That would be my guess and would follow Tesla's MO perfectly. They already offer a software "unlock" via their acceleration upgrade (which really just means the LR cars are software limited). FSD capability is built into all cars and yet you need to pay $15k or $200/mo to "add it". Why is anyone surprised that they could/would do the same thing with range.

If true, I think this is a great business move. Theoretically increases the lifespan of the car/battery, would allow the user to actually charge to "100%" on a regular basis without damaging the battery, and it allows Tesla the option to let customers upgrade later if necessary or when the consumer can afford it. Plus it allows more people to get into an awesome car for $10k less.

It's just wins all around. Makes me want one of these "standard" range versions even more.

I should add, I also think it's possible that Tesla is testing the market with this offer before they manufacture another batter pack configuration and add a potentially unnecessary SKU (smaller battery).

Hi Cvrajeesh, congrats on launching! It's a big achievement to get your project out the door and in customer's hands.

We launched a very similar service (fast.io) a few months ago and have found some good interest in the product. Unfortunately, however, there are many other good solutions for simple deployments and performant static hosting. My question for you would be, what are you doing that solves your customer's problem so much better than competitors that they'd be willing to put their mission-critical website on your (unproven) service over anyone else's?

For these simple use-cases (the ones you appear to be targeting) most users just aren't willing to pay. The more sophisticated users who are running businesses (and would pay) often need more features and greater control over their hosting solution - features that will take you a long time to build out and prove in the market.

As such, we're working on a product pivot that's educated by the insights we've gained through our initial launch. We don't want to go head-on with other products that are, quite frankly, doing a great job in this market already. I'll be really curious to see/hear if you encounter similar challenges and how you navigate them.

> We launched a very similar service

I haven't seen them post to a Show HN to shamelessly promote and link to their own rival version, so that's one difference.

I can see how you might think that, but to be more clear we are moving out of this market - I'm trying to be helpful to the OP (and anyone else who's looking at this market) by sharing our experience.

A Google search is going to yield a lot of great other companies for static hosting like https://netlify.com (which even supports this exact functionality of drag and drop uploads) and https://zeit.co just to name a couple, not to mention a graveyard of other services who've tried to do similar things over the last 5 years. You might even notice that we've changed our messaging to focus on file-sharing and direct links - not website hosting.

I think this product is really cool - the copy is not for everyone but I think that's because it's a piece of art (no hyperbole intended) rather than just a business project. It clearly says something about the developer's perspective on the market and startups/tech businesses and that's the fun of it... to me at least.

Anyway, as much as I can appreciate that aspect and enjoy the fun of it, I just can't see myself using CLI for quick and simple image hosting. Especially if we're talking about things like meme sharing.

I definitely do see the market opportunity, to some extent that's why we launched Fast.io to make managing static asset hosting really simple and scaleable by syncing with your cloud storage so you can upload and manage content there.

I like it but I think you need a better way to upload images if you want to be a valid alternative to imgur.

Yes, that's exactly right! As we were developing the early versions of our homepage that's exactly how we used it. I just synced down a Google Drive folder and hacked away on code and images. Derek could check out the progress anytime he wanted by visiting the URL. Basically, our homepage was always live while we were developing it - great for our MVP.

Now that the homepage codebase is more mature and we have more people working on it, we just created a GitHub repo in that same folder. Now whatever I'm working on is deployed to fastdev.imfast.io and then when I commit to the master branch of the repo, it's synced to fastio.imfast.io (which is connected to our domains Fast.io, Fast.app, Fastio.com etc..). I have a password-protected private dev site, but I'll keep that one to myself for now :D

Great! Thanks for the reply. This sounds like it just might fit my needs exactly :) I'll give it a trial run here soon

I'll do my best to answer your question in a different way.

What differentiates Fast.io from Netlify:

1. Simplicity: GitHub + Cloud Storage integration allows an extremely simple workflow (for technical and non-technical people alike). This enables us to handle files up to 1GB each, unlike Netlify which maxes out at 10MB unless you add Large Media support which modifies your Git repo.

