Very cool, thanks for sharing. I would love to see this show up as an OSS project. I know a few people who would likely enjoy being able to contribute if that's something you'd be looking for.
I think this has much to do with certain parties controlling most of the dataflow for NA rail freight moves. Definitely a problem on the ocean and in the port terminals as well. We should chat!
Supply chain/logistics. I've been simultaneously surprised and unsurprised by the relatively minuscule number of people interested in driving technology and change for this space forward compared to other spaces.
I'm actively working in this space right now. Working with a Fortune 100 to replatform their entire supply chain software. Currently handles all $15B of their US revenue.
Maybe for driving technology specifically the space is small. But for supply chain management there are a number of players: SAP, Oracle, and Kinaxis to name three. There are more than a dozen though.
There are plenty SCM solutions and TMS products, agreed, however that isn't the change I'm describing. OTM, SAP S4/HANA, etc are heavily used and have been around for ages, yes -- even better systems exist. Problem is: the quality of data going into those systems has not improved much, the flow of that data is pretty poor, and the barriers to entry for basic visibility are high unless you're moving a lot of boxes.
Despite best efforts, even among the largest lines (Maersk + others via DCSA), EDI still reigns supreme in this space. Nothing inherently wrong with EDI itself but there are plenty problems with access. Port & terminal level visibility are in an even worse place.
The work they do behind the scenes is very impressive. An "AWS, but for supply chain" would be huge in my (biased) opinion, though I'm curious whether they would be motivated enough to share their progress with the rest of the world since it's been quite a competitive advantage.
In a sense they already do with “fulfillment by Amazon”. The only thing missing compared to UPS or FedEx is the retail locations and last mile pick up.
For access to more community-driven data out there, check out aishub.net. If you're able to operate a base station and contribute back, you should be able to get what you need.
Nice! Picked up a shirt and some stickers :) Sorry to see you guys go. Flynn was one of the first things that made me legitimately excited about the future of Docker. Thanks for all your great work.
Vizion is building APIs and software to power digital transformation happening inside the supply chain & logistics industry. We've got some traction, we're growing, and we're now looking to build out our early engineering team.
If you enjoy working with large amounts of unstructured data, API design, and building great user experiences we'd love to chat.
Ditto. AutoRune and later SCAR, Sleepwalker, et al were huge inspirations to teenage me. I spent a lot of time bugging Dylock and Kaitnieks for Delphi help over IRC.
When I had some downtime a year or so ago, it was really interesting to revisit the reverse-engineered clients (a la RuneBot, PowerBot, etc) and taking a look at how that was done then and now. Actually made me somewhat working with Java again.
Very cool to see other folks who found themselves on a similar path thanks to that community!
I don't follow. This is developed and being run by Google, but it doesn't seem Google is attempting to use this to improve their own interviewing processes. Is it implied in this blog post somewhere? I would be really excited to see this in practice.
This initiative (Byteboard) is a part of a small incubator/accelerator that Google runs called "Area120". Think of it as a small startup being run separately within the company. It's unclear whether Google itself will adopt it first from the blogpost or if Byteboard will try to partner with other companies.
