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A Salute to Solo Programmers

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61–70 of 84 posts

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#61
post #56
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that guy's kind of a huge racist, so an ode to him is probably in poor taste: https://twitter.com/TempleOS/status/337551685285195777

I didn't take the time to delve in to other tweets, but if you know more about him, can you tell me whether, based on what you know of him, he is saying "black people are niggers"(0) or "I won't be shamed into not using a word"(1). Based on just the tweet , it sounds like #1. If so, I can only repeat "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". And, furthermore, I don't think t…

No, it's the first one. He's a pretty big bigot and racist. He's also been diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia, so take that for what it's worth.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This!

Since there are no more upvote-points, we can't know how many people agree with the comment, so "this" are again required (or show alternative).

I do not need to know how many people agree with something to know whether I agree or disagree with it.

There's no need to show upvote points; just order it so I'm more likely to read the things that other people think are worth reading. I can judge it myself without seeing N "this" comments or upvote points beside it.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#64
Hi to all the other solo devs out there! I've been building http://moonman.io/ mostly by myself for 4 years now, writing all the code (roughly 100k lines of c++) as well as creating all the earlier art and design. Earlier this year I was lucky to be crowdfunded enough to hire an artist and continue working on the game.

On projects that span years you find that you're not actually working alone, you're collaborating with your younger self. A younger self who is more naive, more optimistic, sloppier, and who leaves funny comments for you to stumble across years later.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#67

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling. At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times…

I did that for 4 years. Beware! Being the only tech at an "agency" will quickly atrophy your core engineering skills, if you're not careful. You will get _good_ at delivering working solutions quickly, but these will tend to be one-off fixes, often data deliverables, but not finished products. You will also gradually slip on testing, and QA in general.

Working in an engineering team environment has all sorts of benefits. After I moved to my next gig, I think I learned more about dev in my first 3 months at product team, than I had in my last 4 years at previous gig, all thanks to simple code reviews and pairing. It's amazing to hear the thought process of other developers and how they would approach a particular problem.

Enjoy it. Learn everything you can, but keep in mind that you're not getting the full picture. Full software product lifecycle might be very different beast than what you're doing right now.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#68

"The many superpowers of Apple’s Preview (here and here) does justice to the app’s power and flexibility. Read it and join me in my appreciation for this labor of love from a solo, unnamed programmer who, I’m told, has been at it since the NeXT days." Preview is one app that is a source of constant admiration and consistency that makes using OS x that much easier. Maybe a single excellent developer can make better ca…

Preview is ok. It's clunky for looking at multiple images in a directory. Editing images is just weird - saving the image as you make edits, so you have to revert if you play with something - it breaks a 40 year old opn file-edit file-save file paradigm.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#69
post #33

Most grunt work is automated and so much knowledge is leveraged even solo-shops can keep all tech together. Good! That said, data from hard-science problems is the new nut to crack. I almost cry thinking of startups like rescale.com, the chance they offer to independent researchers and scientists to do so much more than it can be done in a shared lab or cluster. When I read of $$$ burn rate in the SV, I cringe: one i…

Is rescale's offering the equivalent of an Ikea table? I'm not sure of the relevance of the connection.

I think this person might be a bot, most of his comments are borderline non-sensical.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#70
post #5

Credit where credit is due -> https://github.com/sindresorhus

This guy has me blocked on GitHub and I have no idea why. I've never interacted with him before. I tried to make a simple pull request to fix something and GitHub won't even let me fork his code.

I've emailed him and asked if he perhaps blocked me by accident or something and got no response.

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