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Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

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Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#121

Post by afavour »

cies wrote: post #73
spillguard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's a woman, so it's correct to call her a "woman". No agenda here, necessarily.

I think user "tomp" means that "a one man team" basically means "one person team" in English (and many other languages). Saying "one woman" is shifting the attention to the fact that the one person dev team consists exclusively of women. Which, I think, is pretty cool and note worthy because it is uncommon. Say a startup is run from an tiny island in the pacific, that would also be noteworthy. To me the thing becomes…

> To me the thing becomes "woke" when we are told not to use "one man dev team" to mean "one person dev team"

Is it not a simply a more accurate term? Especially when it's literally a single person. A "one man dev team" that consists of a woman strikes me as unnecessarily confusing.

We're constantly told about these woke scolds that police language but in this instance I'm just seeing conservative scolds trying to police language for no actual logical reason beyond "I don't like it".

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#122

Post by compootr »

bwb wrote: post #37
skizm wrote: post #30

I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?

It is so bad!!! I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list . Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.

I forgot if Anna's archive contains metadata but that'd be my free-ish solution

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#123

Post by giantrobot »

klabb3 wrote: post #80
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.

Can confirm. One of my proudest moments was deleting thousands of LOC of copy-paste-modify garbage. However I introduced one bug that broke another team which used an undocumented feature. It was fixed soon, but yeah, still not great. And very few people would have taken that on, I was not a career chaser. Some would say it’s the other teams fault for not adding a cross-test against my teams code. And while that woul…

> In my humble opinion tests are great if and only if they are hermetic and fast. Unfortunately, the important things that can go wrong are usually the least testable.

Integration tests are hard. A lot of time it's because deployment is very seat of the pants. Even with tightly managed deployment the test environment needs to be representative of the production environment. Just setting that up is time consuming and expensive. Then actually doing tests where the test environment has useful amounts of instrumentation without major performance or behavioral penalties.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#124

Post by wink »

devjab wrote: post #106
mritchie712 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's always fear for me. I'd rather leave it commented out for a decade or so to be safe.

I never understood commenting out code when you have version control. I get why people do it, I’ve done it myself and then two days later been confused which of the 3 commented out function was actually the most recent. It’s infinitely more clear from the version control since the history is there for you to zoom through.

You would find it if you knew it was there.

I only leave it commented out because it has a reason (they all say that, right?).

I suppose the best way would be to provide a meaningful comment "This is the place where 15 lines of coded finally found their resting place, deleted after the bug they solved was eliminated elsewhere".

But in reality, I've never seen a single of the "we could find it it in git" ever actually find it in git.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#125

Post by gerad »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #76
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.

That, and most orgs simply do not reward or even pretend to care about these kinds of improvements. If you delete bad (but working) code, and replace it with good (and, let's assume best-case scenario - also working) code, what has actually changed for the business? Nothing. Except that in 3 years the junior dev that gets a ticket about doing something in this area will come in and not notice the code isn't a dumpste…

> Meanwhile our oauth flow is still a tortured, unloved, twisted writhing mass of pain and suffering that prints bug reports like CVS receipts.

Wow, this line is a keeper. This whole comment is so insightful. Reminds me of how awesome HN can be sometimes.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#126

Post by alternatex »

jahnu wrote: post #97
aniforprez wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case. I've found it to be fairly janky and it has frequent down times every so often. I'm much more inspired to give a small one-person team some leeway about it though for a free app vs. Amazon and all its resources not even bothering to properly maintain Goodreads.

Amazon don’t even properly maintain their Prime Video app for TVs. It’s so bad on my good LG TV that I gave up waiting three seconds for button presses to register while trying to start watching their billion dollar show they kept urging me to watch.

Wait till you try HBO's Max app. I used to plan my watches half an hour ahead. LG TVs do have quite the shoddy hardware though. Every penny goes to the panel.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#127

Post by [deleted] »

jezzamon wrote: post #94
laborcontract wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…

For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

[deleted]

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#128

Post by noprocrasted »

jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#129

Post by Workaccount2 »

jezzamon wrote: post #94
laborcontract wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…

For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success.

Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#130

Post by intelVISA »

jezzamon wrote: post #94
laborcontract wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…

For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!
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