21–30 of 141 posts
If you want to make money: make things that other people want. It is great fun to tinker with the latest JS framework...but that is what you want to do, not what other people actually need.
Btw, just generally, developers could do with understanding business better. At most places, business is just something that gets in the way of fking around with Haskell or whatever.
I would rather go in depth, strengthen your core, learn about different paradigms, algorithms and structures. Why are you going into frameworks and technologies that your employer is not forcing you to adopt? It is an incredible effort to understand a technology and its specifics. What is the value in this, it will be obsolete in a few years at best and odds are that you will never use it again.
If large portion of your knowledge is frequently invalidated, how do you people not burn out 5 years into your careers?
So many big frameworks are oriented towards big companies and many hands, and I understand why, but I wonder if there are examples of frameworks that are designed for single authors, that are designed to stay simple and change slowly, like an LTS release. Like, I still know how to write html hooked to php scripts, but once you want a javascript event model it seems like React swallows everything.
It’s pretty cringeworthy to see someone parroting the “use boring technology” line, then immediately running off and making an SPA for something that...let’s be real...could probably be done in a week or two by a single developer with a Rails install and little else.
I think the tough part that engineers have with these types of side projects is that it's hard to assess how much time to devote to developing the product. A lot of people will try to convince you to spend all your time talking to the customer. I mean that's important too, but it's so much easier when you can show them something that's great rather than just tell them about it. And that's the thing - product development isn't most important thing to do in the early stages, but it's still very important.
I wish there was more insight into why the project failed though. It wasn't clear to me the project had to die. If he started focusing on customer development, could the project have survived? Could he win back his wife's interest? I was a tiny bit disappointed because his project is an adjacent area to one of my company's products and I want to see it succeed!
So many big frameworks are oriented towards big companies and many hands, and I understand why, but I wonder if there are examples of frameworks that are designed for single authors, that are designed to stay simple and change slowly, like an LTS release. Like, I still know how to write html hooked to php scripts, but once you want a javascript event model it seems like React swallows everything.
Actually, if you want it to be a business, the first step would be just use something else out there.
Buy > Customize > Build
It would have been interesting to see what his wife uses at the moment. I think he could have given her functioning software by just taking her excel sheets (for instance, if that is what she used) and just put them online with Google, and connected them with Scripts and an interface with Forms.
After that was working pretty well, maybe he could offer to set it up for some others.
Only after that would he selectively take pieces of the system and change it to Django. So first, have the forms in Django talk to their sheets. Then have their sheets dump into his reporting system etc.
We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…
Time to say no to npm and packages like is_odd that somehow are depended on by thousands of packages. A sign of collective hysteria.
> I didn’t help my customers and was too focused on the technology. Somewhat ironic that your Postmortem is highly focused on technology as well :) But seriously, SaaS businesses are still businesses. I think so many software developers think “I can build that!” about X and fail to realize how much of a business has nothing to do with the product.
The issue is when the focus is _only_ on the product and no effort is done on business development, market research, marketing...
Garbage is an harder sell than outstanding especially with limited resources. However, if "outstanding" means "I think they'll throw money at it, I just have to wait", you've got a problem.
We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…
You don’t need jquery either, native JS works just fine for most simple interactions like startup apps. Time to say no to npm and packages like is_odd that somehow are depended on by thousands of packages. A sign of collective hysteria.
The answer was yes in this case. Perhaps that's just the familiarity of it, but at the end of the day, faster is faster.
I'd say my new philosophy is: let our competitors optimize for purity or trendiness or even render time while we optimize for development speed.