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Monthly Update: 2017.10.31

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George Singer edited this page Mar 23, 2018 · 2 revisions

Happy Halloween—

Here’s what we accomplished last month with Simula, as well as what we plan to accomplish next month. If you’re new to this list, or need a refresher of what Simula is about, see the links at the bottom of this email for explanations of the idea from various viewpoints (YC viewpoint, Thiel viewpoint, probabalistic viewpoint).

As always: Send us feedback. Send us questions. Send us contributors. :)

Last Month’s Goals

Here’s a checklist of last month’s goals (in bold). Some of this might be hard to follow if you aren’t in the weeds:

  1. [X] +1 MVP
    • [X] HTC Vive Rendering Partially Works (!)
      • Rendering has been the hard issue for us for months; now that this is partially working, we expect a rapid acceleration on the other stuff.
      • Thanks to David Kraeutmann for this development.
    • [X] Formed Technical Report to explain existing issues with HMD rendering to contributors (@Zac Slade).
      • [X] Some progress w/controller support (@Zac Slade).
      • [X] 2/3 done w/XWayland Implementation (@KaneTW) (allows all Linux apps, not just wayland ones, to run in compositor)
  2. [X] +1 YC application
    • [X] Application submitted (see below for copy) & rejected.
    • This makes sense since we don’t have a growth curve, or even an MVP.
  3. [X] ≥1 non-trivial open-source contributors, who push at least 500 lines of code without any sort of payment
    • [X] Schell Scivally (West Coast Haskeller) forked the project and made a small pull request (accepted).
    • [X] Agnishom Chattopadhyay forked the project and made a small pull request (rejected).
  4. [X] ≥2 correspondences with industry experts and/or VC’s
    • [X] James Andrew (VR expert) said we should look into Linux game engines. I researched the game engine terrain (to understand what they can provide that Simula doesn’t already have). Ultimately, we decided it wasn’t a good idea to pursue in the short-run, but probably a great idea to pursue in the long-run. You can see the details of this technical decision here.
    • [X] Edward Kmett (Haskell/graphics guru) said GC pauses wouldn’t be an issue, and pointed us to a library that we might find handy.
    • [X] Forrest Reilling (author of motorcar/VR expert) said we should start an email list.
    • [X] Ryan Trinkle (Haskell guru) said GC pauses might be a performance issue, but he wasn’t sure. Many others ignored us :)
  5. [X] +1 website
    • Trey volunteered for this, since it gives him some technical work to improve our team balance.

Last Month’s Metrics

  1. Lines of Code:
    • Master branch: +819/-616.
    • Rendering branch: +529/-417
    • Controllers branch: +700/-443
    • Xwayland branch: +193/-1
  2. Usage: 0 people using 0 MVP’s for more than 1hr/day.
  3. Contributors: 0 new non-trivial (i.e., 500+ LOC) contributors to the repository

Other Stuff from Last Month

  • GitHub Stats: 16 watchers, 133 stars, 7 forks, and 5 contributors.
  • Monthly Email Recipients. Added David Kraeutmann (contributor), Zac Slade (contributor), William Wold (@Aurora), Christoph Haag (helpful hand), James Andrew, Will Wilson, and Jack O’Connor to this email list.

Diagnosis of Last Month’s Issues

Lack of focus. The only thing that matters is getting an MVP. I think too much of last month’s time was focused on networking, feedback seeking, contributor recruitment, and other things that don’t short-term matter. 5 Next Month’s Goals & Metrics

The only thing that counts this month is progress towards a runnable MVP. No points for attending a conference, networking, vanity campaigns, seeking feedback, and so forth (we’ll still do some of this, but it doesn’t “count”). Some metrics we’ll be tracking: lines of code, number of technical decisions made, and hours worked on the MVP. I’m sure we’ll do other stuff, but this is the “one thing” that matters.

Date of Next Email: Nov 30th, 2017

Links and Explanation of the Idea

  • The Case for VR Desktop This is an old article we sent to friends to explain why VR Desktop for Linux is a good idea.
  • YC Application We have about $5K left in the tank to fund this idea. For example right now we’re giving HTC Vive’s to new contributors who don’t have them. We’re interested in raising money to hire a developer full-time long term (at some point after we have an MVP with more proof of product thesis).
  • Updated Probabilities. This a list of things that need to be true in order for this project to succeed, and our best estimate for how likely they are being true right now. All feedback that we get is incorporated into these probabilities. Many major technical decisions will be placed in here as well (to keep everything transparent).
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