Only tangentially relevant to the story I guess, but StoryGraph is kind of a brilliant idea.
I should really migrate from GoodReads; since Amazon bought them, development has effectively stopped, and there's a lot of QoL issues.
Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
61–70 of 303 posts
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#62Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#63Pretty 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?
Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size.
At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on.
There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#64Pretty 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?
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Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never…
It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind.
Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#66Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#67Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#68I tried using this but it was too onerous to import my existing list of books I’ve read (1000+). So I gave up after a bit. I usually don’t really have trouble finding books to read anyway.
BTW my library (and probably yours too) has a free service where librarians will actually recommend books for you based on other books you liked or other criteria. I found those recommendations to be very good.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt "support" is all that necessary for an app of this type, as you yourself mentioned. Making something that millions of people use and appreciate? That's worthy of praise.
I actually emailed the story graph with a support question and got a prompt response. I imagine you do have to provide it since you have paying customers.
It's expected, I'm sure. But there is not an inherent law of the universe that requires companies to provide support for their services or products.
That StoryGraph provides it is a nice extra touch. I personally would not expect it.