I wish this kind of concept was aspired to by more political parties and countries for their citizens. It seems something that lives only in a small world of the internet for those who achieve it.
I am on the same page with you. But I've also decided to focus all my strength on one thing for the next 5 years just improving it and making it the best product for my customers.
Right now it's so easy to make apps with amazing frameworks like Vue and Laravel that anybody can create something in a week or sometimes even a day[1]. We indiehackers are never short of ideas and shiny objects. I too was part of that movement and I created many projects, one or two even won out Product hunt proudct of the day and started making money too. Alas the fame and fortune was short lived because I was just too distracted and never focused on building one thing.
I never took the step that is much more important than launching the product. It's the boring day-in and day-out sales and marketing part. The content writing and the lead generation part. The SEO part. The thing that acutally brings in the revenue part.
So anytime I have an amazing idea for my next project. I just quietly put in my Google docs and get back to my main focus. I think this is the only thing which will finally help me succeed.
It's a tool to create videos using just text, called Buzzvid. You can play with the demo here (1).
I'm still working on the homepage, tutorials, etc. It's still a month until launch. Don't want to hijack this thread but if you have any feedback, please send it to the email in my HN profile.
love the gardening analogy. Interesting thing I learned from gardening is how plants can frequently benefit from neglect. This also applies to non-plant initiatives.
i think of it like a shop too. you just kind of fuck around making your tools better, goofing off, accumulating knowledge and stuff... and slowly become useful
I struggle with balancing the urge to putter like the author puts it, with doing "expansionistic" things like marketing or building features that are valuable to new customers rather than existing ones. The "correct" business analysis will say the business gets much more out of new acquisition channels than micro-optimizing the product further, that I shouldn't fall into the "build it and they will come" mentality. But my first instinct will always be to want to just create the best possible product for my existing customers - it's what brings me joy, and it's really hard for me to designate any suboptimal state of the product as "good enough for now" and focus on acquisition instead. For now I try to balance it by alternating doing one or the other in each sprint - that way I never neglect puttering completely, but I also force myself not to do it exclusively like I'd probably do if I just based the decision on personal motivation.
I'd say if you have existing customers, you're already past most companies with a "built it and they will come" mentality. Most of those fail to ever acquire real users.
I agree with you and I will add my own tint to it: I do this to push myself to grow and move forward and then lie back and do what's comfortable and familiar. Rinse and repeat.
His book, Rework, is what got me interested in his writings. I guess the short article left a mark mainly because it reflected ideas that I enjoyed from the book
Love this analogy. I feel like it's intended to me. I've been part of this Indiehacker movement since last 2 years building Remote Leaf[1]. Sometimes I worry too much when I get 2 churns in a day and happy next day when I get 1 new customer. I hate these process.
Instead of trying to be like growth at all costs, I need to follow your strategy. Just help people. Just improve the product. Just do the gardening.
Lovely post, and a great idea. I personally very much like the idea of not scaling - and in fact have done this for 10 years with our (still tiny) digital agency. We could have chosen to take on staff many times but instead opt for a lifestyle business where I can hang out and look at the sea and be with my wife and kids.
In building products, my biggest issue to date feels like it is that I rarely bring anything to fruition - but actually this article helped me with that. It really highlighted how it's ok to incrementally push things along, get to a couple of launches just for your own satisfaction, and maybe make a little bit of cash - but you don't have to have any aspiration to "make it big". Thanks for posting :-)
I was about about to correct that use of "putter" as a typo, but it seems it's a USAism. Never seen that before. I'd always thought machines/engines putter, gardeners potter. I put it to the super-accurate Purported Google Results Test:
putter in my garden - 7 million
potter in my garden - 142 million
putter around - 9 million
potter around - 363 million
putter about - 49 million
potter about - 581 million
Although when I put on a USA accent, there's not very much difference between my "potter" and "putter", maybe that's something to do with "putter" apparently being the US spelling.
The writer is from South Africa, as mentioned in the post. "Putter about" is definitely not a USAism, it's an English expression used throughout the anglophone world that can be spelled "putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing. I've only heard it pronounced "putter" personally. The stats are interesting!
Yeah you're right. "Puttering about", with that sense of a machine chugging along, seems a different thing to pottering. Pottering in a garden seems more like patiently tinkering with something than continually moving from place to place.
