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How to never complete anything
131–140 of 220 posts
Re: How to never complete anything
#132Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…
"Ship daily" only works with web applications. If I were to ship my applications daily (or rather: each day where there occur changes), I would just be compiling packages all the time. (Before you ask: This cannot be automated further. I will not give my GPG key to some automation to sign the packages with.)
You can ship daily even if your process is not automated. I usually automate building and deployment later in an application's life -- not at the beginning.
You can automate all steps for building an application but the signing to make your life easier. You can also automate things locally if you're worried about what you're signing.
The bottom line is that this applies to all apps (though your users might be irritated if they need to keep downloading updates).
Re: How to never complete anything
#133I've finished at least 3 major multi-year side projects. One of my open source projects was pretty successful but none of my side projects went anywhere business-wise. Usually some well-funded competitor comes up later with the same idea and takes all the market. My advice: Don't bother starting a side project unless it's really niche, easy to implement and you just want to make enough money to replace your own incom…
>I've met a 17 year old who built a wordpress website that generated $10K per month after just 6 months (though it already had tons of traffic in the first month) and couldn't write a single line of code. I've heard of hundreds of similar stories.
As developers, we tend to think the technical stuff matters way more than it really does. I think non-technical people almost have an advantage here - they'll choose the minimum technology to get the job done.
I've seen some really nice websites created by friends using nothing more than Squarespace or similar. I fear that if I'd been given the job I'd have procrastinated for ages over all the different options and ended up wasting a lot of time and ultimately creating something less impressive.
Re: How to never complete anything
#134Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…
Don't agree. I think that is like saying you can become a professional athlete by just working out everyday. We mostly know what works. It's comradely, career and cash. Most things worth doing isn't going to result in much professional progress or money in the beginning, so working with and showing things for your community is generally the most important. That's what driving every sports team, music group, enthusiast etc. in the beginning. You still of course need the time, knowledge and motivation to do something.
Shipping can be the result of, or one way, to do the right things. But if you look at projects on Github it's usually not a lack of "shipping daily" so much as a lack of packaging it as something useful. Often you see daily commits until the motivation wears off and the project stops. But the software is still buggy, there's no screenshots, it's not straight forward how to build it, lacks documentation etc. They haven't made it into something that is easy for other people to appreciate, so they don't get much positive feedback.
Re: How to never complete anything
#135You could think of building a scalable back end you don't actually need as a form of premature optimization, and I think the way around that is to evaluate & measure what you actually need - problems you have now, not problems you might have later (no matter how sure you are). @gerlv's suggestion to "Ship daily" is great because it not only forces you to ship often, so you feel like you're getting something done, it…
> You could think of building a scalable back end you don't actually need as a form of premature optimization
I've heard this described as "solving the problem you wish you had". A globally-distributed, scalable cloud infrastructure of microservices is good for the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, etc. because it solves problems they face: handling millions of hits in a timely manner; avoiding downtime, every second of which is user-visible, loses them money and damages users' confidence in their service; etc.
It's very unlikely that a side-project will ever face these problems; an off-the-shelf Web server on an off-the-shelf host (say, Apache running on EC2) is probably fine.
A side-project which isn't shipped will never face these problems, because it doesn't have any users, any uptime, any revenue, etc.
Re: How to never complete anything
#136Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…
Once you have a working project, it's OK. But what until then? At first, you will have to invest a lot of time to have the base running.
Re: How to never complete anything
#137Make smaller projects, divide things in manageable pieces and define a clear end.. before starting it.
A project never gets finished just because we never stop adding to it..
Re: How to never complete anything
#138Ship daily This is the advice I can give to anyone who has a side project. Get to the point where you can show something to the users and just start adding stuff. Even if it's just two lines of code or changing the favicon - still worth it. In practice, it's harder to do than it sounds, but I've been doing it for some time and it's been going great. In reality, you won't have millions of users on day 1 no matter how…
In terms of incomplete projects, "Ship daily" could apply to shipping something that sorta works to your non-tech business partners, pre-launch. If you don't have business partners then use your friends or, heck, even yer mom. Just show daily progress to someone (anyone) else. Doesn't have to be your users (which you may not even have yet).
Re: How to never complete anything
#139At the highest level, the trick is to actively do things to increase momentum while avoiding things that reduce momentum. Pick a stack you know, build a way to collect money, release before you've even written code, etc.
I wrote a post titled Side Projects: Avoiding Failures to Launch[1] a few months ago that touches on these same ideas in more detail.
Re: How to never complete anything
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everything you're saying except for this one. It's (currently) easy to get a tech job (in certain areas). It's NOT easy to get a good job. Unless you're well known, or have some popular programming blog with lots of readers, or really self promote well, you have to pound pavement with the rest of us to fight for a good company. There are plenty of dog jobs doing enterprise middleware API plumbing, and po…
A decent job is one that a) pays you reliably b) isn't a sweatshop, and c) doesn't have political problems that you can't handle. I've had these jobs throughout my career and I'd be very happy to continue having them up until the day I retire. Many of what you call "dog jobs" are jobs that I could be perfectly comfortable in. The reason I can be comfortable in these jobs and many techies would feel So Unbelievably Pr…
These are the kinds of comments that keep me coming back to HN. While I don't share your view, it's articulated so well and definitely gives me something to reflect on. Thanks.