sam-mueller

Blink Labs | SF Bay Area | Multiple Engineering Positions | Fully Remote + International

gm hn, blink powers the creator economy by making it dirt easy for influencers to launch NFT collectibles and build huge, realtime communities of superfans

we're backed by some amazing VCs in the crypto space -- and we'd love for you to join us for the ride

BLOCKCHAIN ENGINEER: You live in Solidity because you're convinced Ethereum is the future. You know exactly why zkRollups will change the game and you can't wait to get your hands on a zkEVM. You're comfortable with building+deploying advanced, upgradable smart contracts with ethers.js and other web3 tools.

WEB ENGINEER: You've got metric tons of experience with React, Vue or Svelte, and you're curious about working with SvelteKit in particular. You're comfortable with Realtime APIs and/or GraphQL. Hopefully you like TypeScript. You're able to take designs and bring them to life with animations and transitions. Bonus if you've worked with three.js or babylon.

IOS ENGINEER: You love SwiftUI, understand unidirectional data flow architecture and know your way around UIKit too. You're able to take design comps and bring them to life with animations, transitions, and pixel perfection.

ANDROID ENGINEER: You love Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, because you hate Java and want to build modern android apps. You're intrigued with Compose Multiplatform and are challenged by the idea of building a first-class, native Windows desktop app with the same Kotlin codebase.

contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

Blink Labs | SF Bay Area | Multiple Engineering Positions | Fully Remote + International

gm hn, blink powers the creator economy by making it dirt easy for influencers to launch NFT collectibles and build huge, realtime communities of superfans

we're backed by some amazing VCs in the crypto space -- and we'd love for you to join us for the ride

BLOCKCHAIN ENGINEER: You live in Solidity because you're convinced Ethereum is the future. You know exactly why zkRollups will change the game and you can't wait to get your hands on a zkEVM. You're comfortable with building+deploying advanced, upgradable smart contracts with ethers.js and other web3 tools.

WEB ENGINEER: You've got metric tons of experience with React, Vue or Svelte, and you're curious about working with SvelteKit in particular. You're comfortable with Realtime APIs and/or GraphQL. Hopefully you like TypeScript. You're able to take designs and bring them to life with animations and transitions. Bonus if you've worked with three.js or babylon.

IOS ENGINEER: You love SwiftUI, understand unidirectional data flow architecture and know your way around UIKit too. You're able to take design comps and bring them to life with animations, transitions, and pixel perfection.

ANDROID ENGINEER: You love Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, because you hate Java and want to build modern android apps. You're intrigued with Compose Multiplatform and are challenged by the idea of building a first-class, native Windows desktop app with the same Kotlin codebase.

Contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

In the wake of Facebook copying TikTok with Reels, here's a story in 5 tweets of how my startup got xeroxed. Happy to answer questions, ama.

Blink Labs | SF Bay Area | Multiple Mobile Engineering Positions | Fully Remote Maybe you've heard about us, we are the stepchickens as featured in NYTimes, Forbes, Washington Post and more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/style/step-chickens-tikto... https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/05/25/birds-of-... https://constine.substack.com/p/why-influencers-are-replacin...

Last month we reached the top 5 social networking apps in the Apple App Store, and this is just the beginning. We are hiring for multiple roles:

IOS ENGINEER: You are interested in working with SwiftUI and also have UIKit experience too. You understand unidirectional data flow architecture and have worked with AVFoundation. You are able to take design comps and bring them to life with animations, transitions, and pixel perfection.

ANDROID ENGINEER: You have experience with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, because you want to build modern android apps. You've got some experience working with android.hardware.camera2 and are already exploring CameraX.

GAMING/GPU ENGINEER: You have experience with Metal Framework and ARKit on iOS. You'd like to work on both 2d and 3d camera experiences, as well as interactive mini-games.

You can be anywhere in the world. We give full benefits and unheard of equity compensation for the right talent. The time is now to come join our small team and help us grow into the best space to build communities for influencers and their fans.

Contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

Blink Labs | SF Bay Area | Multiple Mobile Engineering Positions | Fully Remote

Maybe you've heard about us, we are the stepchickens:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/style/step-chickens-tikto... https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/05/25/birds-of-... https://constine.substack.com/p/why-influencers-are-replacin...

Last week we reached the top 10 social networking apps in the Apple App Store, and this is just the beginning. We are hiring for multiple roles:

IOS ENGINEER: You are interested in working with SwiftUI and also have UIKit experience too. You understand unidirectional data flow architecture and have worked with AVFoundation

ANDROID ENGINEER: You have experience with Kotlin and Jetpack, because you want to build modern android apps. You've got experience working with android.hardware.camera2 as well.

