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A certain fraction of this website's user base are, and always have been, basically Quark from DS9. Some really bizarre attitudes to women.
Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
131–140 of 303 posts
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#132Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#133Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…
After Windows, Stardew Valley was ported to consoles by other companies, like Chucklefish, Sickhead Games, and The Secret Police (not dev work but console Q&A was handled by others too, as was localization).
Barone is still a beast, just making sure the "one guy did the whole thing" thing has some nuance.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#134Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never…
> Delete bad code. Replace with good code
Your points are valid but there's also the issue that the more developers you have the more communication overhead there is, which makes large changes to the codebase hard/impossible.
With a handful of devs you can jump on a call, brainstorm for an hour or two and come to a mutual agreement, then one can submit a several-thousand-line PR refactoring the whole thing and nobody would bat an eye.
This kind of coordination is impossible in larger teams, if anything just because everyone is busy and can't afford to spend a couple hours brainstorming + subsequently get acquainted with the new code, but also because the more people the more opinions and mismatched incentives (bad or overly complex code might imply busywork which some people thrive on, so refactoring it to no longer require said busywork is a downside in their eyes).
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#135Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
>Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase?
Tons of FOSS projects.
See the entire JiaTan fiasco.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#136Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…
For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it.
Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!
He wrote it in C# and used XNA for some stuff, but the engine itself is custom[1]
[1] https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/game-development...
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That, and most orgs simply do not reward or even pretend to care about these kinds of improvements. If you delete bad (but working) code, and replace it with good (and, let's assume best-case scenario - also working) code, what has actually changed for the business? Nothing. Except that in 3 years the junior dev that gets a ticket about doing something in this area will come in and not notice the code isn't a dumpste…
One of the most rewarding aspects of my previous career at a company spanning from a startup to an IPO and beyond was deleting bad code and replacing it in a massive Rails app that was touched by hundreds of devs in a high churn environment. I also took on fixing massive schema inefficiencies that had a lot of risk of breaking nearly every other team's flow. It took a lot of careful work and communication across mult…
I think I’ve taken some considerable career hits for that kind of attitude, but mostly no regrets here either. But I think I was affected by how, once you leave that company, your contribution to the effort can seem kind of gone, gone gone. That’s part of why I came back to trying to create a physical invention that someone might care about. Something for the grandkid to put on his mantlepiece and say “my granddaddy made this and patented it and (hopefully) it was the start of his big company.”
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!
Building an engine from scratch cannot be the hard part. It’s not complicated.
Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.