Ask HN: How much do you spend on your side project
I mean for side projects that's not making any profit. I'm setting a budget of $800/year, including hosting cost like heroku, domain name purchase, etc.
If you have multiple projects, can you please say the average and max cost.
31 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadthat's about it
[0]: https://design.atlassian.com/
- All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.
- Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make the ecosystem feel less cohesive.
- Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.
- It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much more on my GitHub homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.
- There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites. GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value. Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.
> Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make the ecosystem feel less cohesive.
I think the minor style differences are in part an artifact of our design process. We have a fairly large portfolio of products these days, and try to avoid dependencies between the release timelines and roadmaps of each. This means that a new design pattern or improvement will often appear in one product several releases before it is syndicated elsewhere. The way this often works on the ground is that a designer will invent a new pattern in one product, see it implemented and shipped, and then later abstracted and incorporated into the Atlassian Design Guidelines and Atlassian UI library that ships with all of our products.
> Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.
Simplifying administration (particularly initial setup) has been a long-time focus of ours, so much so that we codified it into our design principles as "Gracefully reveal depth"[0]. But it's a tough proposition: JIRA is powerful and flexible, but seriously complex, and we're still figuring out how to ease administration without removing or reducing functionality that our customers rely on. We're getting there (check out the admin console in JIRA 7 vs JIRA 6, or any other two consecutive major versions) but I think it will be more or less a constant battle as the products continue to expand in functionality. I appreciate the time you've taken to provide the feedback already, but if you have any specific pain points regarding administration I'd love to hear them.
> All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.
> It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much more on my GitHub homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.
> There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites. GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value. Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.
I'm personally not an aesthete in any sense of the word, but this seems valuable feedback. I'll bring it to the attention of our design and brand teams (and see if I can get them to jump in and comment). Thanks again for the feedback mate.
[0]: https://design.atlassian.com/how-we-design/principles/
It's not horrible but one of the things I don't like is the listing of open Issues.
There is a 'T' heading and a 'P' heading. That's not descriptive enough. Then the items under those headings are icons that aren't easily identified.
I can never remember what the T and P stand for and I still don't know what the icons mean. Some of the icons seem to be the same for different things. I'd rather see the name.
While I don't hate Bitbucket these items are confusing enough for me to try something else (probably GitLab) the next time I need a private repo.
Now that you mention it I agree that in the "Priority" column in particular it can be a bit tricky to differentiate between some of the values ("Minor" and "Trivial" in particular). These have recently been replaced with some much more easily distinguishable ones in JIRA[0], which I'm sure will make it to Bitbucket soon. Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it on to the designers of both the JIRA & Bitbucket teams.
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/R4dbC9B.png
I also spend money on designers and developers. Even for a side project, there are places I don't have time / skills to go to :) and I rely on external -paid- help.
In a year, it could be 5 times the cost of hosting if there's no heavy development from outside (or a complete rebranding :)).
If you like https://wormhole.network I can put you in touch with the designer. She's professional and fast - I just now think it doesn't look as great as I thought at first :)
Couple websites net ~$1000 adsense a year, after $8/mo hosting costs.
Smart mirror raised $4k (lol) seed from university accelerator.
Personal website somehow got a random donation that payed for hosting.
So, whatever all that adds up to. We don't have any customer revenue yet, so I sustain things out of my "day job" salary.