2. Enterprise CDN included with Free: We work with CloudFlare and Akamai to provide their full Enterprise capabilities to all users, including Free. Netlify only provides a real CDN to their Enterprise customers - they call it "Enterprise CDN".

3. Analytics: We integrate directly with Google Analytics (and future MixPanel) directly from the CDN - so you can get complete analytics data on even direct file downloads - no javascript required. Unlike Netlify who only gives their own analysis tools, with us you can leverage Google and MixPanel’s much more powerful interfaces and tools.

Most of the same can be said for all other competitors in the static hosting space - and yes, simplicity is probably our true key differentiator, especially compared to Amazon S3, GCP, or Azure.

We think we’re a great developer tool, but we may be better positioned to offer powerful features to novice developers or non-developers (marketing people, designers, etc..).

Hi, thanks for the kind words! I'm Tom, co-founder of Fast.io. We started with a basic Bootstrap template and then heavily customized it (hand-coded). I'm really glad you like it! We've agonized over the messaging, illustrations, and animation quite a bit. I'm sure we still have a lot we can still improve but we're really proud of how it came out.

Actually, I should mention that it was really interesting to build our homepage on our own platform. We started out roughing it in really quickly in a shared Google Drive folder that deployed to a public URL (https://fastdev.imfast.io for example) then, once we started to have more people working on it and required version control, we switched the site over to GitHub and started deploying there. It's a little mind-bending to just hit save and watch a public site update.

This looks like a really cool product!

I just have to say though, this landing page is incredibly pretty. Anyone involved in its design should be proud. I really like it. It renders beautifully on both my mobile and desktop.

Thanks again!! Really appreciate it! It was definitely a team effort.

TLDR: The benefit is to the team, not the individual. When executing open concept, ensure communication is relevant to the team by not including unrelated teams in the same space. We have had private and open offices; we're much happier with the results of open offices.

Overview:

First, we believe the benefit of the open office space is derived at the organization/team level by an increase in communication and ambient awareness. The mental load of this awareness and communication negatively affects the productivity of individuals but results a net benefit to the whole. This is why many individuals working in an open space will have their complaints, but project managers/product owners will often sing the open concept's praises. I'm in the latter group but I work in our open office as well.

In Practice:

Here in our office, we've done it both ways. We're located in Texas and space is plentiful, we've got enough private offices to go around and we did it that way for quite some time. After years of struggling through project overrun, bugs, and misallocated resources we decided to try an open concept.

Doing it Wrong:

The difference in team productivity couldn't be more apparent, at first it was much worse... we combined QA, Engineering, and Customer Service in one open concept office. Everyone was unhappy; Customer Service was constantly talking and distracting others with their one-sided phone calls, QA was very collaborative and yet had to talk over Customer Service, and the poor engineering team was just annoyed by both and resorted to headphones and instant messaging each other.

Doing it Right (the second time):

We realized that the biggest benefit in better communication is to the teams of people who are directly working on building our new products and features and anything else in the room just distracts from those goals.

After reorganizing our teams we moved QA and Customer Service out of the room, and instead filled it with more engineering teams and added our design and product teams as well. By including the right teams in the open space, the ambient noise level is much lower, when conversations do occur they're often directly relevant to all other teams in the room. Overall everyone is much happier in the open space even though some miss the privacy of their own offices.

To address the needs of those who occasionally need to work in a quiet place, we've turned a few of our private offices into "break out rooms" where anyone can go work as they wish. They're a great place to take phone calls and they're communal and provide limited amenities so nobody is occupying them constantly and removing themselves from their core team.

Months Later / Conclusions:

Today, we have one large open office which includes web engineers, iOS engineers, Android engineers, OSX/Windows engineers, UX designers, quality assurance, and product managers. We have breakout rooms for private work and all other staff is in private offices just outside the open space.