I would have assumed "putter" (in this sense) is onomatopoeic, from the sound of a small engine running slowly.
"Potter", OTOH, comes from a word for poking or prodding at the ground (hence appropriate for gardening).
(I suppose with the right kind of ride-on mower, it's possible to "putter about the garden" with appropriate sound effects!)
Checking OED citations, though, it seems the "putter" form (as a variant of "potter", distinct from the sound of an engine "puttering") does have a similar history (both go back to the 1820s).
Still, I'd agree that "potter about the garden" is by far the more common usage.
Ha, glad I'm not the only one, I went directly to Wiktionary after finishing the article, which doesn't mark it 'chiefly US' or anything, and gives RP IPA.
Which contains another surprise, for me anyway - it's not pronounced like the golf club, but starting like 'put' (that over there) or 'foot'.
Apple's Dictionary.app, which for me pulls from the New Oxford American Dictionary, does mention that potter is the British version:
> put·ter³ | ˈpədər | (British potter)
> verb [no object] North American
> occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant manner, doing a number of small tasks or not concentrating on anything particular: early morning is the best time of the day to putter around in the garden.
> • [with adverbial of direction] move or go in a casual, unhurried way: the duck putters on the surface of the pond.
and defines potter as:
> verb British
> another term for putter³.
(It also has all 3 definitions of putter - golf, engine, gardening - pronounced the same way: ˈpədər)
Thanks. Hehe that's amusingly parochial. ("Whole World except USA" they like to call "British", and 'potter' is merely 'another term for putter'. Everything is inside-out.)
This is me for a sec every time I see UK collective plural nouns, for example, 'Apple have 10k employees'. Actually now that I think about it, people from Britain must feel like something's off even MORE often from this difference than americans, seeing as lots of content online is US english.
What a nice sentiment, and one I am completely on board with. I've likened my "digital puttering" to my father whiling away the hours in the garage during my childhood. Some hammering, some grinding, and my mother occasionally taking out a cup of tea.
And to build on that there was a cool video recently about a forensic pathologist in Houston who makes kitchen knives. He's not scaling, but it seems that it is a hobby that he loves.
I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar.
I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice.
I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is not this day.
I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
I long to be an indiehacker but for all the supposedly wrong reasons.
I want to putter but don't know where to get the right seeds to be puttering for.
Is Basecamp really the example to aspire to? Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that would be the software equivalent of Peter Frampton, and I mean that in the most positive way.
I think we know that we’re not all going platinum. This article was about just “working on the song(s)” for the enjoyment of it, whatever that may involve, or that’s the way I took it.
I think the sentiment is that Basecamp is no Led Zeppelin. In that they perhaps haven't achieved the record breaking, Unicorn level growth that many startups strive for. But perhaps that's OK for them?
They've got some great tunes, a loyal following, and can still put on a fantastic show. They're superstars by any definition.
Peter Frampton had a standout, influential "live" album and an innovative style of playing that will forever be remembered.
Led Zeppelin had a series of standout albums and hit songs spanning close to a decade, spawning Unicorn level sales, crowds and generational fandom that held influence on rock and roll for 40+ years.
But the band members of Zeppelin eventually succumbed to the excesses of their success. They split up after some really dark days. The scope and size of their success wasn't long term manageable on a personal level. But their legacy remains.
Whereas Frampton is still playing small live venues today!!!!
> Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that
It's not entirely fair thing to say as DHH's rise to fame was really on both fronts in parallel, actually I remember that one of the selling points for ruby/RoR thing early on was that "the basecamp was built on it". Most of people (me included) never even heard of Ruby before they've made it popular, and they could do that partially thanks to having an already very popular product built on it and big following of fans to their approach to business and software. It was before "the lean" ideas got popular, so it was all very new and revolutionary.
Now I really know I'm getting old, when I've gone past nostalgia for the 1980s 8-bit era and even Web 2.0 feels like a distant, but warm and fuzzy memory...
What if the idea doesn't really matter? You need to start the journey and be ready to adapt along the way. I've been at it for 12 years now as a cofounder and you'll need to change your product every couple of years. Remember - even Microsoft is shipping Linux these days.
That's the minimum viable product thing - you need to figure out what's actually helpful to people.
