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Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

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Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#51

Post by tmaly »

I ran into the same situation many times. Come up with an idea, buy a domain, do some coding, drop the idea.

You really have to stick it out and work through the idea. The best way to approach it is to do customer development first. Steve Blank was probably the first to bring this idea to the forefront.

Find out if people actually have a problem for which you are building the solution. The book Running Lean has some scripts you can mirror to do this. It will save you lots of time and actually get you pointed to an idea that has some merrit.

Derek Sivers from CDBaby had a great approach to this where he contrasted pushing onto people verse pulling an idea from people where there is already demand.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#52

Post by selmat »

AndreyErmakov wrote: post #48
daveinspace wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I think it force us to focus and put limits in time and features. A solution can be to outsource : hire contractors to make all that is not your core project (ex design, content...). Yes, as a dev you can do everything, but not with limited ressources (your time and money are precious!)

Sometimes you can't outsource. If it's a small personal project and you can't pay anyone to work for you. It it doesn't smell like a hot startup, nobody's going to be attracted by equity either.

Sure. You are absolutely right. If its personal project for fun or learning and there is no one (except of) you waiting for results then outsourcing has no sense.

I was talking mainly about projects with commercial intentions.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#53

Post by jventura »

I have a similar experience.. The thing is that although many of us can work on one or other part of a complete product, it is pretty hard to focus on everything at the same time and build an entire product alone!

For me, I have identified my problem not as fear of failure but perfectionism. So I start questioning all little things and things move very slow. I am currently building a SaaS app, and I've built others before but none made me any money so far. But lately I've been tuning my strategy to make things work faster, and have been seeing some success on it. Some of my main points are:

* start with something very simple that has the minimum functionality, like drawing a chart if the app is to draw charts, etc.

* since I'm working full time on this, decide to implement a feature per day (until you have enough features for now).

* THIS ONE IS REALLY IMPORTANT: never leave an inconsistent and non-working application between two commits. Make sure that the version on your repo is always fully working even if it lacks features (it may not be between two commits, I hope you get the idea..).

* ANOTHER IMPORTANT ONE: when you have a stable app, do a release to your server, even if you have it mounted on a personal url. It will give you the feeling of being moving forward..

* When you have something usable enough for other users, invite them to use it. Non-technical people feel flatered if you invite them personally to test your application. - Use a repo such as github (or gitlab for private projects). Commiting the code to those repositories will give you the feeling of moving forward every day. And if your local copy does not work anymore, you can always reset to the latest working commit..

I've been working on this project for much more time than I ever wanted (5+ years) and the points above have been what I learned from it.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#54

Post by segmondy »

You don't have doubt, you are just not motivated. Not doing your real work has consequences such as losing your job and ending up homeless. The cost of not doing your personal project as you perceive it is not that high. This is true for most people that are employed, I'm in the same boat. The struggle is to find out how to have a high level of motivation and to replenish it when it runs low.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#55

Post by wilsonfiifi »

I think you should read/watch the following 2 resources if you can:

    'Start Small, Stay Small A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup' [0]
    'Creating and selling a digital product' [1]
Your product on codecanyon appears to be doing quite well and has good reviews/sales [2] so you should probably market it more (if you're not doing so already). Also, building an ecosystem of free/paid plugins around it might be something you could explore. Finally, you could look into offering hosted instances for less technical savy users.

Good luck and keep up the good work!

    [0] https://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968

    [1] https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/creating-selling-digital-product
    
    [2] http://codecanyon.net/item/stock-awesome-inventory-system-and-stock-control/11210315?s_rank=2

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#56

Post by Jemmeh »

Accept that frustration, fear, and doubt are just part of the job. Those feelings don't mean you're a bad software dev or a coward, they're just the natural reaction to consistently facing the unknown. Sometimes you have to slog through it, even if it feels bad, and actually finish. You will not finish perfect. There are always bugs. But get something put out there anyways.

You are always going to be learning with this kind of job. And sometimes that makes you look back at your old code and say, "Oh boy, this sucks." It's because you're improving. If you weren't, you wouldn't be able to look back and see your mistakes.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#57

Post by msdos »

Muted wrote: post #31

I experience the exact same thing. I get an idea for a side project, get really excited about it, think about all the great things it could do, work on it like crazy for a weekend, and then never touch it again. I got to a point where I got really frustrated with myself that I can't finish anything. So this past Saturday I picked a really small simple project I had and said to myself "No matter what, I'm doing a Show…

the HN community seems to shine at not making you feel embarrassed about what you've made.

Not in my experience. Several Show HN type of things I posted were highly criticized with harsh words. I'm not posting anything on HN ever again.

Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?

#58

Post by freestockoption »

maratd wrote: post #13

> As a result I have numerous half baked personal projects. Every decent developer has dozens of half-baked personal projects. Some get finished, some don't. All eventually get abandoned. They are never a waste. If you go through your codebase, you will find that you re-use code and techniques that you learned on your next project. This is how we learn.

I second this! I have never done a project that I fully regretted or gone to a job wishing I had stayed at a previous job. While I have gone to a job that I hated almost immediately, I still didn't see returning to the previous job as a viable option.

Every new venture I take, I feel I couldn't have done without the accumulation of all my past experiences (both professional and nonprofessional).

Where you are is also a function of where you've been, which can be hard as the human mind sometimes likes to dwell on regret.

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