Couple years ago I talked to Nadia. Crazy story.
End of year is a big time for her as people setup reading goals for the year I think. My wife is now using it.
I wouldn't have guessed a book site would be so seasonal.
Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
161–170 of 303 posts
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such thing as a 10-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week hobby.
^This is obviously a tangent, but sure there is, if you consider a hobby to be non-professional activities. It is trivial to come up with activities that can consume a lot of time, but don't provide financial rewards.
I suppose maybe parent is mixing up difficult work and difficult hobbies. There are plenty of hobbies which are difficult and require a lot of hard work. Hobbies can be frustrating and yet still enjoyable when you overcome whatever it is that hindered your progress. Someone who does painting as a hobby might face a period of no inspiration - it can be immeasurably frustrating and it completely blocks you from painting. And then one day you see a particular way that the stained glass window reflects light onto the pavement and something gets switched inside and then you proceed to feverishly paint every waking hour and it will feel like it is not you who wield the brush but that you yourself are some sort of instrument being used by something greater.
Game dev is an arduous and draining process that both requires the patience to go through periods of dreary work where no progress seems to be made and yet the creative spirit to devise art, concepts, mechanics, rules, etc. If I had the time, I could easily see myself spending multiple years on a project like that without the need to see any financial reward. I wouldn't see it as work, I would see it as Work with a capital W. A hobby that requires a lot of personal effort but something I do because purely for the joy of doing it.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind. Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
> Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale
The real question here is scale in terms of what? Because a lot of folks are out here trying to scale people/careers, not software.
It's extremely noticeable at BigCorps. Why do we need to scale this project from 3 -> 30 -> 300 developers? Because that's the number of reports to promo from Manager I -> Manager II -> Director
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#164Pretty 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…
I have no incentive to delete bad code and replace it with good code when doing megacorp work. For things I own, it's situational.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's always fear for me. I'd rather leave it commented out for a decade or so to be safe.
I never understood commenting out code when you have version control. I get why people do it, I’ve done it myself and then two days later been confused which of the 3 commented out function was actually the most recent. It’s infinitely more clear from the version control since the history is there for you to zoom through.
> It’s infinitely more clear from the version control since the history is there for you to zoom through
Only if you already know it is there. There is like... zero history discoverability built in the git. and git's historical search story is pretty bad too.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
> Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on. But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
> But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
The point here is to explain how much of a risk these small teams are making.
So that is the relevance of the example. It shows how much more difficult and risky these successes are, by pointing out that even if someone puts in a lot of work, it is actually more impressive because of the large risk.
This is relevant because the sub thread/topic was this:
"Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it."
Therefore, bringing up failures or the fact that there is large risk, supports this point that someone else brought up, which is that it is both hard and deserving of "massive respect".
So that is why someone would bring it up and why it is definitely relevant and correct to bring it up, in response to this point.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#167[stub for offtopicness] [good grief]
Meta: It's a shame all the [dead] comments here over the title of this post are hidden to most. I think it's a good reminder of the opposition some face in this (and other) industries for merely existing.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.
In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hilarious! But even on DS9, there was room for a Quark.
One, sure. If there had been about 15 per episode, as there are on any threads which so much as imply the existence of FEEEEEMALES here, it would've gotten old. (There were other Ferengi sometimes, but they were far less strident on this particular matter, in general.)
Btw, glad I am not the only one making a mental note of someone being a "ferengi". It is such a perfect description somehow. And our industry is full of them.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#170StoryGraph is an excellent tool and I continue to use it daily. I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it. Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you
Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.