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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

mike.zwobble.org

71–80 of 195 posts

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't FIX messaging part of the stone age problem?

Well, baby steps and all that :^)

At least it’s not a hand-rolled, “enterprise-grade” (read: extremely verbose with unnecessary abstractions) pile of spaghetti. I’m slightly scarred from my brief stint at a large finance firm.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#72

I 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'm trying to find niches where positive feedback loops have a nicer effect on society (right now trying to help courthouse daily duties for instance)

It would be nice to make a list of such niches. Things that wouldn’t take more than a couple of hundred hours to make (at max) and are tremendously useful, especially to vulnerable populations like old people, people with limited internet connection, physically challenged people etc.

These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#74

Companies 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…

Documenting and communicating motivation and impact are often pretty high up the priority list for PMs, otherwise you're just a context-free ticket factory, which typically results in subpar products.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#75

I 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'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of your time working on things that matter more to humanity.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#76

I 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've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think you're being too hard on yourself.

The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win win for all parties involved and more.

From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access to startup using js and with relatively simple tech stacks access to a tool that would otherwise be relatively complicated and time consuming and for which they would not necessary have the resouces. By doing so you lowered the cost of entry and allowed new entrants to challenge the status quo.

And from a macroeconomic perspective I think it's one of the reason access to capital has been simplified and has lowered in cost, it's one of the reason for the low cost of mortgages and the relative resilience of economies during covid (central banks interventions are useless without bank and other financial intermediaries participation, it would be like pushing on a string).

Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. It's still the most important reason that explain the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years, and the best thing one can do is to make it less arcane and open it to more people. One of the achievements of your tool.

You can be proud of your work.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#77

Companies 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 project I'm currently the "lead developer" on never had a PM, so we directly communicate with users/customers. Often we are able to implement changes and make them available in a test environment within the hour - people are amazed, because they're used to everything taking days at the very least, usually weeks or months, with a lot of stuff never being fixed and so on.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#78

I 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…

Huh! You left out the most funky part: you wrote a FIX parser in Typescript.

What are people using it for? To make web apps and just not have to roll their own wrappers around FIX/FIX-derived data? (That is, if all back ends are used to speaking FIX, it’s nicer to have the front end and web serving tools also just speak it?).

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#79
This happens in the crypto currency space all the time. I have friends that have launched very thought out projects that they spend a significant amount of time on. Then they’ll launch some meme project and it will do 1000x better. It’s certainly a weird feeling.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#80
post #78

I 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…

Huh! You left out the most funky part: you wrote a FIX parser in Typescript . What are people using it for? To make web apps and just not have to roll their own wrappers around FIX/FIX-derived data? (That is, if all back ends are used to speaking FIX, it’s nicer to have the front end and web serving tools also just speak it?).

People use nodejs in finance backends too. Its async operators make it easy to munge different data streams together and fan in/out results.
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