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My product is my garden

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: My product is my garden

#51

Post by ivanhoe »

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.

> Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that

It's not entirely fair thing to say as DHH's rise to fame was really on both fronts in parallel, actually I remember that one of the selling points for ruby/RoR thing early on was that "the basecamp was built on it". Most of people (me included) never even heard of Ruby before they've made it popular, and they could do that partially thanks to having an already very popular product built on it and big following of fans to their approach to business and software. It was before "the lean" ideas got popular, so it was all very new and revolutionary.

Re: My product is my garden

#52

Post by konschubert »

olau wrote: post #50
friseurtermin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you want government money in the EU for IT stuff you have to be huge, boring and inefficient ...

Re: My product is my garden

#53

Post by dustinmoris »

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 deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid.

Honestly, DHH looks to me and comes across to me as extremely burnt out to an unhealthy point. I wouldn't want to aspire what he has become. He doesn't strike me as someone like the author of Bear Blog who just enjoys puttering along. He comes across as someone who constantly stresses himself to become BIG without VC money so he can prove someone that you can achieve VC level success without VC money. As a result he seems to be constantly arguing and lecturing people on social media to a point where it feels difficult to watch. Also Hey feels like a real flop to me, an attempt to fix something that really nobody wanted to be fixed. It's like creating yet another social media app when people are already sickened by the sheer amount of apps which demand their constant attention.

I admire what bear blog stands for and to me that is far away from Basecamp, otherwise I agree with your points :)

Re: My product is my garden

#54

Post by shoo »

baxtr wrote: post #3

A very appealing concept. I hope people doing this succeed in generating sufficient income to make a living. PS: I also like the gardener analogy. It is used elsewhere, too, e.g. the “Gardener-Leader” concept of the US Army. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Ar...

thank you for sharing the link, very interesting to see a similar idea discussed within another community.

Re: My product is my garden

#55

Post by ehnto »

This article resonated with me quite a bit. I very much dislike the fast, throwaway software culture of much software development. A revolving door of technology, platforms and methodology. The first few years you're excited by the pace of learning, and that prospect of new projects is really alluring as it's a new and exciting problem to solve.

Eventually you realise everything you pour your heart into only matters for a year or two before it's inevitably thrown away, replaced by the new kids on the block.

I can see why VC land can support the irrational churn of technology, and that's fine, hell even entire companies are ephemeral in the startup universe. I think it doesn't make sense for any other kind of project. We shouldn't need to rewrite something every year or two, it should have been built to be a stable platform with boring, fundamental technology from which you can grow the product over years to come.

Re: My product is my garden

#56

Post by kuu »

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?

If you're trying to sell and earn money, you don't need an idea, you need customers. From customers to idea is much easier than from idea to customers.

I'm not saying that getting/finding customers is easy neither...

Re: My product is my garden

#57

Post by alixanderwang »

I quit my job at Google a little over a year ago to work full time on my product. I still don't make near half the salary, but that connection to my users using a product I built is something that, prior to this last year, I didn't know I'd be so attached to.

Users message me to appreciate some small look & feel improvements, they leave feedback and I fix things for them, I get excited about a new feature and it brings value to their work. I let them vote on the more experimental ideas.

I get happily excited for each new subscription, and it all feels earned, a stark contrast to how I felt about my biweekly paychecks at corporate life.

The product [0] launched on HN a year ago, and I've worked on it almost every day since then, and after having reached some threshold of MRR, I've since felt that I can keep working on it forever.

Tonight, I'm up late releasing another feature [1]. The motivation to do so feels effortless, as, it's my garden.

[0] https://terrastruct.com

[1] Sync diagrams with a github repo, ~hacking the README as a presentation tool (https://github.com/terrastruct-bot/Demo)

Re: My product is my garden

#59

Post by dagw »

elliotec wrote: post #24
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…

The writer is from South Africa, as mentioned in the post. "Putter about" is definitely not a USAism, it's an English expression used throughout the anglophone world that can be spelled "putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing. I've only heard it pronounced "putter" personally. The stats are interesting!

"putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing.

I don't think they mean the same in British English. My motorboat "putters about the lake" while I "potter about in my garden". But I could be wrong.

Re: My product is my garden

#60

Post by thejosh »

alixanderwang wrote: post #57

I quit my job at Google a little over a year ago to work full time on my product. I still don't make near half the salary, but that connection to my users using a product I built is something that, prior to this last year, I didn't know I'd be so attached to. Users message me to appreciate some small look & feel improvements, they leave feedback and I fix things for them, I get excited about a new feature and it brin…

Wow. This looks extremely slick, and the landing page is awesome. Going to give it a whirl.
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