tool maker. team lead swe. built @mailoverai ai email client. obsessed w simplicity & delightful design. notes to self.
Munich, Germany
Joined April 2022
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Meet MailOver: The Al Email Secretary That Reads & Organizes Your Inbox
What if your inbox were already read before you opened it?
MailOver turns hundreds of messages into a few clear priorities, then organizes everything else in neat buckets.
It finds action items, deadlines, important decisions, and the messages that genuinely need your attention.
MailOver reads everything. You read what matters.
Try it for free, link in comments:
miss being on a mission.
i'd love to build sth in physical ai next.
currently exploring & developing new convictions.
that would be the natural next step. just like they restricted entire areas of nuclear physics after the atomic bomb
very interesting observation. i've never built any hardware, but always had this thought that much of building a physical product seems to be designing, simulating and testing without violating the laws of physics. and that kinda means, software, software and more software...
12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.
the recipe for paralyzing a group of people:
make sure they are: aimless & uncertain
in other words, make sure they don't have leadership.
“Get moving.”
my mantra for when I feel depressed, down, or just not like myself.
motion creates motivation.
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
An incredible metaphor for entrepreneurship:
"If you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? You have to embrace that sailing means that you can't control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. You will not be able to control exactly how you get across. That's the game you've decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then don't get in the f*cking boat."
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
James Clear's one-line mantra for the days you don't feel like showing up.
@JamesClear
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
The Law of The Sublime has been a transformative book to write, and I hope you all enjoy reading it. Here is a trailer explaining what led me to write the book and what it's about. It's out in 7 days!
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
The new scarcity is having a purpose and mission big enough to make use of the SI.
relentlessly prune bs,
don’t wait to do things that matter,
try things that slow down the time for u.
life is short.
the worst thing about being a solo founder is the “solo” part in my view.
life is short. why would you want to spend the best years of it building alone?
finding great people to work with, in person (not remotely), building things together, is how i want to spend my days. and ultimately die while doing it.
it’s hard to have meaningful work without meaningful relationships at work.
a lesson i’ve learned and been thinking about a lot lately.
we need to write down our assumptions about the technology and what we can do with it and ask every month if they are still true and update this document regularly
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
Hey @grok list 10 situations that will satisfy this condition
Daniel Daneshi retweeted
Saying there’s no reason to buy Bitcoin because anyone can create a cryptocurrency is like saying there’s no reason to learn English because anyone can invent a language.
