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My product is my garden

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: My product is my garden

#41

Post by OJFord »

yesenadam wrote: post #19

> This is my garden, and I intend to putter. I was about about to correct that use of "putter" as a typo, but it seems it's a USAism. Never seen that before. I'd always thought machines/engines putter, gardeners potter. I put it to the super-accurate Purported Google Results Test: putter in my garden - 7 million potter in my garden - 142 million putter around - 9 million potter around - 363 million putter about - 49…

Ha, glad I'm not the only one, I went directly to Wiktionary after finishing the article, which doesn't mark it 'chiefly US' or anything, and gives RP IPA.

Which contains another surprise, for me anyway - it's not pronounced like the golf club, but starting like 'put' (that over there) or 'foot'.

Re: My product is my garden

#42

Post by erwinh »

erwinh wrote: post #39

Really feeling this, got so much work done last year by just continuously smoothing out all kinds of small little details in my parametric design software tools. Which individually are all quite insignificant but now it really starts to feel like an ecosystem (garden!) of functions, classes & objects working together in concert for beautiful effects.

Literally used it to make digital grass as well:

https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1348394004413620224?s...

Re: My product is my garden

#43

Post by luka-birsa »

friseurtermin wrote: post #37
elliotec wrote: post #28

I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar. I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice. I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is…

I feel the same way. Even if you have a lot of ideas, as I'm sure everyone has, how would you decide on the "right" one to pour all your energy into?

What if the idea doesn't really matter? You need to start the journey and be ready to adapt along the way. I've been at it for 12 years now as a cofounder and you'll need to change your product every couple of years. Remember - even Microsoft is shipping Linux these days.

Re: My product is my garden

#44

Post by playpause »

qwantim1 wrote: post #33
elliotec wrote: post #28

I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar. I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice. I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is…

Is Basecamp really the example to aspire to? Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that would be the software equivalent of Peter Frampton, and I mean that in the most positive way. I think we know that we’re not all going platinum. This article was about just “working on the song(s)” for the enjoyment of it, whatever that may involve, or that’s the way I took it.

> the software equivalent of Peter Frampton

Can you clarify this? Just curious. Heard of him, but no idea what you mean.

Re: My product is my garden

#45

Post by afarrell »

This is one thing that has made the transition to a larger company so hard for me. In smaller team, you can spend a bit of time cleaning up the codebase or tooling and know that investment will compound via increased velocity.

When you share a codebase with 200 others, trying to get anything tidy and readable is such a yak-shaving exercise, you feel like the main character from https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

This is the actual emotional reason why I am now such a big fan of microservices (or rather, moderately-sized services): I want my own garden to tend alongside a moderately-sized team.

Re: My product is my garden

#46

Post by square_usual »

qwantim1 wrote: post #33
elliotec wrote: post #28

I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar. I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice. I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is…

Is Basecamp really the example to aspire to? Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that would be the software equivalent of Peter Frampton, and I mean that in the most positive way. I think we know that we’re not all going platinum. This article was about just “working on the song(s)” for the enjoyment of it, whatever that may involve, or that’s the way I took it.

I think BaseCamp is the best you can hope for with this mindset, so in an "aim high" kind of way, it's a good ideal.

Re: My product is my garden

#48

Post by new_here »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #36

Where are there online communities for people into this kind of tech sub-culture? Most Indie Hacker type communities seem to eventually attract a critical mass of "Hustle Boys" and most startup communities tend to be dismissive of anything that doesn't have hyper-growth potential. It makes sense that a large number of tech entrepreneurs live between these two extremes. Where do they hang out?

There are various communities around the web that all have their own personalities. HN, /r/programming and Twitter are the biggest and most active but also most cynical. Lobste.rs (https://lobste.rs/) is almost purely tech focussed. Dev.to is very (overly?) friendly but it's hard to find substance among the noise. Indie Hackers which you've alluded to, does what it says on the tin but also attracts those hustler types.

The great thing about the internet is that if you think it's missing something, you can build it! I've been working on my own tech community called Able (https://able.bio) in my spare time for about 3 years now. I'd like it to be an intersection of software, hardware and business but with less cynicism and self-hype of other places. Just a place to appreciate the merits of human ingenuity. You're welcome to come hang out there if you like.

But yeah, if anyone knows of any other communities I'd also be interested to check them out. I feel like a bit of variety would be nice at the moment.

Re: My product is my garden

#49

Post by m-i-l »

This was a good read. I've read about personal websites being digital gardens, and describe my own as "more of a functional vegetable patch than an ornamental floral garden". However, I've not seen bootstrapped side-projects compared to gardens, and like the analogy between gardening and farming, where gardening is more fun and less scalable than farming (but that being a good thing in this context). I wonder if a smallholding might be a more appropriate analogy for side-projects though, given gardens and personal websites are usually for personal use while smallholdings and side-projects are more likely to have a small commercial element.

Re: My product is my garden

#50

Post by olau »

friseurtermin wrote: post #37
elliotec wrote: post #28

I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar. I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice. I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is…

I feel the same way. Even if you have a lot of ideas, as I'm sure everyone has, how would you decide on the "right" one to pour all your energy into?

That's the minimum viable product thing - you need to figure out what's actually helpful to people.

For instance, I hope some day someone takes up the mantle and goes out making a decent free identity system. I think most of the North European countries have one of those, and they are all proprietary and suck with no interoperability. If think there's government or even EU money to be had for something that works.

So basically, every citizen needs a way of authenticating, e.g. to submit tax information, log in to banks etc.

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