For instance, I hope some day someone takes up the mantle and goes out making a decent free identity system. I think most of the North European countries have one of those, and they are all proprietary and suck with no interoperability. If think there's government or even EU money to be had for something that works.
So basically, every citizen needs a way of authenticating, e.g. to submit tax information, log in to banks etc.
If you're trying to sell and earn money, you don't need an idea, you need customers. From customers to idea is much easier than from idea to customers.
I'm not saying that getting/finding customers is easy neither...
> I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid.
Honestly, DHH looks to me and comes across to me as extremely burnt out to an unhealthy point. I wouldn't want to aspire what he has become. He doesn't strike me as someone like the author of Bear Blog who just enjoys puttering along. He comes across as someone who constantly stresses himself to become BIG without VC money so he can prove someone that you can achieve VC level success without VC money. As a result he seems to be constantly arguing and lecturing people on social media to a point where it feels difficult to watch. Also Hey feels like a real flop to me, an attempt to fix something that really nobody wanted to be fixed. It's like creating yet another social media app when people are already sickened by the sheer amount of apps which demand their constant attention.
I admire what bear blog stands for and to me that is far away from Basecamp, otherwise I agree with your points :)
DHH certainly doesn't putter (by the common definition), but as someone who has followed his output here and there over the course of ~15 years I disagree that he is burnt out or that he is out to impress.
Over the years his approach has in my opinion been an example of how to be practical, think for yourself, be productive and not burn out. His form of puttering looks to be blocking out time to program in Ruby and extracting patterns from Basecamp (and now Hey) to release as open source. This looks like a form of cultivation/gardening to me.
I think most people, myself included, would burn out if they attempted to emulate him—he has clearly found a way to remain balanced, in his own way.
For the rest of us I think Bear Blog is a good example to follow if you can make a living doing so. If you want to see the parallels between this and Basecamp then you would need to wind the clock way back to the early days of that product/company. That said, winding the clock forward on Bear Blog will likely not get you something that looks like Basecamp today.
I have too many ideas. Every problem or small improvement is a potential business opportunity or startup idea and I see them everywhere. My experience as a software consultant likely contributes to this. It's my job to go talk to customers, understand their problem and propose a solution.
If you want to just build stuff for yourself, go work for a software consulting firm for a while. It should be a smaller one that's interested in tackling smaller jobs. This way, you'll interact with more potential customers. You'll learn a ton about their businesses, because after all; they hired your company to solve their problems. Save as much money as you can.
When you have enough money saved up, you can afford to quit your job and focus on something you that interests you because it's fun or an amazing opportunity. I've done this a couple of times so far. Right now I am splitting my time between a startup and a part time job.
I am really glad I have the part time job. Not so much for the money, but for the socialization aspects.
I second all of this, and this line from the fine article resonated deeply:
> That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so.
I too have the same "writer's block" issue for ideas. I've got some, but I dunno, it just seems so hopeless to gamble and go that route.
For now, I've managed to scrimp and invest enough from the day job, I may just quit and putter on projects until I hit on something. If I don't make enough to cover costs, I can try freelancing/consulting. Worst case, I can go back to the corporate grind.
> I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
This resonates with me. I get the same experience from my youtube channel - making a modest but sufficient income to make a living, talking directly to my "users" every day - hearing their appreciation and the stories on how my videos directly changed their life. So enjoyable.
This post almost reads like a manifesto of the digital gardening movement that was showcased on HN a few months back [1], with some indiehackers sprinkled in. Just a small space of your own on the Internet to cultivate your thoughts/projects, outside the gigantic walls and rigidity of Big Tech platforms. There's even a subreddit [2] for them!
I like to think of software projects as belonging in three categories - massive high growth products (big tech), more niche low growth products, and side-projects. Digital gardens and small software projects with a band of loyal users seem to go between side-project and niche product. They are a welcome escape from the noise of big platforms, so I hope this developer/Internet trend catches on across the web.
This is how I approach my SaaS business. Long-term sustainability, enjoyable development using technologies I like, dealing with smart and nice customers. Caring for the app.
One of my favourite quotes is from Jane McGonical: "we are as human beings designed to do hard, meaningful work". If you enjoy gardening, it doesn't feel like work. You do it because it's... meaningful.
Ikigai is that perfect spot in which the work you enjoy doing also creates value from someone else. You are in the zone, doing what you love.
