Suraj Gupta

I'm a software professional. I blog about building well-engineered systems. I care deeply about humanity. Some more about me:

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@tucows #tucows Reported a phishing attack to TuCows over a month ago with no response. Does anyone work at this company?

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@BetterStackHQ offered to schedule 15 mins to help us not spend 3x more for what's included today. But I would have to wake up at 3am to talk to them. Really frustrating! #BetterStack

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@BetterStackHQ is increasing our pricing 3x and we're using the most basic features they provide. We're a very small company. Not great. #BetterStack

[Niels Hoven 🐮 @NielsHoven]

Friends. Massive milestone today and I could use your help.

Today, we’re officially launching Mentava on Product Hunt. (Please visit, comment, share, etc.) For the first time, you can sign up and teach preschoolers to read with Mentava as we imagined it when we started this project over two years ago.

Basically, we’ve made it to the starting line.

Learning to read is a magic moment for a child. It’s like a secret code that unlocks the world around them. But many kids miss out on years of this magic because of societal myths like “learning to read is hard”, or “learning too fast will damage kids brains”, or “kids can’t learn to read until they’re 7 or 8”.

Learning to read isn’t rocket science. Kids need to memorize letter/sound pairings and then learn to blend them together. It’s not hard but it is time-consuming (and can be kind of boring).

Fortunately, “motivation” is a solved problem in game design. (Just walk through the slot machines in any casino if you need to be convinced of this.)

The open questions when we started this project were:

(1) could we combine quality curriculum with game design best practices to create learn-to-read software that was both fun and effective?

(2) are there actually enough people who want high-quality educational software to make a company viable? Or is the edutainment slop that dominates today’s market the only option?

Given the feedback from our customers, the answer to question 1 is a resounding yes. Now we have to find out how many people actually want what we’ve built.

If you believe in our mission of accelerating education, please please please help us out today by giving us a signal boost, as well as a comment on our Product Hunt page (link in next tweet).

And let me know what you think of our new product demo video! It was harder than expected to capture what Mentava is all about, but I think we got there.

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@PersonalCapital can you please add support for connecting @justworks 401k, which YOU administer? #empower #justworks @EmpowerToday

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@Verizon - your signin and password reset is broken. I have reset my password 10 times and quadruple-checked that I'm entering the new password and it's failing to login. #verizon #auth #softwarefail #bigfuckingcompanywithshittysoftware

[Niels Hoven 🐮 @NielsHoven]

How it started vs. How it's going

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@Zendesk #zendesk It's MY data. I own it. Making me upgrade to a more expensive plan to export my data is questionable business practices. Also, is this legal??

[Joe Biden @JoeBiden]

Every generation has a moment where they have had to stand up for democracy. To stand up for their fundamental freedoms. I believe this is ours.

That’s why I’m running for reelection as President of the United States. Join us. Let’s finish the job. https://t.co/V9Mzpw8Sqy

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@vimeo, @VimeoStaff, @VimeoEng Usually when you pay for a product you get some level of support. I filed a ticket 10 days ago and still no real response. #Vimeo #CustomerService

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@Vimeo Hi! I heard back 4 days ago that the ticket needed to be escalated, but no progress since then. Really frustrated at how slow this is moving; this is holding up a deploy.

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@Vimeo - I am a paying customer and created a support ticket last week and still haven't heard back. What's the deal? I sent a direct message to @VimeoStaff #vimeo

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@MyGetTeam I've been waiting for hours for deleted packages to be removed. What's going on?? #nuget #myget

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

AWESOME post by @NielsHoven about how he got 50 high-profile angels to invest in @MentavaInc
Such an exciting and creative company bringing fresh ideas to childhood education.

https://t.co/vLOENSH8Pd

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

How many days of your life could you buy back if NuGet package updates were faster? NuGet performance is such a drain on productivity @nuget #nuget @VisualStudio #VisualStudio #csharp @dotnet #dotnet

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@united #unitedAIRLINES Your iOS app keeps crashing when I attempt to complete Travel Ready.

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@moonliteworld #moonlightworld - contacted you on site by haven't heard back. I have enough stuff in my cart for free shipping, but when I apply Black Friday deal I'm still being charged for shipping. A little misleading.

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

#segway @Segway @NinebotGlobal Looks at your customer service response to ticket 200720. I guess you are not into answering questions to help people buy your product? Does your CEO know that?

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

@RobinhoodApp Powerful people made you do this because they were losing money. You guys disgust me.

[Suraj Gupta @surajgupta]

You sold the middle class on democratizing access to financial markets then took it away when it threated Wall St. Shame on you for blocking access to GME, BB, others. @RobinhoodApp #RobinHood #RobinhoodApp