I’ve worked at a VC funded startup that burned $3 million for 2,000 users.
I built a side project that I put on Reddit that got 5,000 hits last month.
The second seems like better ROI
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
51–60 of 195 posts
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#52Quite a few years ago as a (very) junior FE dev I used mammoth.js to automate the generation of a biennial report. Three months had been earmarked for the task as this is what it had taken in previous years (due to bad tools and lack of expertise). I had it done in less than a week by using mammoth. Mike was also very accommodating with questions I'm pleased I cant remember as I'm sure they were embarrassingly simple…
Your story and mammoth's origin story really highlight how the Sisyphean corporate world is seemingly at odds -- or at least tangential -- to progress.
I'm just thinking about how mammoth.js is being developed for free but is being used by corporations to make money. In a way, he's working for free by making this open source. Something is off about that.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#53Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…
The best PMs I've worked with have very clear understandings of customer workflows and needs (or work towards developing them) and communicate those to the dev team. They also make sure to share customer feedback, whether constructive criticism or excitement/thanks.
It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
My most used program was a 7 byte .COM I wrote with debug.exe. It made the machine reboot. It took about 15 seconds to write. A friend who worked at the college ended up using it in their scripts. They had a way to do it before but it wasn't as reliable as my little program. That college's infrastructure was used as a model for the rest of the district and so my little program spread to the other colleges.
jmp f000:e05b Between fiddling with debug.exe and discovering that fixed address, that put me on the path to demystifying technology (or at least understanding everything is approachable).
I feel like everyone has an ah-ha moment when software's facade of magic gives way to a genuine feeling that nothing in software is inunderstandable.
I was helping my brother through some CS classes, and he had to use some sort of graphics library, and things just weren't clicking. I opened the source of the graphics library so he could see what was going on under the hood and he was like "whoa... It's all just... Regular code..."
Demystifying indeed.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#55Same here, I spent many years on complex and large pieces of software with relatively little impact, and an 'all nighter' pretty much changed the world for real time video on the web. Pretty weird when you consider that it was mostly gluing together pieces that already existed and adding a small HTTP server. I haven't been able to replicate anything close to that success in all the years since then.
what was the software ?
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#56I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…
Are your users compensating you well for this? Sounds like the impact you're having is making fintech serious money, so I hope you're getting some of that.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#57Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…
The best PMs I've worked with have very clear understandings of customer workflows and needs (or work towards developing them) and communicate those to the dev team. They also make sure to share customer feedback, whether constructive criticism or excitement/thanks. It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.
Outsourced operations like contractors are often neglected in the feedback loop. So are SRE’s and parts of the business that are less customer facing. This can lead to lack of purpose. Good companies make sure everyone knows their contribution to the whole.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#58Same here, for most of my 15+ years career in IT I've been doing DevOps stuff, mostly writing small scripts and infrastructure code, occasionally hacking on existing projects enough to do drive-by contributions. About 6 years ago I started AutoSpotting, an open source tool designed to reduce AWS costs by automatically replacing on-demand instances with up to 90% cheaper Spot instances, it was meant to be my playgroun…
> I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have been built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.
> It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at some point I tried to monetize it through support and custom development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen users whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.
We've had a lot of issues doing donations for cool projects like this. I'd really like a simple subscription service ala Gumroad so we can sign up for the "Enterprise" tier. Saving $100k we can totally kick back $5k to the person every month without feeling it.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#59I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…
That's great! Did you guide them through the process? Did you motivate them in any way?
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#60I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…
I don’t think you have any obligation to continue supporting the software,
but give yourself more credit! You’re making dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of developers lives significantly better. You’re helping bring the finance industry out of the stone age. You’ve created something useful and valuable, which is no small feat.