GAMING/GPU ENGINEER: You have experience with Metal Framework and ARKit on iOS. You'd like to work on both 2d and 3d camera experiences, as well as interactive mini-games.

You can be anywhere in the world. We give full benefits and unheard of equity compensation for the right talent. The time is now to come join our small team and help us grow into the best space to build communities for influencers and their fans.

Contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected], I'd love to hear from you!

Blink Labs | Senior GPU/Gaming Engineer | Fully Remote

Want to help build a new kind of AR camera app that will power the largest network of meme communities in the world? If you're wondering what a meme community is.. imagine if Discord and TikTok had a baby, and that baby was dank.

We're a SF Bay Area startup that's looking for an AR/GPU/Gaming engineer who wants to work full time on ARKit 3, RealityKit and the latest version of Metal. You should already have experience working with Metal on iOS, and have the ability to write shaders.

You can be anywhere in the world. We give full benefits and unheard of equity compensation for the right talent. Come join our small team :)

Contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected]

Blink Labs | SF Bay Area | Senior GPU/Gaming Engineer | Fully Remote

Do you ever wonder if it's possible to speak entirely in memes? Want to build a new kind of AR camera app that will power the largest network of meme communities in the world?

Blink is looking for a AR/GPU/Gaming engineer who is ridiculously excited about all the WWDC 2019 announcements, and wants to work full time on ARKit 3, RealityKit and Metal. You should have extensive experience working with Metal on iOS, and you must be able to appreciate a good meme :)

You can be anywhere in the world. We give full benefits and unheard of equity compensation for the right talent. Come join our small team :)

Contact me on twitter https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller (DMs are open) or shoot us an email to [email protected]

You can read (and see) more in the the App Store description without installing. We are pre-launch, so the focus has been on the app and platform rather than website & marketing material:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blink-video-messenger/id1199...

This is exactly why we set out to build Blink (YC SS ‘18), where you talk to friends face-to-face with video messaging, and share your plans to gather IRL for genuine, in-person connections. We think gen z will set a trend that bounces back from the social excess of the last decade, in favor of something more balanced and natural. This won’t necessarily mean ditching technology, but rather the technology evolving to facilitate healthy and more rewarding relationships.

The most popular social apps out there optimize video for broadcasting your life at your friends (and followers), but not so much for actual conversation with your friends. Their Stories format only amplifies this concept: show off what you’re doing now to everyone who’s watching. Who should be surprised that it feels like a popularity contest competing for who has the most perfect life?

What makes Blink different is a new video format we’re introducing that brings your words to life. Through a symbiosis of speech-to-text, NLP/NLU and kinetic typography, Blink captures your emotion and your words, resulting in video conversations that get the message across, sound or not! This is our foundation: Talk more, broadcast less. Message face-to-face, not with a text.

If you’d like to see a preview of what we’ve been cooking up (and you have an iPhone), you’re welcome to check us out in the App Store: https://blink.cm

We’d love to hear your feedback!

Great question biasforaction! Snap/insta is used primarily for broadcasting your life "at" people. Our new video format is all about talking "with" your friends. We use speech to text and NLP to embed what you say in the video, that way your friends always get the message. The result is fluid communication that flows as smooth as texting, but with the personality, character and connection that only video can offer. We've then built upon this foundation in clever ways to bring you closer together with the people in your life that matter the most. If you'd like early access to our app, DM me on twitter and I'd be happy to share! https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller

Blink Labs | Prelaunch, early-stage startup | Full time | Bay Area, CA | Remote or onsite | $90-$130k + equity

• Product: Video messaging that brings you together with your friends IRL.

• Why: Because we've all gotten used to the impersonal imperfections of texting. We have the antidote; we are what comes next.

• Stack: RxSwift, React Native, Javascript & Elixir

• Culture: Make extradordinary things with the camaraderie of extradordinary people

Jobs:

• iOS AR/VR/Game Engineer

• Motion Designer/Animator, C4D/Blender/After Effects expert

Contact:

[email protected] or direct message https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller

- Sam Mueller, Founder

There's another part of the trend that is less obvious: the social giants haven't focused on making it easier to hang out with friends IRL. On the surface that statement might seem counterintuitive; after all, if I want to message a friend for lunch, I can just DM them with messenger/imsg/snap/insta. When I want to invite a bunch of friends to my super bowl party, just create a fb event. Simple right?

Not quite. There are a million opportunities in between to have genuine, in-person connections with friends that don't necessarily fall into those two categories. Just to prove it, here's a thought exercise. Take your top 5 friends, local people you'd be most inclined to hang with on any given day. Now ask yourself, what are they doing tonight on this random Wednesday? If you had trouble answering this question, you're not alone. We're all so busy nowadays, it's become harder to line up those fleeting moments of availability that we do have. Now think about how many intersecting pockets of free time amongst your friends that were probably missed in the past month. Some of these opportunities could've been a quick cup of coffee together, swinging by to watch Isaiah's debut with the Cavs, or last minute studying for mid terms.

