Upsolve (YC W19) | Senior Software Engineer | Remote US | Full Time | https://upsolve.org
Upsolve is a nonprofit that helps low-income and working-class families improve their financial situation through free online education, tools, and community.
We have helped 16,000 families erase $700 million in debt, increased the average user’s net worth by $118,000 over 10 years, and average 4.9 stars out of 5 in over 1700 google reviews.
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build new AI-driven customer support experiences, improve the success rates of our existing flows, and enhance automation to make our users lives easier using typescript/node/react.
We review the web presence of a business as our core product offering for payment processors, etc. as they look to onboard ecomm merchants. This (and techniques like it) make a great way to find scummy actors and have a proveable piece of evidence as opposed to a 'yea, this looks off' or 'this doesn't fit the profile of what an established business looks like'. We leverage a lot of subtle signals like this.
I've found rapidfuzz to be a good, digestable C/Python integration. It's especially nice as the algorithms implemented in C frequently have good pseudocode or other language representations, so you can reference really well. The docs are in reasonable shape as well:
Seriously. As an engineer and engineering leader, I cannot maintain focus to code, sit in meetings, and a variety of other tasks for more than 2-3 hours without a break. It is good to get up, move around, catch up on the news, etc. Taking appropriate breaks and conducting self care gives my mind an opportunity to decompress, allowing me to come back to work more focused and productive. Very long sessions (5+ hours) without a break tend to run into a wall - I may still be doing work, but the quality drops precipitously. Sometimes, I can raise my productivity by distracting myself with home chores (e.g. laundry). Sometimes, I find a quick dip into the news or a catchup on our friend group's discord server productive. This may not be the same for all of us, but studies have repeatedly shown breaks improve productivity for most individuals. Being outside the office, I find it much more convenient to take a productive break without having other coworkers distracting me. Looking over studies and suggestions, it seems interesting to me that tasks like meditation, power naps, small chores, snacks, listening to music, and interacting with pets are much more easily conducted in the comfort of our homes.
Or you can be in the office and speak to people. I've never been in an office for a professional job where chatting, popping down to the canteen, stepping outside for a bit etc are not completely normal things to do and not frowned upon. For young people without families and pets, having a thriving office where we can take social breaks sometimes is important. Otherwise I literally just sit in my room and want to die. This is why I'm glad my company has 3 days compulsory.
ZoomInfo is in the same general area on quality and the price per record is competitive, but they have historically required a high minimum annual spend and have a reputation for litigiousness. There are a few other large players (e.g. apollo), a few medium sized players (e.g. coresignal, mixrank), and some smaller players (e.g. thecompanies, bigpicture). There are also a lot of other folks who are not as api-oriented and are more focused around the sales/marketing experience (e.g. seamless.ai)
For a typical db.t3.xlarge instance, you're talking about 29c/hour vs 27.2c per hour. That's $157.68 as the total difference for one year's runtime, when the whole instance cost for postgres would be $2540.4 for the year, or about 6%. The larger the machine, the closer to parity. Given the absolutely small difference, I hope this isn't the dividing line in any commercial project.
Again, I don't still know if this is the case, but you could use smaller instances with MySQL aurora than with Postgres, given the way our application worked it would have made a big difference for us if we had used mysql.
RDS/Aurora was our most expensive resource so we were looking at ways to cut that cost down and mysql was one option (though the way the app worked and the extensions that it relied on made it not a possibility.)
Generally speaking, it's inadvisable to 'discard' migrations with django. If the migration set is getting too large, the general practice is to 'squash' migrations, which is a django-supported function for merging the migrations down to a single app. You can do the less blessed, but more simple function of nuking the migrations, updating the migrations table, and remaking your migrations... but you have to coordinate that in every environment.
For an existing database, you can easily create django models for each table, etc. There's a --fake option to update the migration table to make it think you've applied these migrations, but not actually apply them. This convinces django you've brought the database in sync. May your deity or deities help you if you did not actually bring it in sync. I've used this quite a bit in some java ee->python migrations I've done in the past.
I think this is a really naive idea, I think you're seriously underestimating the level of complexity in a real estate transaction. You're dealing with what is for many people is the most impactful and expensive purchase of their life. In that transaction, they have imperfect, limited knowledge of the market and acquisition process. Further, there are varying levels of dishonest actors within the process - with an extreme range of dishonesty present. Top that off with the fact that you're actually negotiating with imperfect information as well... :exploding_head: Having an actual expert present who can enable you to be successful is extremely empowering and much more likely to result in a positive outcome.
Now, all that being said, it's obvious there's a deficit of actual SME's who are extremely helpful in the process. I've purchased two homes... one with an agent who I feel would fit right in with the culture of the used car salesman stereotype and another who actually was that SME. She knew the market inside and out, knew what to look for in the neighborhoods, and found the problems in each house we looked at. She had connections that got us through a weird mortgage issue (multiunit home converted into one with... sloppy paperwork), helped with specialized inspections (radon issues), and provided great advice when dealing with a cantankerous negotiator. I certainly didn't find my money wasted there and actively recommend her for anyone in the NW Columbus, OH area. There's a lot that could be done to improve the situation - higher requirements for education and qualification of realtors, prohibiting companies from being the buyers and sellers agents, etc. There's a lot to automate as well. But when there's serious complexity and life changing quantities of dollars floating around, an expert should be strongly valued.
These are all edge case, for more complicated cases you could still hire an agent. Think of it like the current tax situation in the US. 90% of people use turbo tax and H&R Block, but the rest have to hire an accountant.
If I know how much houses go for in my neighborhood, and know what I want, I should be make an offer on a house without an agent. If you are getting a mortgage it is going to have to be appraised anyway, so no one is going to get terribly screwed over. You could also get an inspection to point any red flags.
The current situation you basically have to have two agents involved which is silly, especially if the buyer and seller can reach an agreement by themselves.
Most also only ever go through a small number of real estate transactions in a lifetime. If it’s your first or second purchase or sale, the agent is worth it. On your third or fourth maybe not — but how many buy more than two or three properties in a lifetime?
Thanks. Our roadmap isn't currently public, but this is on it. That being said, this is a medium-term priority, so definitely not something coming in the next couple weeks.
Upsolve is a nonprofit that helps low-income and working-class families improve their financial situation through free online education, tools, and community. We have helped 16,000 families erase $700 million in debt, increased the average user’s net worth by $118,000 over 10 years, and average 4.9 stars out of 5 in over 1700 google reviews.
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build new AI-driven customer support experiences, improve the success rates of our existing flows, and enhance automation to make our users lives easier using typescript/node/react.
link: https://jobs.gusto.com/postings/upsolve-inc-senior-software-...