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I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

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Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#71

Post by Nemi »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #24
reactordev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.

How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?

Pivoting means you are solving a new core problem. Adding features keeps the core problem intact.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#73

Post by kubb »

AutistiCoder wrote: post #59
kubb wrote: post #29

How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.

You could just not do a Web app. There are plenty of apps you can build that don't require any upfront costs. I'm working on an app that runs entirely on a consumer PC.

Hey, my question was about the costs of living, not the costs of web hosting :)

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#75

Post by ge96 »

beryilma wrote: post #61

> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote…

What is the latest now in JS land? HTMX and combining client/server side code in one file right?

I am guilty of trying to keep up with the buzz like learning Rust even if I don't need it (get by with JS/Python/C++)

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#76

Post by chrismorgan »

piskov wrote: post #34

2.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any accessibility specs. Please don’t do this

I’d noticed it as 2.58 in Firefox’s dev tools, so when you say 2.54, I’m curious. #ab9ea2 on #ffffff. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ says 2.57, https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white says 2.57 and on hover expands that to 2.5785676343306743. I presume Firefox is rounding, while the other two are truncating. Truncating actually feels more useful for how people are too likely to use such things—taking values as low as they can while still complying.

The new, superior method is https://www.myndex.com/APCA/. It yields an Lc of 50.4, which is (as you’d expect) wildly unsuitable for body text.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#77

Post by chkhd »

beryilma wrote: post #61

> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote…

Exactly why I have zero regrets going native on macOS. Yes, Xcode isn't the best to put it mildly and SwiftUI is still maturing.. but I am so glad I don't have to deal with the modern web stack. Daily smiles instead of facepalms, most of the time!

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#78

Post by mvdtnz »

chkhd wrote: post #77
beryilma wrote: post #61

> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote…

Exactly why I have zero regrets going native on macOS. Yes, Xcode isn't the best to put it mildly and SwiftUI is still maturing.. but I am so glad I don't have to deal with the modern web stack. Daily smiles instead of facepalms, most of the time!

No one "has to" rewrite just because they're building on the web. Coffeescript was a bad bet but other than that all of the technologies listed there would have been fine for many years to come without a rewrite.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#79

Post by taylodl »

beryilma wrote: post #61

> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote…

Some people see a new project as a new opportunity to get to use new tools and processes. They get wrapped up in that more so than in the delivery of the product. Others see a new project as an opportunity to hone existing skills in their current set of tools and processes. The latter group tend to deliver a much higher-quality project on time and budget.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#80

Post by smaudet »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #68
EGreg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting 12 years ago I released v1.0 of the full stack open source platform for anyone to use to quickly put together pretty much anything on the Web in a standard way, and focus on actually growing it, but I have faced opposition from day 1, on weird bases First, I was told that the name of my library “conflicts with the excellent Q.js library for promises” and that no one was going to take a look. Well, pr…

Web devs specifically seem to be especially prone to inheriting biases from more senior devs that they've worked with, to the point that they spout things like "php is terrible and no one should use it" or "jquery is bloated and useless" without actually having used the technology they're rallying against. Or sometimes they'll maybe have messed around with a poorly written legacy application, or they'll go through a…

Exactly. The one thing I learned about web dev in 10+ years is, all (or most of) the opinions are wrong.

Where we were in the early 2000s wasn't bad, it was actually pretty slick compared to all the "shiny" we have today.

There will always be problems, but the idea that to solve the problems we should use Yet Another Cool Library/Language is just incorrect. Sometimes its good to refactor/rewrite, but often the rewrite is just as bad (or worse) as the old thing. You should have a very compelling reason to do so (at least for large scale rewrites, removing tech debt is OK).

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