281–290 of 303 posts
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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!
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. https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
love your authentic coverage adam. never change.
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Good code and bad code are not objective values. I have worked with many people that spend days replacing good code with bad code because they are ”paying down technical debt”.
This is a good point, but I think it's mostly a precondition to having the luxury of the problems I was describing. If you can't even broadly agree on what is good vs bad code, your engineering org has deeper problems. You don't even need substantial agreement, just enough to identify what the genuine problem areas are, vs what's just not how someone would've written it themselves.
I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?
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.
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It’s cyclical. Once the StoryGraphs and Hardcovers of today are big enough to be not bothered about some users with refined UX taste they’d do the same. This repeats.
nah, not for them, passion runs StoryGraph and Hardcover. Amazon runs Goodreads and they are never around :)
Here's the link, in case you finish watching her talk and want an even deeper-dive: https://changelog.com/podcast/577
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?
The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people.
And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.
I just want to +1 the recommendation for StoryGraph. I used Goodreads for a decade but got frustrated at how little Amazon invested in it. Plus the review culture was getting toxic. Took me an hour or two to migrate all of my books over. StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have t…
I’m not sure what world other people live in but Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with my reading ebooks. Not how I buy them, not how I read them. I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
> I’ve been building an app
Most people live in a world where they don’t build their own ebook software. I think you actually do know this.
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I’m not sure what world other people live in but Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with my reading ebooks. Not how I buy them, not how I read them. I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
> I’m not sure what world other people live in > I’ve been building an app Most people live in a world where they don’t build their own ebook software. I think you actually do know this.
I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?