This concept, together with the one about optimising your area of luck that was posted a few days ago, are all you really need to craft a successful - and joyful - career.
Where are there online communities for people into this kind of tech sub-culture? Most Indie Hacker type communities seem to eventually attract a critical mass of "Hustle Boys" and most startup communities tend to be dismissive of anything that doesn't have hyper-growth potential. It makes sense that a large number of tech entrepreneurs live between these two extremes. Where do they hang out?
I think you can find it in the crossover towards more artistic/design/science focussed communities.
Generative art, data visualisation etc. Of course there are hustlers there as well but to me it does feel to be more about the creativity, techniques, ideas.
There are various communities around the web that all have their own personalities. HN, /r/programming and Twitter are the biggest and most active but also most cynical. Lobste.rs (https://lobste.rs/) is almost purely tech focussed. Dev.to is very (overly?) friendly but it's hard to find substance among the noise. Indie Hackers which you've alluded to, does what it says on the tin but also attracts those hustler types.
The great thing about the internet is that if you think it's missing something, you can build it! I've been working on my own tech community called Able (https://able.bio) in my spare time for about 3 years now. I'd like it to be an intersection of software, hardware and business but with less cynicism and self-hype of other places. Just a place to appreciate the merits of human ingenuity. You're welcome to come hang out there if you like.
But yeah, if anyone knows of any other communities I'd also be interested to check them out. I feel like a bit of variety would be nice at the moment.
I decided to start a Discord for it, it's been on my mind for a while. I'm not interested in the VC moonshot culture, and frankly am not in the location for it anyway. I also don't care for SEO marketing ploys and hustle bullshit.
The community values I would want in a community like that are:
* A focus on building products that meet real world problems
* Pragmatism, stability and longevity in your products
* Discussions about bootstrapping with real customers
* Investment can be useful but it shouldn't be a stand in for a real business model
* Realistically these are businesses, money is a real factor, but no get rich quick schemes, we're just trying to get sensibly rich slowly
* No narcissistic hustle bullshit, no marketing ploys
This goes into the direction of something I heard of in the past as "slow business". I started a (now rather small) list, together with the lost manifesto:
https://v01.io/2021/01/13/slow-business-list/
Slow business is a great term for it, that is the antithesis for grow-fast or burn out trying style companies. I love seeing businesses that grew naturally out of a grass roots need, tied directly to real world industry or community needs.
Mastodon and Pleroma are home to many communities filled with people like this! One of my favorite instances, Merveilles[1], is probably among the highest quality in terms of the people themselves and the projects they work on, but there are dozens of others with similar energy. Make an account somewhere[2][3] and see for yourself!
Oh, and if you're willing to leave the Web, there's also Gemini[4]. Here are some proxied links to aggregators, CAPCOM[5] and Spacewalk[6], where you can find all sorts of people writing about their intimate personal projects, technological and otherwise (although mostly technological).
Really feeling this, got so much work done last year by just continuously smoothing out all kinds of small little details in my parametric design software tools. Which individually are all quite insignificant but now it really starts to feel like an ecosystem (garden!) of functions, classes & objects working together in concert for beautiful effects.
This is one thing that has made the transition to a larger company so hard for me. In smaller team, you can spend a bit of time cleaning up the codebase or tooling and know that investment will compound via increased velocity.
This is the actual emotional reason why I am now such a big fan of microservices (or rather, moderately-sized services): I want my own garden to tend alongside a moderately-sized team.
149 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadPutter on, my friend.
PS: I also like the gardener analogy. It is used elsewhere, too, e.g. the “Gardener-Leader” concept of the US Army.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Ar...
Right now it's so easy to make apps with amazing frameworks like Vue and Laravel that anybody can create something in a week or sometimes even a day[1]. We indiehackers are never short of ideas and shiny objects. I too was part of that movement and I created many projects, one or two even won out Product hunt proudct of the day and started making money too. Alas the fame and fortune was short lived because I was just too distracted and never focused on building one thing.
I never took the step that is much more important than launching the product. It's the boring day-in and day-out sales and marketing part. The content writing and the lead generation part. The SEO part. The thing that acutally brings in the revenue part.
So anytime I have an amazing idea for my next project. I just quietly put in my Google docs and get back to my main focus. I think this is the only thing which will finally help me succeed.
