Every major source of my income over the past ten years has started as a side project. Not a single one came out of a deliberate effort to build something big but began as a mere experiment for the fun of it.
Side projects
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: Side projects
#152Companies have long sponsored (or hired) individuals to work on FLOSS, but I think we could go a lot further. If we could make it part of the culture of (scaling) companies / funding ecosystems to say "when we reach X revenue, we're going to hire /sponsor 5 people to work on FLOSS stuff full time." Obviously, these companies will have more incentive to sponsor people who work on software they use heavily (which should stay the first priority, as it makes a lot of sense), but it'd be great to take it to the next level and have them hire people who work on useful / popular software that they don't use everyday (directly) or doesn't have much to do with their bottom line. This could include 'adjunct' software work like package repository maintainers and writers of documentation for these projects.
If it wasn't one-offs and outliers, but just something that companies did as part of getting big, we'd have a lot less need for periodic emergency fundraisers, and fewer stories about "important software X that's about to lose its sole maintainer(s)."
Re: Side projects
#153Is there a list of companies and the people they hired/sponsor to maintain FLOSS stuff?
Re: Side projects
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.
> The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. This. That's the primary reason I keep eating unhealthy. Since I started working, I naturally gravitated toward few dishes that basically make themselves - e.g. french fries, boiled/fried sausage, etc. - basically anything I can drop on the stove and leave unatte…
I would strongly recommend slow cookers. You can leave it in the morning and get it in the evening. The recipes are straightforward and require little actual cooking knowledge.
Even better you can easily cook large quantities so you're not even cooking every day.
My healthy favorite is slow-cooked stew combined with rice-cooker brown rice/quinoa - both are set on timers so they finish just before we get home - so no reheating.
Re: Side projects
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I don't even have kids yet. I'm still ~5 years from having little ones I'd imagine. Both of the people working with me on the project have kids, and I admire them (and you) tremendously for fitting everything in.
Once you have children, everything changes. I went from having 5+ hours of free time each day to -5 hours of free time every day. You have to get super efficient with everything in your life. Cut out the things that aren't the most important things. Kids (especially when they're between 0-7 years old) take up an enormous amount of energy and focus. You'll learn tricks to improve your performance and squeeze more time…
I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well.
At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time.
A part of the "playing" that I do with him is building and repairing stuff around the home. He loves it. It takes much longer to complete anything that if I was just doing it myself, but I'm doubling up "play" and "chores" so it works out. For things that he can't help with I try to outsource.
I like some of the ideas of past generations who often viewed kids as resources.
Re: Side projects
#156I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…
I can completely empathize. I have a family, and so it takes even more effort to create the time and find the space to make things happen.
I just launched a game into the App Store. The journey was incredible, and filled with joy, sweat, and tears.
I've written about what I've gone through. It might be helpful for you. A small caution... these are relatively long posts, but hopefully they are enjoyable, insightful, and personally beneficial for you.
My experiences with what I felt while developing the game:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888070
An older post that I wrote about work, embracing the grind, and driving through.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076143
I wish you every success.
P.S. I figured I should do a TL;DR since those posts are even more epic in length than I realized, so I snagged some salient points:
1. You may look at your project and think, "I'm never going to make it. I'll never finish." Please, I urge you to set these thoughts aside and push through. Think about the analogy of building a wall. A wall is built one brick at a time. Watch a mason build a wall one day. You will observe that he or she lays one brick at a time.
This is how you have to view your project. Sure, it would be amazing to have an entire day, every day to devote to your project. However, the reality is that most of us simply do not have that luxury. So, strive to think of it as a mason: lay one brick at a time, and eventually the wall will be built. Every character that you type into Xcode, Visual Studio, etc. turns into a keyword, a variable name, etc... that subsequently turns into a line. Those lines build up, day by day, and before you know it, you have a program, and you look back and think, "Wow, why did I ever think I could not finish?"
2. You have to fight. This is paramount. I will say it again... you have to fight! What I mean here is fighting by engaging your Will. Engage your will to get up, to get moving. Engage your will to eat right, to exercise and go to bed on time so that you have the energy to get up and bring it.
3. You never know where your work will take you. Do not forget that, you have to dream it first in your mind before you can see it in your life. And to see it in your life, you must work. You may not be able to see things clearly now, but you never know what doors could open for you that you did not even know existed.
4. I find that I read this story at least once a month; it's just incredibly encouraging to me:
http://whatshihsaid.com/2013/02/26/ang-lee-a-never-ending-dr...
Re: Side projects
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to argue your point and you should read heavily into the "tragedy of the commons" problem that plagues many open source communities, but companies can give back in many ways, in terms of bug fixes, features and improvements to the projects they use (at least wise companies do). In Twitter's case, we've also contributed to the Redis ecosystem via twemproxy: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy Twemproxy h…
can give back in many ways The standard way society compensates persons for useful goods and services is by exchanging currency, not by bartering favors or by saying "look! we made a billion dollars using your software, here, have these free 40 lines of code as a bug fix. thx." Unrelated note: every time I see these (needlessly?) optimized string compare statements, I fall out of my chair laughing and/or crying: http…
The standard way people indicate to society that they would like to exchange currency is by setting a price for their product.
It doesn't seem particularly fair to say "here world, use my open source project for free," and then get mad that people use it for free.
And in fact, I don't think antirez is saying that. It looks to me like other people, who didn't build Redis in the first place, are the ones saying that.
Re: Side projects
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
2 kids, 3 freelance gigs (full time at this), a couple startups behind me (1 pivoted away, 1 still running). I would love to get 5 hours for an OSX app I really want to build. You really do have to shut out the rest of your life if you want to make a serious run at a project. When you are cramming a side project into you life, you really can "work" 80 hour weeks. The irritability you're experiencing will probably jus…
Speaking of side projects and learning to cook, I'm working on a side project that helps people learn to cook. Happy to share if interested.
Since people expressed interest, my side project is https://cookacademy.com
Happy to offer whatever help I can outside of the site, too.
Re: Side projects
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of side projects and learning to cook, I'm working on a side project that helps people learn to cook. Happy to share if interested.
Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.
Yes, though sometimes in non-obvious ways. For example, cleaning a pan after making pan-sautéed chicken is difficult until you realize you can make a pan sauce and get the pan clean at the same time.
Lessons are broken down into the mise en place steps (which makes preparation simpler). We're working on content now to help with simplifying cleaning, though the general mantra is to clean as you go.
Important metrics for us when creating lessons are number of ingredients required and number of dirty dishes that result. We want you to make things that won't fill a sink with dirty dishes and doesn't require a 30-minute, $100 trip to the grocery store. Satisfying all these requirements are hard and I don't think we've nailed it yet, but it's on our mind constantly.
Re: Side projects
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.
There are a few services now that deliver a box of ingredients and recipes for $60 or so a week for three meals. Plated, HelloFresh, BlueApron. They really helped us actually cook more, instead of talking about it. It still takes time (30-40 min per meal) but you do learn cooking techniques and you do eat much healthier. And while it seems expensive, we probably go out one less night a week because of it, saving $60…
The pain of going to buy ingredients is a big one for people. I just can't personally see myself spending that on much ingredient delivery, though my wife does get some things delivered from a CSA.
I think there are two other pains wrapped up in why people buy from these services: meal planning and instruction. Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air. To some degree these services provide some instruction, though I've heard people get instructional benefits from these to varying degrees. Would be curious to see how the instruction has helped you.