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Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

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Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#191

Post by nightski »

stale2002 wrote: post #166
diggan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

There are countless AAA teams that fail at game dev as well. It's just a really hard industry to garner success in. I'm not sure team size is the most relevant factor.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#192

Post by anonfordays »

madeofpalk wrote: post #167
dang wrote: post #201

[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.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#194

Post by Alupis »

ziddoap wrote: post #182
qup wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have them hidden. I can't find anything derogatory about women; rather, the comments point out perceived hypocrisy around naming genders in titles. The comments about Nadia specifically were great, including a dead comment saying what a blessing she is to the rails community. > Ruby on Rails community is so lucky to have Nadia Another dead comment says it's not impressive, but doesn't mention gender. Two dead…

> I don't really find any of the specific comments notable, hateful, or oppositional. The fact that gender is mentioned at all, when it's never mentioned in posts that have "one man dev team" in the title, doesn't imply anything to you?

Are we not at a point where it would be vastly more appropriate to title this "one person dev team"?

The reality is your gender has nothing to do with your ability to write software. Software is the greatest of equalizers.

There is definitely a subset of society that feels it necessary to thrust gender into discussions where they have no place - such as this article.

Are we supposed to be more impressed because it was a female? Why?

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#195

Post by rafram »

matwood wrote: post #50
bwb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is so bad!!! I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list . Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.

If you have an ISBN you can also check Worldcat, but at scale it's also probably not free. And if you're working with anything that might have an academic slant, Crossref can be useful. Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.

WorldCat doesn't have an official API for anyone but member libraries, scraping the site is not fun, and the quality of the data isn't great (it's essentially bulk-imported from member libraries' catalogs).

National databases like the Library of Congress are significantly better - WorldCat is best used as a fallback for books that aren't included in the high-quality databases.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#196

Post by ziddoap »

Alupis wrote: post #194
ziddoap wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really find any of the specific comments notable, hateful, or oppositional. The fact that gender is mentioned at all, when it's never mentioned in posts that have "one man dev team" in the title, doesn't imply anything to you?

Are we not at a point where it would be vastly more appropriate to title this "one person dev team"? The reality is your gender has nothing to do with your ability to write software. Software is the greatest of equalizers. There is definitely a subset of society that feels it necessary to thrust gender into discussions where they have no place - such as this article. Are we supposed to be more impressed because it wa…

>Are we not at a point where it would be vastly more appropriate to title this "one person dev team"?

Sure! I just find it interesting that these discussions only happen when "woman" is in the title, and never when "man" is in the title.

>There is definitely a certain subset of society that feels it necessary to thrust gender into discussions where they have no place - such as this article.

As long as you feel the same way whenever you see "one man dev team" or similar, I think that can be a good discussion.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#197

Post by sangnoir »

swiftcoder wrote: post #168
julianeon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do

That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#198

Post by [deleted] »

anonfordays wrote: post #192
madeofpalk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[deleted]

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#199

Post by kumarm »

jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty 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?

Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#200

Post by Alupis »

ziddoap wrote: post #196
Alupis wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we not at a point where it would be vastly more appropriate to title this "one person dev team"? The reality is your gender has nothing to do with your ability to write software. Software is the greatest of equalizers. There is definitely a subset of society that feels it necessary to thrust gender into discussions where they have no place - such as this article. Are we supposed to be more impressed because it wa…

> Are we not at a point where it would be vastly more appropriate to title this "one person dev team"? Sure! I just find it interesting that these discussions only happen when "woman" is in the title, and never when "man" is in the title. > There is definitely a certain subset of society that feels it necessary to thrust gender into discussions where they have no place - such as this article. As long as you feel the…

I agree with you entirely - however allow me to illustrate a point:

I think the difference often is the intention of the writer. We get these types of headlines when people want to really promote how cool it is a female is capable of doing something - and we're all supposed to be amazed. That's pretty sexist if you think about it... of course a female is capable of writing high quality software! We should be amazed at what this person achieved because it is impressive on it's own merit - not because of the person's gender.

However, nobody is reading a headline like "one man dev team" and thinking "you go dude!".

It's a two-way double-standard that we should work on ending.

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