[1] https://24hrstartup.com/
I'm still working on the homepage, tutorials, etc. It's still a month until launch. Don't want to hijack this thread but if you have any feedback, please send it to the email in my HN profile.
(1) https://buzzvid.com/members.html
Not focusing this way only guarantees that you'll move on before even finding out.
Was reminded of another short piece going way back to 2007: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-g...
I think I read it too.
Instead of trying to be like growth at all costs, I need to follow your strategy. Just help people. Just improve the product. Just do the gardening.
[1] - https://remoteleaf.com
In building products, my biggest issue to date feels like it is that I rarely bring anything to fruition - but actually this article helped me with that. It really highlighted how it's ok to incrementally push things along, get to a couple of launches just for your own satisfaction, and maybe make a little bit of cash - but you don't have to have any aspiration to "make it big". Thanks for posting :-)
I was about about to correct that use of "putter" as a typo, but it seems it's a USAism. Never seen that before. I'd always thought machines/engines putter, gardeners potter. I put it to the super-accurate Purported Google Results Test:
putter in my garden - 7 million
potter in my garden - 142 million
putter around - 9 million
potter around - 363 million
putter about - 49 million
potter about - 581 million
Although when I put on a USA accent, there's not very much difference between my "potter" and "putter", maybe that's something to do with "putter" apparently being the US spelling.
I don't think they mean the same in British English. My motorboat "putters about the lake" while I "potter about in my garden". But I could be wrong.
"Potter", OTOH, comes from a word for poking or prodding at the ground (hence appropriate for gardening).
(I suppose with the right kind of ride-on mower, it's possible to "putter about the garden" with appropriate sound effects!)
Checking OED citations, though, it seems the "putter" form (as a variant of "potter", distinct from the sound of an engine "puttering") does have a similar history (both go back to the 1820s).
Still, I'd agree that "potter about the garden" is by far the more common usage.
Which contains another surprise, for me anyway - it's not pronounced like the golf club, but starting like 'put' (that over there) or 'foot'.
> put·ter³ | ˈpədər | (British potter) > verb [no object] North American > occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant manner, doing a number of small tasks or not concentrating on anything particular: early morning is the best time of the day to putter around in the garden. > • [with adverbial of direction] move or go in a casual, unhurried way: the duck putters on the surface of the pond.
and defines potter as:
> verb British > another term for putter³.
(It also has all 3 definitions of putter - golf, engine, gardening - pronounced the same way: ˈpədər)
My pronunciation of putter is "puh-ter" (same sound as under) and potter is "pah-ter" (same sound as father).
And to build on that there was a cool video recently about a forensic pathologist in Houston who makes kitchen knives. He's not scaling, but it seems that it is a hobby that he loves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VPSlfz65h8
I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice.
I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is not this day.
I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
I long to be an indiehacker but for all the supposedly wrong reasons.
I want to putter but don't know where to get the right seeds to be puttering for.
I think we know that we’re not all going platinum. This article was about just “working on the song(s)” for the enjoyment of it, whatever that may involve, or that’s the way I took it.
Can you clarify this? Just curious. Heard of him, but no idea what you mean.
They've got some great tunes, a loyal following, and can still put on a fantastic show. They're superstars by any definition.
Peter Frampton had a standout, influential "live" album and an innovative style of playing that will forever be remembered.
Led Zeppelin had a series of standout albums and hit songs spanning close to a decade, spawning Unicorn level sales, crowds and generational fandom that held influence on rock and roll for 40+ years.
But the band members of Zeppelin eventually succumbed to the excesses of their success. They split up after some really dark days. The scope and size of their success wasn't long term manageable on a personal level. But their legacy remains.
Whereas Frampton is still playing small live venues today!!!!
He's still rocking out.
It's not entirely fair thing to say as DHH's rise to fame was really on both fronts in parallel, actually I remember that one of the selling points for ruby/RoR thing early on was that "the basecamp was built on it". Most of people (me included) never even heard of Ruby before they've made it popular, and they could do that partially thanks to having an already very popular product built on it and big following of fans to their approach to business and software. It was before "the lean" ideas got popular, so it was all very new and revolutionary.
For instance, I hope some day someone takes up the mantle and goes out making a decent free identity system. I think most of the North European countries have one of those, and they are all proprietary and suck with no interoperability. If think there's government or even EU money to be had for something that works.
