101–110 of 316 posts
I found that becoming an actual user of your own system changes the perspective entirely. I had this thing that I was making for myself, and it was not ready, not usable at all, or so I thought. After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the c…
There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it". Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear: Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from t…
> Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible. Wow. That reminds me of what the guy who was fired said. I’ll never understand him. He lives in a house that’s below sea level, with one kid and one wife, and it gets flooded every 4 years. He was raised 30% during Covid, job was quite comfortable, he was competent for it, then stopped pulling his w…
There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it". Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear: Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from t…
Is it a hobby for passing time? For pleasure? For the beauty of the code?
Could be. But most of the time, you develop in order for the software to perfom a task someone needs.
And that should be your first focus: to develop something that brings value for its user, and develop it as efficiently as possible. After all, what's the point of a software if nobody uses it? So no, your job is not to create great software, your job is to bring value to users.
In my career, I've mostly seen the developers pleasuring themselves with overengineering, bloating code with features nobody needs, and writing lines to anticipate future developments that never came. Rather than the opposite.
So I think the challenge is to remain minimalistic, that's hard, and that's what the original post is about.
Isn't this more a lesson of keeping your cards close to your chest? There's a very good reason why people are on guard with pitch decks. Cause those very people you pitched could just take the idea and throw money at it.
Currently my problem is being a one-man band. I've realized I can't "just ship" a product that relies on a hand-rolled user-authorization scheme that I create with very little experience. So now I've interrupted my whole project to learn Supabase and oh yeah, containers... because I've never used those either and as far as I can tell I'd better use those for deployment and scalability.
And oh yeah, I had to learn SwiftUI (already knew Swift & iOS pretty well) to write the app... and also JavaScript/TypeScript and Deno for the back end. So now I'm entering year two and still trying to vacuum up knowledge fast enough to get this thing out the door before someone else announces it.
I've been thinking that I'd have to hire someone to consult on security and scaling as I finish up actual functionality. But the days go by...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. The thing is though, that p…
> This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. Developers aren't compensated for any extraordinary achievement, though. Unless they own a notable share of the company. So, why should they give everything and get nothing back? How is that fair? Salespe…
Devs are paid a premium, have generally much more relaxed work schedules than managers or any customer facing role.
If you screw over your health working in a toxic environment that’s on you IMO - as tech worker you probably have more opportunities to improve your working conditions than the vast majority of humans
I wish someone would solve my problem for me. I'm working on the problem because there are no solutions that I can just go and buy. Someone else putting their blood, sweat, and tears into solving my problem, they're the ones who have to deal with being on-call for it, they're the ones who have to maintain it, would be a joy . Why is it so important for you to be the one to solve this problem? Why is it so important f…
I guess some solo dev engineers hope to implement a novel idea, curate the implementation into a somewhat successful business (have a firm grip on the market) and then sell it all off to a bigger fish and make bank. I don't think many people actually want to run a business (long term), but most of us wouldn't mind suddenly being paid a good chunk of money for having solved or worked on an interesting problem.
Perhaps it's just me, but I can't stand the "I'm trying so hard to be funny" writing style.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It reminded me of that quote wrongly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto (who created Mario and Zelda and other classic games). "A rushed game is bad forever, but a delayed one may eventually be good." Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-rel…
Games were not updatable at the time of the quote, which makes an incredibly huge difference from products that can be regularly updated to fix issues.
[0] Games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria and online games being a minority.