Coordination has to become easier, because everything else competing for your free time has become easier. This is one of the primary reasons why I left Yahoo and founded a new startup called Blink. We're creating an app that bridges the gap between your phone and your real life.

We are eventually planning to do a "Show HN" to give folks a preview of what we're building, but I couldn't help but notice quite a few here (westmeal, ktta, joaomacp, julianh95 and others) who are both young in age and have quite a sophisticated understanding of how our social trends are evolving. If you're under 25, we'd really love to get your feedback on where we are going with Blink! You can check it out here (iOS only):

https://blinkwith.me/hn-teens-dont-party

We're also looking for a junior iOS engineer who's as passionate about this stuff as we are, but that's also an entirely different HN post altogether!

Are there any plans to make Guetzli available as a library for iOS and Android? Would be great to process images right on device with this level of compression.

Actually, the stock price is being majorly affected today! YHOO usually tracks BABA quite precisely, and BABA was up big today (+3.5%). This usually means that YHOO would be up around 2%, which equates to nearly $1.00 in upside. Instead it was flat today.

To make matters worse, YHOO has actually fallen off quite a bit since BABA reached $105/share 1.5 weeks ago, and YHOO corresponded with a high of around $45. If you do the math, with BABA currently nearing $110, YHOO should actually be just north of $46.

tl;dr YHOO shares are actually suffering, but it's harder to see if you're not familiar with the underlying mechanisms at play.

> VR? Probably not.

You are correct. AR (augmented reality) is the future, and it's going to be huge. Look at microsoft's hololens, and use your imagination as to what magic leap is cooking up. Once the hardware is there, it'll be like the second coming of the iphone.

This is a smart move by Segment, since the industry has been moving in this direction. Looks like mParticle launched support for redshift a few months ago:

http://blog.mparticle.com/mparticle-launches-next-generation...

You seem pretty confident in your argument that developers are just complaining while using the tool wrong. It makes me think that your experiences in UI development on large teams is limited.

There is a reason why you hear this constant complaint, and the reason is because IB is really horrible in this regard. Behind the scenes it is generating unnecessarily verbose xml that is not developer friendly at all. This is unacceptable. Even Microsoft did a much better job when generating XAML from Expression Blend, and this was half a decade ago.

I'm not sure if you've ever used react-native, but imagine if IB generated ode that looked like a react component. Not a single soul would be complaining because these problems wouldn't exist.

Utilizing rethinkdb on compose.io with heroku does take some hackery, mainly around deploying to the same colo (amzn us-east-1), and then using heroku env variables to store your ssh key that will be used to connect your api/svc to compose box. See this article for more info: https://www.compose.io/articles/tunneling-from-heroku-to-com...

I was never able to get the referenced python script working, but using a shell script inside `.profile.d` did the trick.

I like the steady stream of innovative projects coming out of facebook as of late, but I can't help but feel like there's quite a bit of overlap in their initiatives. Just the fact that there's a footnote about how this isn't react-native illustrates my sentiments exactly.

I definitely concur. Having just attended emberconf, there's a stark contrast in how each framework is choosing to evolve with the web. Personally, I favor ember's approach of smaller, more iterative releases that are largely backwards compatible with previous versions. It not only means that teams building ember apps now can continue their efforts with confidence, but it's also a testament to the amount of thought and care the core team has placed in developing ember's abstractions; no major rewrite needed (so far). And ember's version 2.0 due out next quarter will be no different; same release cycle, same emphasis on compatibility with the added benefit of removing cruft that has built up in the codebase.

Perhaps I'm speaking from the perspective of our products at Yahoo, but ember has suited us well for precisely these tenets.

--Sam

I recently learned that Elon Musk wasn't actually the founder of Tesla, but rather an early investor. This article borders on the same theme; there's more than meets the eye to the faces of today's most innovative technologies. It is alarming to see how often proper accreditation is being misattributed/stolen in our industry.

I think Yahoo is moving in the right direction on many fronts, and this decision is definitely welcomed within the company. At the breakneck pace of the web, every framework must eventually meet its demise; YUI is no different.

As the person who first brought Ember to Yahoo a year ago, I can tell you that both the mood and perspective towards SPA development has changed significantly; it's refreshing. Developers are definitely beginning to embrace the direction of web components, and the majority now see the value that these newer frameworks provide.

There was a time (not too long ago) where Yahoo mandated the use of YUI. We are now seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction, and teams have more freedom to choose which framework works best for their situation.

