit the top of HN twice in a row doing this.
--
General notes:
1. Understand your customer's problems. Lead with benefits then explain with features. Read books like "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz or "Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.
2. Talk to people who make it work. The more people you can talk to, the better.
3. Focus on testing messages. Find what resonates and scale that
Former Uber engineer/EM here: I worked on the Rider app.
The “there are only a few screens” is not true. The app works in 60+ countries, with features shipped in the app that often for a country, and - in rare cases - a city.
The app has thousands of scenarios. It speaks to good design that each user thinks the user is there to support their 5 use cases, not showing all the other use cases (that are often regional or just not relevant to the type if user - like business traveler use cases).
Uber builds and experiments with custom features all the time. An experimental screen built for London, UK would be part of the app. Multiply this by the 40-50 product teams building various features and experiments outside the core flows you are talking about (which core flows are slightly different per region as well).
I worked on payments, and this is what screens and components are in the Uber app:
- Credit cards (yes, this is only a a few screens)
- Apple Pay / Google Pay on respective platforms
- PayPal (SDK)
- Venmo (SDK)
- PayTM (15+ screens)
- Special screens for India credit cards and 2FA, EU credit cards and SCA, Brazil combo cards and custom logic
- Cash (several touch points)
- AMEX rewards and other credit card rewards (several screens)
- Uber credits & top-ups (several screens)
- UPI SDK (India)
- We used to have Campus Cards (10 screens), Airtel Money (5), Alipay (a few more), Google Wallet (a few) and I other payment methods I forget about. All with native screens. Still with me? This was just payments. The part where most people assume “oh, it’s just a credit card screen”. Or people in India assume “oh it’s just UPI and PayTM”. Or people in Mexico “oh, it’s just cash”. And so on.
Then you have other features that have their own business logic and similar depths behind the scenes when you need to make them work for 60 countries:
- Airport pickup (lots of specific rules per region)
- Scheduled rides
- Commmuter card functionality
- Product types (there are SO many of these with special UI, from disabled vehicles, vans, mass transport in a few regions etc)
- Uber for Business (LOTS of touchpoints)
- On-trip experience business logic
- Pickup special cases
- Safety toolkit (have you seen it? Very neat features!)
- Receipts
- Custom fraud features for certain regions
- Customer support flows
- Regional business logic: growth features for the like of India, Brazil and other regions.
- Uber Eats touchpoints
- Uber Family
- Jump / Lime integrations (you can get bikes / scooters through the app)
- Transit functionality (seen it?)
- A bunch of others I won’t know about.
Much of the app “bloat” has to do with how business logic and screens need to be bundled in the binary, even if they are for another region. E.g. the UPI and PayTM SDKs were part of the app, despite only being used for India. Uber Transit was in a city or two when it launched, but it also shipped worldwide.
And then you have the binary size bloat with Swift that OP takes about.
Street views was actually started as a Stanford project called CityBlock.
LOLOL, business analysis? The idea was entirely an engineering nerd project. We wanted to index the physical world, just like the book scanning project and a bunch of similar ideas.
Source: I helped build one of the original street views vans as my 20% project.
They do a lot more than that. In particular, they take a screenshot of what you’re currently watching at regular intervals and send it to a content recognition server. That way they’re able to tell what every single Samsung owner is watching at any given time and even if you’re watching a show you downloaded or something that’s not on the air. They then sell this data to broadcasters for measuring audience but also to show you ads related to what you’re watching (if you watched ice age, maybe they’ll advertise another animation movie to you). And they also use that data to target you on other devices you own because they’re able to use your tv as a Trojan horse and figure out what other devices are on your network and thus belong to the same person. IIRC they also scan and extract what devices are connected to hdmi ports so they know what consoles etc you’re using to further complete your advertising profile. That was several years ago, I can’t imagine they’ve gotten anything but even more data greedy over time.
A good Samsung tv is an offline Samsung tv. A better Samsung tv is one you don’t own.
I'll take "things you can do when you're single"... can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"
Human synapses top out at <100 Hz and the human brain has <10^14 of them. Single silicon chips are >10^10 transistors, operating at >10^9 Hz. Naively, a high end GPU is capable of more state transitions than the human brain by a factor of 1000. That figure for the brain also includes memory; the GPU doesn't. The human brain runs on impressively little power and is basically self-manufacturing, but it's WAY less compact or intricate than a $2000 processor.
The capabilities of the brain are in how it's all wired up. That's exactly what you don't want if you're trying to coopt it to do something else. The brain has giant chunks devoted to extremely specialized purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area#/media/File...
How do you turn that into a workhorse? It would be incredibly difficult. It's like looking at a factory floor and saying oh, look at all that power- lets turn it into a racecar! You can't just grab a ton of unrelated systems and expect them to work together on a task for you.
So a lot of philosophical writing references a sort of general canon, at least as far as western thinking is concerned. Other traditions I'm sure have their own details but I can't speak intelligently to them. The field is enormous, and without more specific information regarding your goals it is difficult to pinpoint the classics in subfields that may interest you. That said, there are a few highlights I think you're bound to come across reference or allusion to in many, many other works that would benefit you to get some exposure to. I am strongly biased toward a western analytical philosophy tradition--you'll want to check into things far more broadly than I'm recommending to find your own path. My little list is not meant to be exhaustive and is coming from personal memory of "aha!" moments in my own life, but will perhaps serve as a useful beach head for your own investigations:
* Descartes' Meditations
* Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding
* Hobbes Leviathan
* Kant Critique of Pure Reason
* Kant Prolegomena
* Kuhn Structure of Scientific Revolution
* Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit
* Foucault Discipline & Punish
* Sellars Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind
* Sellars The Scientific Image of Man
* Quine Word & Object
* Davidson On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme
* Nagel What is it like to be a bat?
* Searle Minds, Brains, and Programs
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0] has a ton of great summary articles and bibliographies that could definitely keep you busy for a few decades or so. I've never been tremendously into ancient or non-western philosophy, which is a deficiency I aim to correct one day, but there are a ton of great essays there as well.
1. Paid search.
If someone is searching, give them a good product and good reason to sign up. Be relevant, be clear, and offer a no-risk way for someone to get started with your product.
2. Reddit
If there is a subreddit _already_ talking about the problem your products solves, you've got a goldmine. Keep your ad simple. Keep comments on. Respond to comments.
3. Organic Search
Have the best content on a specific topic related to your product. Add in CTA's in your content while being respectful.
4. Follow trends
Monitor keywords on Hacker News/Reddit and see what's going on. I hit the top of HN twice in a row doing this.
--
General notes:
1. Understand your customer's problems. Lead with benefits then explain with features. Read books like "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz or "Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.
2. Talk to people who make it work. The more people you can talk to, the better.
3. Focus on testing messages. Find what resonates and scale that