At the risk of turning my personal website into a review website, I'm writing exactly that. I've long had the urge to write about the products/services that have yielded the greatest improvement in my quality of life, and I'm finally doing it.
After numerous half-written blog posts about interesting math problems that I'll likely never finish, I've decided to improve the lives of the maybe 3 people that will ever read this.
I'm not a superstitious person, but I hesitate to recommend Citi Biking given the risks.
Here are the facts:
Approximately of all bike rides in NYC are Citi Bike rides. (Source: 400K daily bikers, peak 130K Citi Bikers)
Let's make an assumption that the crash rate between Citi Bikers and non-Citi Bikers is equal.
This is likely wrong, as a reasonable portion of non-Citi Bikers bike professionally (delivery drivers, e.g.) and must get from point A to B in the shortest amount of time possible on souped-up electric bikes, whereas Citi Bikers typically bike for leisure or casual transportation.
I tried looking whether these injuries were reported (meaning it's a massive underestimate) or done via randomized survey, but I couldn't find an answer. Let's take them at their word and say that is the true number of serious injuries.
Therefore, the 7.9 million hours Citi biked is equivalent to 1,600 injuries and 7 fatalities. If I bike 105 hours, there is a:
, chance I get seriously injured in a given year. This means in the next ten years, I have an chance of getting seriously injured.
There are a bunch of caveats to this. 90% of accidents happen on streets without a bike lane, while I mainly bike on safer streets. My biking volume is also higher than most, leading to a lower risk of injury due to experience. I also don't bike as part of my commute, so I miss rush hour.
It's 2am. I'm in East Village, Chelsea, FiDi, or Downtown Brooklyn. I no longer have to wait for a late-night Subway alone or call a $30 Uber.
It takes me 21 minutes to bike between my apartment in SoHo and my friend's in downtown Brooklyn. A subway ride would take 28 minutes. There are very few things more beautiful than admiring the Manhattan skyline at 1am from the empty Brooklyn Bridge while early 2000s pop is playing in transparent mode on your AirPods.
I no longer have to consider plans based on how convenient the commute is. I have the freedom to go between any two points in the city for effectively free and never have to wait for anyone or anything.
I am no longer at the whim of subway connections. I just bike to the most convenient train and bike to my final destination from the end stop.
It's winter and cold? I own a balaclava and gloves. It's summer and scorching hot? The breeze keeps me cool.
Day-to-day time savings: It costs $ 12/hr to e-Bike. Per Google Maps' estimate, I can bike 3x as fast as I walk. Therefore, that 1 hour I biked ($12 I spent) saved me 2 hours. Do I consider my time worth more than $6/hr? Yes.
Finally, the financial aspect: I would have spent $3,000 on Citi Bikes had I not paid for the annual subscription. There have been many an instance where I've replaced a $20 Uber with a $1.52 Citi Bike ride. I've funnelled that money directly into my dearest charity (kidding): my Chipotle lunch fund.
This is a hard pivot from Citi Biking, but this product is $18/mo, and for its value, I'd (albeit, begrudgingly) pay 100x that.
It feels as though David augmented with Cursor pre-AI David + average engineer (no AI)
Aside from the obvious (intelligent autocomplete), I've found it especially valuable for a few specific things:
Navigating around the codebase. I can ask it a question like "@codebase Find me the function that does XYZ". It immediately returns me the function I was thinking of. That alone could've taken me 10 minutes to remember the name or backtrack and find the function.
Frontend. I'm able to build new frontend features 20x faster then make small tweaks very easily (make the text slightly smaller, center it, etc.)
Debugging. I can attach a few code snippets and help me brainstorm what is causing an issue to happen.
Terminal commands. You can run Cursor in the terminal directly. For example, I created a new branch name recently and didn't remember the name. I just asked Cursor how to help me find it
(git branch --sort=-committerdate)
Boiler-plate code. "Make these network requests multi-threaded", "Write this .nginx config"
Normal coding questions "Which index would be best for this frequent SQL query"
Code review "@git Diff of Working State: Read through this diff VERY carefully. This is my Github Issues: [GH ISSUE]. Did this PR safely and effectively address the issue?"
To be honest, I do have a bit of shame that I'm so reliant on these tools. While I am shipping significantly more code, I'm learning frontend much slower than I would've been. Now that I code for a living, I think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but I would never touch these tools if I were in school.
At Noon, we send out a significant amount of cold outbound. It generates the bulk of our sales leads and therefore a significant chunk of our revenue.
Cold emails have follow-up emails. You use any service: Apollo.io, Instantly, Smartleads, etc., etc., etc, and see that it's very straightforward to do that. However, we've found an equally important thing to do is send follow-ups for your responses.
If a lead responds positively and you send a Calendly link, there's a ~30% chance they'll book a call.
To combat this, we send follow-up after follow-up to make sure a lead schedules a call. If we put in all this effort to get you to respond once, you better believe we'll hound you down until you book a call.
More than sales, however, this has permeated my day-to-day life. I send follow-up texts to my friends significantly more liberally now.
I email customer support, my professors, my primary care physician, and potential sublessors with multiple automated email followups scheduled. It frees up so much mental bandwidth, improves effectiveness of the request, and (apart from a few exceptions) doesn't offend or annoy anyone.
The fact of the matter is people are busy. A lot of the time, people miss your message or forget to respond. Bumping a message back to the top of their inbox helps everyone.