I struggle to think of good gifts for friends and family, so I tried creating a simple gift recommendation engine.
Right now the suggestions are hardcoded based on my own experience with these hobbies, but I intend to crowdsource future hobby additions and gift recommendations from users who build a personal wishlist on the site.
This is my first time building a product idea of my own and sharing it with the world. I built it over the course of a few months. Tech stack is react, node, serverless framework, and a few AWS services (DynamoDB, Cognito, Amplify). It also uses Cloudinary (serving images), Mailchimp (email), and Mixpanel (event analytics).
This is still experimental so I'd be very happy for any feedback. Thank you!
I know a lot of people buy gifts that way, but I try to avoid getting people gifts for their hobbies and interests. If it's their expertise and not yours, there's a very good chance that it's going to be something they either already have or chose not to have.
It's not impossible to find that "Oh, I always wanted one of these" gifts, but even when I get such a gift, it feels oddly disconnected if the giver doesn't know why it's important to me.
The best gifts are the ones that you get because they share something with you. "I picked this up because it reminded me of that trip we took", or "The net time we go golfing together, I know you'll like this putter because it worked so well for me."
There are still uses for such a list: even when you share things it helps to have something jog your memory and spark ideas. But I'd be worry about finding a fishing lure for a fishing-obsessed friend no matter how many fishing aficionadoes recommended it. I'll do that if I have no other ideas, but it would feel desperate.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that the best gifts emphasize connection with the individual and it's difficult to replicate that insight through an app. Perhaps using this as a tool to simply "jog the memory" is its most effective use case.
I was inspired by Spotify's "Discovered Weekly" algorithm which recommends songs based on other users with similar music tastes. It's uncanny how effective the Spotify algorithm is at suggesting new songs that I like. My hypothesis is that this can be harnessed and applied to gift recommendations, but right now it's only that, a hypothesis, and indeed all the gift recommendations are currently hardcoded.
Hey, I'm one of the cofounders of Nava. We currently are only hiring for on-site roles, as we find physical presence to be essential for much of our work. However, we have a flexible work policy that in practice shakes out to many people working from home around one day/week.
I think a key factor for our success was in being a small team, using a modern technology stack, and building in an agile way. I think the article overemphasizes the youth of the team. While many of us were quite young, our team included individuals in their 40s and 50s. I think the skew towards youth is more a byproduct of the risk profile of the project, and the need for us to spend significant time in Baltimore/DC.
Washington DC - Nava - Reimagining technology in government - Onsite preferred
I'm part of a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. In the process, we learned a ton about the world of government software. Many people know about the disastrous Healthcare.gov launch, but there's a long list of huge technical problems that impact everyone in the US. A few examples: people are dying because the Veteran's Administration is six months behind in processing claims, the IRS system goes down for regular maintenance every night, and the Social Security Administration is still paying benefits to millions of deceased Americans because their data is so poorly managed.
Over the past year, our team has seen an opportunity to create software that radically improves how our government serves its people, and we've started our company, Nava, to chase that vision.
You probably remember the initial launch of Healthcare.gov, but you might not have seen our relaunch in the news. That’s a good thing. Here are a few facts we can share: our new insurance application is processing 70% of all apps coming through the marketplace, converts 35% more people than the old app, gets them through in half the time, and is mobile-friendly (20% of applications were started on mobile). App 2.0 was the first system that CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) ever hosted on Amazon AWS, and the login system we just launched saves taxpayers $70 million a year. (Here's a Wired article from last summer about us: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/)
We’re continuing to rebuild and improve Healthcare.gov while expanding in bold new directions, bringing talented engineers (we're mainly Stanford, Google, and Y Combinator alums) to DC, the place where we're needed most. If you'd like to build software that reimagines how millions of Americans interact with their government, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com.
Specifically, we’re looking for:
- a product manager with a technical background
- senior devops engineers
- senior full-stack engineers