After our second try at an open office we can confidently say that we made the right decision. We've launched two major products in one quarter of the time it took to previously launch one. We've launched numerous bug fixes, updates, and features. And most importantly, our metrics not only show the real world results of that work, but everyone on the team is aware of them in their everyday workflow. The pace of development is not only faster, but we're making better engineering and design decisions. And, as an added benefit, our sense of team solidarity and moral is way up as well. People (who previously had private offices) still occasionally complain about being distracted, and sometimes they choose to work in a breakout room, but overall everyone has adjusted now and feels like we're kicking butt.

Of course, I'm simplifying months of thoughts and work down as much as I can here, and there's a lot more in the details of executing a good open office. I'm happy to expand on anything if this is at all helpful to anyone.

Doesn't answer the question though; maybe OP just doesn't like to work in that environment regardless of its merits.

Thanks for the insights! I've just got a couple of questions:

1. What's the ratio of junior to senior level developers?

2. When you were in private offices did the company set aside work time each day to socialise with your coworkers (e.g. Board games for an hour each day)?

3. How many of the developers use headphones during the day?

No problem :) 1. Our ratio is about 1 senior developer to 2 juniors, although as far as organization structure we're fairly flat and in some teams it's more 1 to 1. Average team size is about 3 engineers. 2. Yes, every Wednesday was game day and we'd alternate through a number of card and board games. Now this happens more organically, people are setting up their own games and times. We (of course) have ping pong and pool tables as well. 3. We have about 16 people in our open space and at any time one or two have headphones on (max). The way we have the room laid out seems to cut down on ambient chatter.

If you're interested: We have 4 pods of 4, plus conference and lounge separating the room into 2 sets of 2. Each desk in a pod has roughly about 49 square feet of space, all desks are L shaped (ikea galant with extensions), facing out towards the corners. We have half-height cubicle-style walls between pods, otherwise no walls between desks (other than dual 27-30in displays). It seems to be just the right amount of privacy/openness/sound dampening. We're currently building out another identical one of these open offices in our extra warehouse (did I mention space in Texas is cheap?) to house a few more engineers who are still in private offices and in anticipation of hiring.

Ironically, MegaUpload is headquartered in Hong Kong...

Which has considerable autonomy from mainland China.

IntoMobile is looking for talented lead software developer utilizing PHP and Javascript to help customize our WordPress blog and build our custom community website. Previous job experience is not required.

Requirements:

Solid mid to advanced level ability in PHP5 website development and optimization. Experience with MySQL query design and optimization. (optimizing indexes, query analysis) Ability to work with and edit basic web user interfaces in HTML and CSS by hand (without the aid of a WYSIWYG editor). Bonus:

Familiarity with the internal operations of WordPress, creating WordPress plugins from scratch and interacting with all aspects of WordPress's core operations. You must be able to independently solve problems and acquire new skills on the fly to meet project goals.

We need a creative, detail and results oriented, self starter willing to give their best and be able to produce quality work on a timely basis, performing the job thoroughly and accurately so that the next person can do theirs. You will work as part of a team as well as individually, while being focused on a common goal.

This is an immediate opening for a long term, work from home, full-time contract position. Contract rate is commiserate with experience. Please provide salary history and salary requirements. Also, please indicate if you are legally authorized to work in the U.S. and, if you will now, or in the future, require sponsorship for employment visa status (H-1B visa).

We have several projects for this person to work on currently with more on the horizon so ideally this would be a full-time contract position that would ultimately turn into a full-time permanent team member. We'd prefer someone local, but we know that talent is sometimes hard to come by so we're willing to work with someone offsite, as long as you reside in the same time zone (PST), you are available during normal business hours, and you are an individual not a company or company rep.

Learn more about us here: http://www.intomobile.com/about/

See other positions we're hiring for: http://www.intomobile.com/jobs/

Apply Email us at 6530@jobs.authenticjobs.com with an updated resume highlighting your relevant experience. We will NOT review applications that don't include a resume and salary requirement. PDF files are preferred.