My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Asymmetryk » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #88

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.

Yeah, I think especially in finance companies would be willing to pay for support and feature development. There has to be a way to monetize the project and make it so at least it pays for your time. There's nothing wrong with a labor of love, but the companies using your software can afford to pay for your time.

I am probably not actually being realistic in terms of economic results and ROI, but the FIX library GP seems well established - making it documentation that's the case I would like to put forward : any code in a critical path, and what better than a financial exchange subsystem, can be purchased from any number of vendors with support, but how many have genuinely caring, intelligent, thoughtful and usable beyond the immediate remit, thorough and readable documentation? Cloth letter binder and loose leaf format with theoretical introduction, theory of operation, enumerated common implementation errors for examples together with laying out conventions for the payload / XML DTD - the docs you can write tests and tools against without the code.... I have signed off on a pretty penny or two to obtain docs like this, and hundreds of dollars per copy is totally reasonable. I'd thin film laminate select chapters and affix a dry wipe pen inside (how much would it be to custom some from All express?) and by the sounds of this situation I think you could see a standard adoption and satisfying return. Boxes, ring bind, shrink wrap and a 2nd color printed sparingly add up to something that management likes a lot, usually. Professional product support bridges the economicd to enterprise fees, imo..

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

#122

Post by zrail » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

In 2015 or so I wrote a tiny tool for people to record the outgoing voicemail message from their phone. In the intervening years it's helped more than 23,000 people move on from loss, save a grown child's cute voice, and lots of other things. It hasn't been significantly financially rewarding but it's incredibly fulfilling to help someone on such a personal level.

https://vmsave.petekeen.net if you're curious.

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

#123

Post by mech4bg » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:02 PM UTC

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…

This is amazing. I now work in consumer SAAS web development, but I worked for a long time in finance and for 7 years of that exclusively focused on FIX, writing a real-time, highly performant market interface. I would have _loved_ to have had something like this while I was working on it. Have you thought of commercializing it? Do you get to use it in your day-to-day work?

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

#124

Post by Asymmetryk » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

I'm prematurely dreaming of a browser plug in that can more intelligentl arrange page elements when I am heavily zooming in on text. The ability to select page trft6 enlarge would be great. I miss Opera browsers whole page zoom possible because they wrote their own display layer. Windows has lost so many years spawning graphics subsystems, I can't believe that a distro hasn't emerged for us olds. We'll give you green dollars for it on silver round things even ..

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

#125

Post by DangitBobby » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

> I don't know what the total amount of time saved is, but I'm almost certain that it's at least hundreds of times more than the time I've spent working on the tool.

To me, this is the entire point of software and automation. To give time and money back to people, because I want to make the world better. I see software being priced to just barely be worth it for the buyer because it saves time (e.g. Mailgun and Auth0). When I write software, I want to price it so that it saves them so much money adoption is a no-brainer. "Free" pricing would be included in that, of course. Unfortunately, I also don't write much useful software.

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

#126

Post by nicoburns » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:13 PM UTC

satellite2 wrote: post #76

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've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think you're being too hard on yourself. The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win win for all parties involved and more. From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access to startup using js and with rel…

> Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. It's still the most important reason that explain the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years

I think the contempt comes from the fact that financial instruments have a tendency to concentrate those benefits in small proportion of the population. Low-cost mortgages are an excellent example: these have enabled wealth gain for those who were able to get them at a certain time. But that gain has come almost entirely at the expense of those who weren't able to (or simply didn't) get them, who now face greatly increased rent and house prices.

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

#127

Post by petschge » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #117

jjeaff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a common refrain in charitable organizations that are focused on helping the poor: "Sometimes you have to feed the greedy to get to the truly needy." In other words, the greedy will always take advantage, but that doesn't diminish the help you give to the needy. There is simply no way to totally filter for the greedy. This doesn't really apply directly to your situation, but at least for every greedy company…

I do find this aspect of human morality interesting... people get REALLY upset at freeloaders, to a degree that is not proportionate to the cost they add. We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. I guess it kinda makes sense as social creatures, but it can be frustrating at times when you are trying to he…

> We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders.

Is it also more than what we would lose to freeloaders if we did nothing against them? If yes, then it's indeed not rational. But if no, then it's just indicative that what we are doing is working.

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

#128

Post by cortesoft » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

petschge wrote: post #127

cortesoft wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find this aspect of human morality interesting... people get REALLY upset at freeloaders, to a degree that is not proportionate to the cost they add. We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. I guess it kinda makes sense as social creatures, but it can be frustrating at times when you are trying to he…

> We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. Is it also more than what we would lose to freeloaders if we did nothing against them? If yes, then it's indeed not rational. But if no, then it's just indicative that what we are doing is working.

Yeah, that is part of why I said it was interesting… it is hard to figure out how important that behavior is for social stability.

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

#129

Post by drran » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

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…

> My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company.

Did you agree on the price of that extra work? If not, I recommend to set price prohibitively high, e.g. $100 per line of code or $1000 per hour of work. If your company really want to own your side project, then they will need to pay the requested price.

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

#130

Post by nicoffeine » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

satellite2 wrote: post #76

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've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think you're being too hard on yourself. The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win win for all parties involved and more. From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access to startup using js and with rel…

> (central banks interventions are useless without bank and other financial intermediaries participation, it would be like pushing on a string).

Yes, the only thing financial intermediaries would be missing is the actual funds (largely paid by the middle class) to bail out corporations for the second time in less than twenty years.

> Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance.

There has been contempt for greed and corruption for a long time, and for the same reasons that finance continues to earn it today. If the middle class didn’t constantly bail out the banks and their related parasites, you would all be bankrupt.

Frankly I don’t want to hear any advice from anyone in the financial industry until you demonstrate the ability to pay taxes and save enough to make it through the next crisis without crawling to the capitol building with your hand out.