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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

mike.zwobble.org

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Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#101

Post by mwilliamson »

georgeburdell wrote: post #87

As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product. The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't…

Author here! The open sourced code was rewritten from scratch, not least because the original version was in C# while the open source version is in JavaScript. So, the same idea, but an entirely new implementation.

I forget exactly what conversations I had, but it was also very clear that they had no problem with me doing so since it doesn't really have any connection with their core business. If I wanted to, I suspect I could have open sourced the original version so long as I stripped out the stuff that was specific to the company.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#102

Post by wreath »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #50

Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…

I've seen more engineers completely disinterested in anything customer related (and even calling users stupid!) more than I've seen PMs isolating devs. Every time I ask a PM if I could interact with a customer (not asking for permission, but to hook me up) they were delighted. Every single time.

Another way to solve this problem is to have engineers on customer support rotation of some sort. This way, engineers get to see how their software is used in the wild and interact with customers, and PMs get to see how unrealistic expectations and deadlines comes back to bite you in the ass in a form of your engineers being busy fixing half assed crap.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#103

Post by vinceguidry »

I guess I can see why this would be surprising to most programmers. It doesn't surprise me at all. Why would the wishes of any profit-seeking enterprise, who serves a very select clientele, those willing to pay for what the business provides, have anywhere close to the impact of a software project chosen out of a random itch, taken to the point where others actually get interested in it, and use to build their side projects, each of which can provide their own impact?

Unless you're a big techco with worldwide reach, what could compete with that?

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#104

Post by kilroy123 »

alien_ wrote: post #75
logotype wrote: post #49

I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…

I'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of your time working on things that matter more to humanity.

But then it's a job and he/she probably won't like it anymore.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#105

Post by didibus »

andreilys wrote: post #86
mattwad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of little features for each client, making individuals happy, but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy" for everyone...

Why do you need a PM for that? That’s what a good tech lead with a robust roadmap is for. PMs sprung out of the notion that engineers are anti-social and need someone to keep customers/internal teams at bay so eng can focus on coding. Of course in reality there are plenty of highly competent tech leads who can both negotiate with customers on a roadmap and build it.

The work involved in keeping up with a roadmap, convincing execs that the roadmap is worth investing in, communicating it with the marketing teams, content teams and support teams, tying it back with customer demands and needs, and all that really ends up taking most of your time as a tech lead, and you no longer have time to work on tech design, architecture, training, reviews, coding, testing, etc.

That's where you'd want a PM brought in, the tech lead ideally would work together with the PM on the roadmap, in that technology must be considered when designing a roadmap, feasibility, effort needed, technical complexities, needed tech dept pay backs, needed redesigns, infrastructure upgrades, security considerations, etc. As well as being consulted for what can tech realistically provide as means to solve problems, etc.

That's why I think a PM is needed, so the tech lead can focus on leading the technology, while the PM focuses on capturing requirements, getting funding, coordinating the launch, and all that.

Ideally, there's also a separate dev manager, so the tech lead doesn't have to worry about employee resourcing, project allocation, hiring, compensation, promotion, needs/wants, vacation time, performance, etc.

For all these things, the tech lead should be consulted and have a voice, but freeing them from all this work is definitely a plus, why have your most experienced developer do all this management work?

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#106

Post by alien_ »

kilroy123 wrote: post #104
alien_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of your time working on things that matter more to humanity.

But then it's a job and he/she probably won't like it anymore.

That's okay, it doesn't need to be a full-time job, but more like a "4 hour work week" mini-job that pays the bills with minimal ongoing effort.

The rest of the time could be spent doing other more interesting things that just bring joy and/or benefit humankind.

They'll probably also have further potential for monetization, and so on, sustaining a life of leisure and doing meaningful work.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#107

Post by agumonkey »

akudha wrote: post #96
agumonkey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd gladly help people with those issues. I'm gonna seek them (no idea why I never thought about that). The reason I put elders aside is that their motivations and emotions are very different from younger people. There are lot of fear, loneliness driving their need for help, and often they don't really want to own the knowledge, it's more a little bit of emotional support; which is cool, but not as motivating as, say…

There was a language website that connected old people with youngsters who want to learn languages. They practice their language skills and help the old people with loneliness. This is a very good idea.

indeed, those bridges are great

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#108

Post by dahart »

andreilys wrote: post #86
mattwad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of little features for each client, making individuals happy, but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy" for everyone...

Why do you need a PM for that? That’s what a good tech lead with a robust roadmap is for. PMs sprung out of the notion that engineers are anti-social and need someone to keep customers/internal teams at bay so eng can focus on coding. Of course in reality there are plenty of highly competent tech leads who can both negotiate with customers on a roadmap and build it.

It’s true, there are plenty of engineers who are capable of dealing with customers. PMs, however, did not come from an idea that engineers are antisocial, you’re making assumptions. PMs have long existed in other industries where the very same is true as software; the people building the product are often capable of talking to customers, but don’t.

The reason PMs exist is because it’s a full time job, just like most roles. Being an engineer and/or tech lead is also a full time job. In larger companies, we tend to split out full time jobs. Often in small startups, people have multiple roles. So in a small company you might see someone talking to customers and engineering. In a large company, it’s far more likely that the engineer and the PM are two different people.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#109

Post by vmception »

true_religion wrote: post #80
boulos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh! You left out the most funky part: you wrote a FIX parser in Typescript . What are people using it for? To make web apps and just not have to roll their own wrappers around FIX/FIX-derived data? (That is, if all back ends are used to speaking FIX, it’s nicer to have the front end and web serving tools also just speak it?).

People use nodejs in finance backends too. Its async operators make it easy to munge different data streams together and fan in/out results.

oh this is something to say louder for the people in the back: there is no reason that finance and computational finance gravitated around python

there is nothing inherent about that language aside from people not having made some libraries in other languages

javascript especially nodejs is fine for most people's finance cases

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#110

Post by alien_ »

agumonkey wrote: post #84
akudha wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to make a list of such niches. Things that wouldn’t take more than a couple of hundred hours to make (at max) and are tremendously useful, especially to vulnerable populations like old people, people with limited internet connection, physically challenged people etc. These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily

old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of them regularly, for IT reasons or not) the obvious fields in the list: - education - healthcare - justice someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically ma…

There's a lot to be done to address digital divide especially for the elderly.

The other week I witnessed first hand how multiple 50-something folks who own smartphones struggled with something as easy as filling a form on a website for making an appointment (in this case for getting a passport) and confirming the appointment by clicking an email.

Or think about the thousands of vulnerable/old people who will die of COVID-19 because they failed to schedule their vaccinations even though they could otherwise access it. A friend who works in Berlin on radiotherapy for cancer patients said lots of them aren't vaccinated because they just can't sign up for it and their doctor doesn't do it for them.

Anything that requires using technology, even as simple as using a browser and getting a confirmation email should be probably be also made available by more familiar/accessible tools such as SMS/whatsapp/facebook or a call center.

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