Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#291

Post by mchan » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 12:45 PM UTC

20years wrote: post #166

mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

This is excellent advice. There is a local company near me that has been working on their SaaS for almost 2 years now and still yet to launch. They started it on Angular 1 and are now re-factoring it on Angular 2 (or maybe 4 now). During this time they released a small open source Angular library but not even an alpha release of their own product. Keep in mind their product is not gear towards devs. They also hit eve…

Upvoted not just for the comment, but also the user name. Had to do a double-take on that one!

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#292

Post by brianwawok » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 12:59 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #280

brianwawok wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that same flexibility in monkey patching makes the codebase rubbish in a year when it's time to upgrade dependencies.

It really depends on the interaction between the discipline of your team and the failure modes of the tool. A culture of code review which puts a high bar of justification and documentation-for-new-contributors on monkey patching can counteract this failure mode.

Do you code review what each new library does? It doesn't have to be code you wrote to cause problems. And most people treat a library as a black box with inputs and outputs. Which works well in a sane language, but often not ruby.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#293

Post by brightball » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 1:50 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #277

brightball wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Come a long way since Rails 2. There are still much faster options out there but it's nowhere near the beast that it used to be.

Great to hear, I might revisit it in a future project then - the experience was generally really nice, but the performance was really painful.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Elixir advocate largely because you get the performance and scaling perks of other languages with very close to the development perks of Ruby.

I just get tired of hearing the "but Ruby is slow" drum beats when it's so consistently successful. Scaling web servers is easy. Scaling the database is hard.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#294

Post by a-guest » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

20years wrote: post #166

mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

This is excellent advice. There is a local company near me that has been working on their SaaS for almost 2 years now and still yet to launch. They started it on Angular 1 and are now re-factoring it on Angular 2 (or maybe 4 now). During this time they released a small open source Angular library but not even an alpha release of their own product. Keep in mind their product is not gear towards devs. They also hit eve…

Javascript hipster echo chamber: you're not using react [or insert other trendy framework pushed by code schools and tutorial makers]? Product user: does not give a rip about your precious tech stack.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#295

Post by magic_beans » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #238

magic_beans wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. If it is, it means you're probably working too much for someone else!

Maybe you're right. Unfortunately. Thanks for the heads up anyway.

Good luck out there.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#296

Post by cgrusden » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 2:37 PM UTC

gabeh wrote: post #174

mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

I love this advice. Here is a blog post that I keep coming back to regarding this. http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Wow, love this article. The context of this article is how I ran my consultancy and the developers didn't enjoy my choices to choose the "boring" tech over what new tech they wanted to bring in, in the middle of a project. "Secrets of Consulting" is a great book if you've never read it, too

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#297

Post by nsarafa » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

Be conscious of your core values. Let them permeate the story you tell, guide your key performance indicators, and become the foundation for your company' culture. When you feel your values are being violated, it may be a sign to take a step back and reflect.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#298

Post by nsarafa » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

Go at your own pace.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#299

Post by infinite8s » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 3:23 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #22

That it takes industry longer than you expected for it to move on to the next new thing. I made this mistake in 2012 thinking that my product would no longer be wanted by 2016 and so didn't invest in expanding sales. 2017 has arrived and our sales are at an all time high and I have no idea when the market will start to decline. I lost a huge amount of money getting this wrong. In my defence eveyone else in our indust…

Regarding your particular circumstances, is it because sequencing centers are slow to upgrade to the newest sequencing technology (probably because the investment in the last-generation is so large)?

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#300

Post by gressquel » Thu, Apr 20, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #267

gressquel wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country I work from 08-15, excercise 1 hour. I still have 6 hours left for cooking food and coding before i go to sleep 22

Let's say you have half of this spare time to work on your side project, that is 3 hours. Excluding weekends, how much time would it take to build a business out of your 15-hours-per-week side project?

Rome wasnt built in 15-hours :-)