Terminal + Sublime.
Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#22Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#231. I have deep long discussions with the customer to understand the business problem they want solved. Usually over a nice coffee in a relaxed environment.
2. I document it in a Spec and make sure the customer reviews and understands exactly what they will get. Again, while enjoying good coffee!
3. The customer pays up front for this initial Spec work. If they don’t want to pay up front I walk away. I don’t work with customers who doesn’t understand that work costs money.
4. If they are happy with the spec I then negotiate a contract and payment terms. This always includes an upfront payment. Usually 10%. If they don’t want to pay a percentage upfront I walk away. Cheap customers are not worth the pain. The rest is paid based on milestone deliverables. I always make sure that milestones are backend heavy so that I have a time buffer if needed.
5. I quickly implement what I call the “skeleton” of the application. All use cases are implemented with a minimum ugly/super simple UI and an in-memory hash map “database” for storage. Test cases cover all use cases end-to-end. I use an in-house code generator to make this step fast (80% of the code is usually generated).
6. I then iterate, refine, and improve the whole application step by step until it is done. With regular demos to the customer getting feedback on progress.
It works well. It isn’t perfect (what is?) but it has been successful for me.
Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#241. I have deep long discussions with the customer to understand the business problem they want solved. Usually over a nice coffee in a relaxed environment. 2. I document it in a Spec and make sure the customer reviews and understands exactly what they will get. Again, while enjoying good coffee! 3. The customer pays up front for this initial Spec work. If they don’t want to pay up front I walk away. I don’t work with…
How detailed are you in the spec?
Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#25Not sure if you care about validation. If not skip to 2. 1. Anybody want it? First I pitch the rough idea to a few paying customers. If they are lukewarm on it I set it aside. If they are warm on it I set it aside. If they say they want it I set it aside. When some time goes by and they check in and say “whatever happened with (feature) I consider it validated.” 2. Be bad at it Give myself permission to make the abso…
Do you ever code something for yourself, or are there always customers involved?
Oh sure, all the time. But that's always a bit wild-west, since I'm more or less doing it for fun, then my approach is always "Well what do I want to do, emotionally" so it's hard to advise on fun projects. It'd be like "What's fun for you to do?"
I guess if I had any kind of advice for that kind of thing it might be this: I've realised that even in my fun projects, there's a 10% crappy annoying tedious thing that -very- frequently stops me from finishing the fun projects.
A potentially bit good of advice would be to do that thing first, use all the "new fresh code base" enthusiasm to BURN through the code you're gonna hate so that it's just fun from then on.
Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#26Oh. One other thing. I tend to go backwards. UX first. Then API. Then whatever fuels it. If I go the other way around I -inevitably- forget some stuff that is crucial for the front end implementation, whereas it’s hard to forget how it supposed to work for the user.
That's funny because I always start at the database level and work up. If I start in the frontend it ends up getting rewritten too often.
That's SUPER interesting. We should form like Voltron. But also I wonder if that's a meaningful 'heuristic' to use both in analysing ones own performance but also in coaching others.
Re: Ask HN: Indie devs, what is your development process?
#271. I have deep long discussions with the customer to understand the business problem they want solved. Usually over a nice coffee in a relaxed environment. 2. I document it in a Spec and make sure the customer reviews and understands exactly what they will get. Again, while enjoying good coffee! 3. The customer pays up front for this initial Spec work. If they don’t want to pay up front I walk away. I don’t work with…
How detailed are you in the spec?
As detailed as needed for the client to understand exactly what they will get delivered. However 100% focused on solving the biz problem not UI details or whatever.