nickspicer1993

Spruce (London/Bristol, UK) — Lead Full Stack Engineer — £85–120k + equity — Hybrid

Spruce builds the operating system for heat pump installation businesses across the UK. The UK needs to install 600,000 heat pumps a year to hit net zero by 2050 — right now we're at ~100,000. We're building the software to close that gap, supporting 500+ installers and growing fast. Founded early 2024, VC-backed.

The problems are genuinely interesting: 2D floor-plan geometry and drawing tools, offline-first PWAs with sync conflict resolution, cross-company job sharing with RBAC permissions, underfloor heating physics and hydronics calculations, LiDAR integration, and solar and battery systems.

Stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Prisma, Docker, Konva, Tailwind.

You'd own slices of architecture and technical strategy, write high-leverage code on critical paths, and mentor a growing engineering team — while still spending most of your time hands-on.

Looking for someone strong in TypeScript across the full stack, who's product-minded and wants real ownership over what they build.

33 days holiday + 30 days/year working abroad. Hybrid (2 days/week in office). Nursery benefits.

Apply: [email protected]

Hello, I don't have PTSD but I do have extreme anxiety and have been in the state you sound like your in now. It sounds like you are being triggered by something and your body is in a constant state of fight or flight causing your brain fog. I would talk with your therapist to try and tease out if it is definitely your work that is doing it?

I think it would be best to try and get to a state where you are sleeping properly and do not experience brain fog before making any larger changes. If therapy is not working try a course of SSRIs if you are not already one, coupled with really focusing on avoiding sugars, alcohol and caffeine, while drinking enough water.

If you experience no changes after doing the above after 4-6 weeks try to put together a game plan for long term change, that will require slow methodical thought about what you need and what your family requires. Best of luck and PTSD is the absolute worst, feel free to message me anytime.

Have you tried it in earnest on a project? I was of the same opinion but once you try it (with VS Code and Tailwind plugin) it's hard not to fall in love with the ultra fast feedback loop and well defined colour palette.

The idea to moving everything to heat pumps right now isn't so that you immediately reduce carbon emissions, but that everything works off of electricity and the grid so that as offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and Hinkley Point C come online it can start to replace fossil fuel energy. Same with EVs.

If you stick with gas boilers there is really no exit strategy for getting off fossil fuels.

Also worth adding that in the UK new homes will not allowed to be built with boilers by 2025 and they will need to be slowly phased out in next decades so definitely invest in home insulation and a heat pump if your boiler is on the way out!

What is the sustainability cycle in your opinion if we don't mass switch to EV?

According to most research the current plan is absolute net zero by 2050 and offset by reforestation, but that would not cover people not switching to EVs? Also projecting significantly further into the future, fossil fuels are not a renewable resource, what do we do when it runs out?

I agree will all of the above points but the last is not really true, there is a concerted and clear agenda across the board to transition everything to electric and then use mostly wind and solar to power the grid (with already available solutions for energy storage due to fluctuations in wind/sun).

I don't see a lot of people really pushing for others to fundamentally change their habits and lifestyle (even getting people to eat less red meat is incredibly hard) and I think that's just because it's fundamentally harder to convince a large number of people to change their habits vs. a small number of dedicated people working towards green energy.

We should strive for both of these things together and share the same goal.

Governments will need to subsidise EVs and create better mass-transit for those that cannot make the switch, but this is really a personal decision based on their own pros and cons. In a fully renewable grid how is using public transport over your EV orders of magnitude lower?

All cars need to be EV for net zero and < 2 degree global warming to be achieved not just a subset, there can't be any fossil fuel powered cars on the road by 2050. As hinted below though you could hit 2 birds with one stone and focus on a great EV ride sharing network, guess it depends on how well EV prices can come down and whether cars owned outright will become out of reach for the average person.

I have dug into this rabbit hole recently and haven't seen any studies indicating Copper is going to be a problem, do you have a source? Cheers

Just to be aware if you're in the UK your recycling does get recycled so you should definitely take advantage of splitting your trash into recycling bins, in my council they recycle 60% (not buried or burned).

The rest is correct though and it will most likely be down-cycled, my personal strategy I have been using without going crazy is:

  - Home Compost bin (this gets rid of 90% of my waste and makes the next steps less gross)
  - split remaining waste according to my recycling program: cardboard, metals, glass, plastics, paper, e-waste
  - cardboard/paper about half goes into compost, rest should biodegrade so vaguely ignore and hope for the best
  - End of each week look at what it going into recycling (dog food containers, salad bags, sauce containers etc.) and try to find a zero-waste alternative or tell the company you are considering moving and if they have any plans to improve their packaging infrastructure

Support policy change, if we can tax plastics (or any material) at the right level to include its waste and energy cost there are plenty of businesses waiting to be economically viable such as; collecting e-waste/batteries and retrieving gold, copper, lithium. Bioplastics for wrapping food, sauce packets.

I am not an expert in this area, so would love other people to correct any mistakes, it's really hard to go zero-waste or think about the right way to solve this problem without getting overwhelmed.

Do you have any books that you would recommend on the subject? I'm all for people being informed but I have looked for information myself sporadically over the last 10 years and it's a very sparse landscape from my point of view.

I find the linked article pretty convincing but admit it's not my area of expertise at all, do you have any resources refuting it?