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Well to be fair, this is mostly what we're all discussing on here. Web Applications.
Any advice for non-web applications? Building a library, desktop application, and soon.
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> Maybe your answer to this is to "just work harder." To that I just have to say, 'absolutely not'. I said "ship" it. not work harder. You can even ship something you built in a couple of hours. It IS ok to not ship every single project you work on, but it is not ok to be proud of how you never ship. Personally in terms of "learning" I learned 90% of what I have learned AFTER shipping. You think you are learning but…
"I said "ship" it. not work harder. You can even ship something you built in a couple of hours. " I did that and gained nothing from it. I don't mean it as a complain, more like reality check - most of the time you don't magically learn by shipping whatever you done in few hours.
It's like saying "I have a Twitter account and nobody cares what I say, I never get a single reply or a like. Btw I have 0 followers".
Shipping means getting it out there AND see what people think of it. If you at least tried to do that, you would have probably learned something. Even one person looking at your thing and giving you their thought is a learning experience.
Most people don't do that because they don't want their ego to be hurt. My point is don't worry about that and just talk about stuff you build with as many people as you can and hear what they say. It's ok even if they tell you it's shit, because you have now learned that you have built shit (You would not have known that if you never talked to anyone), and if you did built shit, you can learn what makes it such a shit, so next time you can do better. Otherwise you can just keep making shit.
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Well to be fair, this is mostly what we're all discussing on here. Web Applications.
Any advice for non-web applications? Building a library, desktop application, and soon.
Receiving daily updates for desktop apps would suck because it typically requires the app to quit and start again. A good compromise would be updates every four weeks. At the same time you as a developer always leave your app in a state were you could push an update anytime. So you still work incrementally in daily units of work.
Daily updates for libraries … if it's only publicly available code, I don't see a reason not to push daily. Anyone interested can check the commit logs. For compiled binaries on the other hand I can see update fatigue for users (other developers). Once a month or longer seems fine.
In the end, push regularly (daily, weekly, monthly, whatever fits you) without annoying your users by spamming them with updates, while at the same time reduce work units to a size that does not feel overwhelming.
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I'm in a similar situation to GP. I've done tons and tons of side projects but I rarely have anything to show for it. And why should I? I'm doing it mostly for the fun of coding, and striving to "ship" things takes some of the fun away. I most certainly do not want to start a start up from any of my side projects. Perhaps an established open source project at most. I do "release" my project, ie. push them to GitHub,…
I think you are doing great that you're releasing them into public, but your problem is you are not sharing it enough. I have many friends who release things like you. I'm not saying you are doing this but these guys just release and make no effort to promote them. They are afraid that they will get hurt if they try hard and no one still wants their thing. I understand this is totally valid fear and I have it too, bu…
http://jpad.io/ - Java snippet runner that means less boilerplate and automatic display as html tables / charts. http://www.sqldashboards.com/ - Real time chart your database queries http://www.timestored.com/ - Niche database training and tools
cough always be pushing :)
Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…
"Ship daily" only works with web applications. If I were to ship my applications daily (or rather: each day where there occur changes), I would just be compiling packages all the time. (Before you ask: This cannot be automated further. I will not give my GPG key to some automation to sign the packages with.)
Perhaps you simply "haven't learned to finish what [you've] started", but sometimes there are deeper issues at play.
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If you can't find a good job in the tech industry, then you're either not really looking, aren't mobile enough, or have personal circumstances, like kids, preventing you from moving. I've never had a bad job. Every job I've ever had after high school, I was glad to have and reluctant to leave. Except the military. I was glad to leave that. But I was also glad to have it. Jobs can be worked on, you don't have to accep…
I agree with everything you're saying except for this one. It's (currently) easy to get a tech job (in certain areas). It's NOT easy to get a good job. Unless you're well known, or have some popular programming blog with lots of readers, or really self promote well, you have to pound pavement with the rest of us to fight for a good company. There are plenty of dog jobs doing enterprise middleware API plumbing, and po…
The reason I can be comfortable in these jobs and many techies would feel So Unbelievably Professionally Stifled is because I have separated my personal life goals from my professional life goals and correctly (to me anyway) prioritized personal over professional.
If you're feeling professionally stifled, then you probably have personal issues to work through that would bear more fruit than moving the needle professionally. If you have a great job, but a shit marriage, you need to reprioritize. If you have a great personal life and you still feel professionally stifled, then by all means start moving that needle.
To me personal life is endlessly fulfilling, I can devote 24 hours a day to it if I was independently wealthy. Personal life is defined by achieving goals together with people you're very close to.
Just about any job in America that's not bleeding over into your personal life is a good job. That's my definition. I want to bleed my personal life into my professional life and not the other way around. This is where quality-of-life perks like work from home days, unlimited PTO, and such come in. Things like successful products, growth opportunities, meaningful raises, are nice-to-haves and not essentials.
I've wanted to write for years but thought I had to pen esoteric essays composed of thousands of words. Recently I just started writing short, simple posts that are helping me establish a habit, develop fluency and enjoy the process of writing.
My first post was on this idea of atomic actions: https://alexsingh.svbtle.com/atomic-actions
Maybe it'll be of help to someone else :)