Pros and cons of solo development
johnjeffers.com
Pros and cons of solo development
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Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#2Founding a company, or just working on any project with a very small team (Less than 5 people) has all of the same issues the author wrote about here. At least they did for me. I resonated a lot with this.
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Separately, I hope the author of this project is able recognize how this project might be able to grow sustainably. Its a hard thing to know that you won't be able to work on something forever, and either building a community who wants to maintain a core project or having some company pay to maintain it could be a good idea. Linus isn't going to be around forever, but I expect that linux will outlive him by a good margin.
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#3maybe a little bit of telemetry that is meant to inform the developer is OK
i assume most people are just against the ad-driven telemetry
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#4Any tips if you have been a solo dev for a very long term (20+ years) for getting hired as part of a team?
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#5I've spent most of the last two or so years working solo (engineering wise) professionally. I'd say the biggest con is that it's lonely. I've gone weeks without talking to people at work. I think that would drive most people crazy :).
I'd say responsibility is the same for me as I've only worked at small companies as a generalist. But yeah I suspect if you come from big tech land, being the everything person might be super tough to get used to.
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#6Lessons from my failure:
- do everything you can to keep burnout at bay
- you do, in fact, need a holiday
- hyperfocus is not your friend, ever; if you feel you can’t put it down, you must put it down
- never delete emails; the one thing you can guarantee is that you will need an email you deleted
- if you look back at your notes and they are not instantly obvious, rewrite them while you still remember what you meant, because one day you won’t
- you might be selling your abilities but you should never rely on them yourself; you do need systems
- you can fall out of love with the thing you are best at
- listen to your friends when they sell your talents; if they say you can do a thing, who are you to argue?
- three days of fully billable work per week is already too risky to gamble on, so:
- you are not charging enough
- YOU ARE NOT CHARGING ENOUGH
- FFS do you even listen? You’re not charging enough
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#7For me the Best Pros is "That one random-internet-comment is a good usability improvement, ask LLM to do the small change and commit immediately."
Smaller ideas need not be approved, or held back by schedule pressure from bean counters. Just Do It. :). It's the small corrections which end up polishing the product as good as "professional usability studies".
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#8A version of this I've been enjoying is mostly solo dev but with a biz-guy partner. I mostly just build software but have a partner who will go find out how people are using it, what they want, handle inbound, and be there to chat about ideas even if we're not getting into the technical weeds.
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#9Any tips if you have been a solo dev for a very long term (20+ years) for getting hired as part of a team?
The conclusion I have drawn is that the only way I will be part of a team is to hire them or be indispensable on one specific project thing.
Re: Pros and cons of solo development
#10Part of the cons is offset, if the single maintainer dissapears, nothing a fork can't fix :)