evanmarks

SEEKING WORK - Remote - Rails / React

Experience: Senior engineer in the SF Bay Area mainly working with Ruby on Rails and React. I've led and worked on teams at very small to mid-size startups for about 6 years.

Looking for: I'm currently working full-time and looking for an additional part-time opportunity of about 10 hours a week.

Some areas I've worked in recently: E-commerce (storefronts, payments, gift cards, order management, warehouse management), ATS integrations, A/B testing signup and onboarding flows

Contact: [email protected]

There are 3 broad groups of geocoding services out there.

1. Free tier with only a few allowed uses (and enterprise access starting in the 5 figures). Google maps falls into this category as in the free tier you can only use the geocoding results to display points on a Google Map that is freely accessible. Google obviously has great results and is worldwide.

2. Open to everyone but rate limited. This is where Nominatim/Open Street Map falls. They have coverage worldwide and you can freely access the API, but with only 1 request per second. I also found that they could not find results for quite a few addresses I tested which were returned easily by other services.

3. Paid API with no restrictions on use. This is where LatLon.io falls and Opencage as well. They look to have a pretty good product and will be a good competitor!

I've been working on a side project that needs to geocode a large amount of addresses, so as a tangent I built this geocoding API over the past month. The state of open source geocoding tools is pretty amazing, especially if you only need to geocode addresses in the US.

I explored Nominatim, which uses Open Street Map data, and PostGIS before settling on PostGIS. Nominatim has the ability to geocode international addresses, which is a huge plus, but it runs as a standalone web service and its address parser seemed to have trouble with many addresses that PostGIS handled well. PostGIS can be setup with the US census Tiger/Line data to cover the entire country and runs directly in the database which gives quite a performance boost.

I was surprised that the presence and importance of teaching the arts in school wasn't mentioned given Paul's background. Aside from the inherent benefit of learning art for art's sake, it requires self-discipline and relentless self critique. No artist thinks they will just be "ok", they want to be the best. I think this type of self-driven pursuit would benefit any young person on their path towards a startup.

This is actually what I am working on right now. The current site has been up for about 2 weeks and I am adding all of the other features behind the scenes. I haven't had a lot of traffic to the site yet, but a decent number have left their emails so it does appear there is some demand for the service.

Any advice on how to step into the tech/startup world? I just moved out to LA, and have about 4 months before I must have some income coming in. I want to use that time to experiment with some different career paths and to learn.

My work experience is not related to tech work, but I have a passion for it and have been working on side projects for a long time. Where should I start to get my feet wet?

Are you referencing the work for free portion of my post, or a general liability that taking a new person onboard entails? I am not familiar with California's laws on the former, but would certainly want to be in compliance. My choice of the word 'free' was to highlight that I am looking for compensation in the form of learning and connections rather than money. Not sure how the latter would work exactly - I would hope to demonstrate to anyone interested that I am competent enough to not interfere with the status quo of their business and the legalities surrounding it.

Thanks for raising this issue, I hadn't considered it before.