daguar

I broadly think this is correct, and that GDS has drifted significantly.

This is why I truly love support-driven development.

While it’s possible to prioritize problems that don’t affect most people (squeaky wheels) it’s a hell of a lot more effective than most of the methods I know to have a very low barrier to contacting you for users, and fixing the things that come up.

GetCalFresh.org. Way easier way to apply for food stamps. Felt good to have left after 6 years going from helping 1 person get help to over a million. Still going strong.

Also lots of strangler pattern iterations! That was fun.

I'm really sorry you're dealing with this. I'm going to mostly share info about public benefits in case it's helpful, just because that's what I know (and I don't have as much knowledge about some of your other questions.)

What state are you in? I know you mentioned SSDI, but just to relieve some of the stress of getting by, you should try to apply for as many public benefits as you might be eligible for (SNAP/food assistance, Medicaid [medical care], affordable connectivity program [internet], Lifeline [phone.]) With little or no income, you should get some decent support from these programs.

For getting disability support (SSDI, or SSI), you might consider getting a lawyer. You're right it can take a long time to get this, but odds go up if you have a lawyer helping you. You can also contact your local legal aid which you may qualify for based on income.

In terms of jobs I'll do some thinking and see if I can post more. Are there any activities that you can definitely do without getting stuck due to your disability? There are definitely options for flexible computer work, and also things that are more phone-oriented.

I've wanted this for a while – thanks so much!

I love my reMarkable — got the 1.0 once the price dropped due to 2.0.

e-Ink is a blessing after so much time on screens, and the rudiments make it quite hackable. So I get a device that pretty much CAN'T try to grab my attention, a calm device, and I can modify it to do more if I want.

(For example, since it can OCR and send notes, I've prototyped a little "message queue" on the other end to receive my notes, parse them ["TEXT Jake this is a text"], and do actions.)

I've even produced some custom e-ink maps which look great for no-phone navigation. (Feel free to let me know if that's interesting to you, happy to share an example and how.)

Is there any existing directory of similar products? Small team, sustainable.

I ask because I know one of the big tradeoffs of bootstrapping is no growth "war chest" — but I would love to find and use more of these!

Ahh thanks for clarifying!

This is neat! That said, I don't think the statistical size makes this a conclusion you can draw:

- "a reply rate of 1% (1 in 100 users)"

- "a reply rate of 4% (1 in 25 users)"

- "a reply rate of 8% (1 in 12 users)"

Sorry to say but... we really can't draw a conclusion like this strictly from these kinds of numbers.

Totally possible these conclusions ARE true, but I'd test at a bigger scale and/or with qualitative research with users.

> But there are also a lot of problems for which I can’t see any concrete benefit to using React. Those are things like blogs, shopping-cart-websites, mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites. For these things, all of the fancy optimizations are optimizations to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.

I think this is at the root of it — most web devs today don't see that some plurality or small majority of web app use cases these days just don't require the tradeoffs of SPAs.

But there's a generation of devs who've come up exclusively on JS tooling (Node, Express, React/Redux or Angular) and the crowding effect has therefore made those the default choices, if only because the labor pool is big.

My honest belief is you can more quickly build most functionality needed for most businesses with a plain-old full stack framework like Rails or Django these days.

But the real value of those frameworks doesn't show in the initial speed to build (though it's there!) — it really shows up in how much common functionality (logins, file uploads, etc.) you get for free 6-12 months in, and how low your cost of change stays over time as a comparable SPA app becomes a pain in the butt to add new features to.

There are a lot of people who have built this app — but they're concierging! (aka... not an app)

The reason is that the work you're describing (which is effectively organizing) doesn't have the unit economics of tech automation.

All of this info can be created but it's pretty hard for a computer to generate it because of the specifics of every project, across every different city/municipality.

Layer on top of that the fact that the biggest bottleneck is the activation energy it requires for people to actually show up, and an app is just less effective.

But you know what turns out to work shockingly well? A social aspect to organizing. Have everyone show up to the meeting, and go grab a drink after together to bond and make it so that folks feel good and want to do it again, that they feel a part of it.

I'm really sorry to hear that. It's unclear to me if you're in Costa Rica, but heads up if you're in the US your situation likely qualifies you for the new unemployment benefits (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.)

It’s open source, and Australia and Canada have both deployed instances. Would love to see a US (or state run) instance.