Out of all the modern SPA frameworks, Ember is currently leveraged the most right now here at the 'hoo, with almost two dozen projects using it. This is mainly because our division adopted it early, and we were fortunate that our UI engineers were able to get over the learning curb and build some impressive apps pretty quickly. Besides Ember, there are pockets of Backbone and even Angular apps. However, it's pretty clear that the YUI team is especially intrigued with React right now, mainly because it is the most lightweight (again, pendulum) and allows more freedom for the developers to do things their way without opting into a more opinionated framework.

Some on this thread have expressed that they wished Yahoo would have recommended an alternative. Well I can give you my personal answer:

Choose the best framework that fits the job.

Each brings its own strengths and weaknesses, and the best approach you could take is to understand the nature and scope of your project to know which one makes the most sense for your needs. For example, many projects at Yahoo have a ton of code that can't immediately be replaced or refactored. For those projects, React may make more sense because it only solves just one piece of the puzzle (albeit very well), and can add a ton of incremental value. If you are starting a project from scratch, choosing Ember or Angular might be the better choice if you want a more mature framework that addresses the many facets of SPA development. We happened to put more weight behind Ember for our greenfield projects because it provided more structure than Angular, and that helped us immensely when our apps grew in complexity.

It's really great to see the state of JavaScript development in 2014. Even though we are losing a great framework in YUI today, the future does indeed look bright. Cheers!

--Sam

FTA: "But, for all intents and purposes, Amazon does not make money"

This is a very myopic view on Amazon's current business model. They are choosing to break even/lose money in exchange for growth. They use profits to expand their business and break into new markets, which is evidenced by initiatives like Kindle Fire and Amazon Instant Video.

At any time, Amazon could change this growth strategy, and profits would flow like the Niagra. Investors understand, and that is why their valuation is sky high at over 150x future price to earnings.

FTA: One might wish that President Obama could put up such a principled defense for his scurrilous conduct in handing over the security of the American people to secret courts and universal surveillance.

What exactly is Obama's defense? I know myself and others are extremely disappointed in his direction, despite voting him in for a second term. Yet it doesn't seem like he's made any attempt at justifying his direction. Does he even feel obligated? Has he directly addressed the issues of his hypocritical back-flopping on prosecuting whistleblowers, or blatant disregard to our privacy rights? Is he just ignoring the backlash?

As an alternative to twitter+linkedin, you can also shoot me an email at [email protected]

Sunnyvale, CA - Yahoo! - Full-time, permanent

Position: UI Ninja

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Big things are happening here at Yahoo! and we want Front-end engineers who are excited about the bleeding edge of web application development.

You're awesome because:

-> Someone in your life is jealous because you love JavaScript more than them

-> You want to build single page applications with Ember or Angular

-> Imperfectly written code keeps you from sleeping at night

-> Canary isn't a bird to you; it's a playground of wonderful new toys

-> You can develop back-end systems, but your keen understanding of user interaction is what sets you apart from the crowd

-> You're badass when working alone, but unstoppable when working with a team that's firing on all cylinders

-> You want/are working with a functional language like Scala or Clojure, because f* verbosity

We're awesome because:

-> We have other UI Ninjas just like yourself

-> We have the camaraderie of a startup, with all the nice perks of a big company

-> The projects you'll work on are incredibly ambitious, highly visible, full of big data, and directly impacting the success of Yahoo!

-> We have disowned Internet Explorer's first 8 children

Sounds like a great fit? Contact me via twitter:

https://twitter.com/samuel_mueller

Or linkedin:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=28225196

"There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM."

There's a good reason, actually - library maturity, especially when trying to get data in and out. Try and do some inner joins with typesafe slick and you'll know what I mean when you see the SQL it generates.

Or try and use Play Framework's json de/serialization, and be prepared to punch your monitor in the face.

I think these critical libraries can get there, but the lack of resources on these projects has me thinking we'll be waiting awhile.

I agree with the premise of learning the fundamentals. However, the fact that jQuery has "free" support for features like data binding is not enough justification to forgoe using a framework like backbonejs or emberjs. What about routing? In a large client-centric app, I'd argue that routing is as important as data binding.

There's no question that understanding the mechanics behind these frameworks will yield much better apps, even if you skip out and go barebones jQuery. But there's always going to be a tradeoff between writing all the boilerplate and structure yourself, rather than relying on a framework to lessen the burden. With emberjs, you get immensely reduced boilerplate and some pretty sound opinions on structure. If you want to exchange writing more code for less of an opinion and more flexibility, then go with backbonejs.

Each of these frameworks bring key strengths to the table, having been written by amazing devs (like Yehuda Katz) with the additional benefit of "community consensus" to boost their usefulness. The article makes valid points, but keep in mind there's definitely more to this story.