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Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

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Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#301

Post by dllthomas »

tome wrote: post #201
jargnar wrote: post #20

It's a skill that can be learned like every other skill. You can take the "in 21 days" route or the MOOC / University course route, or constantly read business articles, Steve Jobs videos, etc. But some top tips stand out for me over time: * Talking to people, networking > Not talking to people * Bug free > Elegant code * UX > UI * Simple products that do one thing well > Complex products * Understanding entire marke…

* Solving your problem first > Solving the worlds problems Any chance you could expand a bit on this one?

I don't think it's accurate if you take it at face value. If you genuinely solve the world's problems, that's a better place to be (business-wise) than having solved your own problems.

But trying to solve the world's problems vs. trying to solve your own is another matter. You probably better understand your own problems.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#302

Post by juancampa »

tome wrote: post #201
jargnar wrote: post #20

It's a skill that can be learned like every other skill. You can take the "in 21 days" route or the MOOC / University course route, or constantly read business articles, Steve Jobs videos, etc. But some top tips stand out for me over time: * Talking to people, networking > Not talking to people * Bug free > Elegant code * UX > UI * Simple products that do one thing well > Complex products * Understanding entire marke…

* Solving your problem first > Solving the worlds problems Any chance you could expand a bit on this one?

It means: Solving your problem first > Solving others' problems (that don't affect you). The reasoning is that you are an expert in problems that affect you.

If the problem affects the whole world, including yourself, then it falls in the left bucket.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#303

Post by scott_karana »

overdrivetg wrote: post #271
scott_karana wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If you're proficient in multiple languages, there's no real upside, especially if each language is easily hireable. And it's particularly irrelevant if the front-end or back-end is weighted more heavily than the other in terms of product value , when you might hire distinct rather than "full stack" devs someday.

Two big reasons are: 1. Your devs can always go to where the work is - if you divide FE/BE and suddenly you have a feature that needs a lot of BE dev, you can move people from the now-mostly idle FE team rather than try to hire them 2. You can share business logic between FE/BE for client-side functionality. I've seen a surprising amount of bugs that boiled down to "oh we updated code on the back end but forgot it su…

Point 2 is a good call. Hadn't thought of that.

In practice, Point 1 isn't too realistic though:

Front-end and back-end almost always use different build/debugging tooling, different unit/integration testing frameworks, and even different paradigms. Unless your developers are good at constantly switching modes, it's hard.

"no real upside" is wrong, as you point out, but I would stand by "no guaranteed upside" :-)

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#304

Post by danieltillett »

infinite8s wrote: post #299
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)?

No. It is because the next-gen sequencers just don't do what the old sequencers (sanger) do (sequence small regions of DNA at high accuracy). The new machines can sequence a whole genome, but if you only want to look at small part of a genome then there is no replacement for Sanger sequencing.

Another surprising reason is the OEM manufacturer of the instrument (hitachi) basically over engineered the machines and built a tank. The machines just keep running and running.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#305

Post by pmarreck »

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 don't know. I think there's room for a high-end niche shop that only deals in functional languages, for example. I see enough data now that 1 line of functional = 4 lines of Java/C/Go for the same amount of work done, to think that perhaps, SOME trendy technologies are actually worth their mettle.

I think the real limitation is not jumping on trends but managing cognitive load. That is your real limitation, the capability of the programmer-mind to fathom all the states their code can get in. To optimize towards that, you have to pick technologies that force the least amount of cognitive load on the developer. Functional languages such as http://elixir-lang.org/ seem to accomplish this (according to those who have switched to it and blogged about it, example http://mattscodecave.com/posts/elixir-for-pythonistas-pt1.ht...). In the javascript space, Elm seems to accomplish this. http://elm-lang.org/

But lastly, if you pick the right technology, you might naturally get access to a pool of very high quality developers, the type who are already interested in that very technology.

I don't get the point of hiring "Java people" and whatnot, anyway. Polyglots are the way to go.

The thing that made Paul Graham a thing was his use of Lisp to edge out his competitors at the time. The fact that Viaweb was later rewritten in [whatever it was rewritten in] is irrelevant. That's my final point.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#306

Post by pmarreck »

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…

That is because Angular is a shit technology.

Why? Because it doesn't reduce cognitive load. One seems to require at least as much brain space to code things in Angular, as you do just writing pure Javascript. That's a no-no, that means it's not a labor-saver long-term.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#307

Post by pmarreck »

a-guest wrote: post #294
20years wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

React has some excellent ideas and quite good performance.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#308

Post by pmarreck »

adeelraza wrote: post #79

I wrote a post on this topic back in 2013. Can a software developer be a successful entrepreneur: http://adeelraza.co/blog/can-a-software-developer-be-a-succe... 4 years later, happy to report that I have a successful startup.

It's rare that I ask someone to self-promote, but what do you do? :)

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#309

Post by ericd »

brightball wrote: post #293
ericd wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I was just asking if it had improved. Scaling web servers might be easy, but it adds administrative overhead, and if you don't have big piles of VC money to burn, it bites into budgets that would be better used hiring more people and working on product. And it makes it so you have to waste your time reworking your server structure earlier than you would have to otherwise - suddenly you need a load balancer, a shared session store, etc. When I ran a company, these were very real concerns.

It being successful doesn't excuse its slowness, in my opinion. There are lots of bad products out there that are successful by many metrics. Speed is an important part of making something good, and RoR added significant hurdles to making very fast sites. There are other stacks that don't have that issue that are also successful, but have other downsides.

Anyway, not worth rehashing these old arguments, I just wanted to know if it had improved. Sounds like it has.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#310

Post by madiathomas »

I am able to deliver features and fix bugs faster when programming in C#.NET and ASP.NET MVC. I am able to administer MS Windows Server with my eyes closed. SQL Server too. That's why I chose MS technologies for my startup. That's what I know best. Use technology that you know best. You wouldn't use a language you hardly know to write a book. You wouldn't want to experience with a second language. Why on Earth would you want to use a sexy and cool tech that you hardly know?

The most useful piece of software that is used by almost all Software Developers around the world was created using Microsoft.NET -> That piece if software is StackOverflow.com. Microsoft .NET is not a sexy and cool tech. Solving problems is hard enough. Don't make it even harder by chosing technology you hardly know.

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