So basically, every citizen needs a way of authenticating, e.g. to submit tax information, log in to banks etc.
I'm not saying that getting/finding customers is easy neither...
Honestly, DHH looks to me and comes across to me as extremely burnt out to an unhealthy point. I wouldn't want to aspire what he has become. He doesn't strike me as someone like the author of Bear Blog who just enjoys puttering along. He comes across as someone who constantly stresses himself to become BIG without VC money so he can prove someone that you can achieve VC level success without VC money. As a result he seems to be constantly arguing and lecturing people on social media to a point where it feels difficult to watch. Also Hey feels like a real flop to me, an attempt to fix something that really nobody wanted to be fixed. It's like creating yet another social media app when people are already sickened by the sheer amount of apps which demand their constant attention.
I admire what bear blog stands for and to me that is far away from Basecamp, otherwise I agree with your points :)
Over the years his approach has in my opinion been an example of how to be practical, think for yourself, be productive and not burn out. His form of puttering looks to be blocking out time to program in Ruby and extracting patterns from Basecamp (and now Hey) to release as open source. This looks like a form of cultivation/gardening to me.
I think most people, myself included, would burn out if they attempted to emulate him—he has clearly found a way to remain balanced, in his own way.
For the rest of us I think Bear Blog is a good example to follow if you can make a living doing so. If you want to see the parallels between this and Basecamp then you would need to wind the clock way back to the early days of that product/company. That said, winding the clock forward on Bear Blog will likely not get you something that looks like Basecamp today.
I think that's just his personality, regardless of his perceived success or lack thereof.
If you want to just build stuff for yourself, go work for a software consulting firm for a while. It should be a smaller one that's interested in tackling smaller jobs. This way, you'll interact with more potential customers. You'll learn a ton about their businesses, because after all; they hired your company to solve their problems. Save as much money as you can.
When you have enough money saved up, you can afford to quit your job and focus on something you that interests you because it's fun or an amazing opportunity. I've done this a couple of times so far. Right now I am splitting my time between a startup and a part time job.
I am really glad I have the part time job. Not so much for the money, but for the socialization aspects.
If you're looking for a little inspiration, here are a couple links:
- Pieter Levels' announcement post on 12 startups in 12 months: https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/
- My own blog, where I'm documenting my own journey in building a startup in a month: https://startupinamonth.net/
I hope you break out soon!
> That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so.
I too have the same "writer's block" issue for ideas. I've got some, but I dunno, it just seems so hopeless to gamble and go that route.
For now, I've managed to scrimp and invest enough from the day job, I may just quit and putter on projects until I hit on something. If I don't make enough to cover costs, I can try freelancing/consulting. Worst case, I can go back to the corporate grind.
> I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
Me too, friend. Me too.
I like to think of software projects as belonging in three categories - massive high growth products (big tech), more niche low growth products, and side-projects. Digital gardens and small software projects with a band of loyal users seem to go between side-project and niche product. They are a welcome escape from the noise of big platforms, so I hope this developer/Internet trend catches on across the web.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996780
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/
One of my favourite quotes is from Jane McGonical: "we are as human beings designed to do hard, meaningful work". If you enjoy gardening, it doesn't feel like work. You do it because it's... meaningful.
Ikigai is that perfect spot in which the work you enjoy doing also creates value from someone else. You are in the zone, doing what you love.
This concept, together with the one about optimising your area of luck that was posted a few days ago, are all you really need to craft a successful - and joyful - career.
The great thing about the internet is that if you think it's missing something, you can build it! I've been working on my own tech community called Able (https://able.bio) in my spare time for about 3 years now. I'd like it to be an intersection of software, hardware and business but with less cynicism and self-hype of other places. Just a place to appreciate the merits of human ingenuity. You're welcome to come hang out there if you like.
But yeah, if anyone knows of any other communities I'd also be interested to check them out. I feel like a bit of variety would be nice at the moment.
The community values I would want in a community like that are:
* A focus on building products that meet real world problems
* Pragmatism, stability and longevity in your products
* Discussions about bootstrapping with real customers
* Investment can be useful but it shouldn't be a stand in for a real business model
* Realistically these are businesses, money is a real factor, but no get rich quick schemes, we're just trying to get sensibly rich slowly
* No narcissistic hustle bullshit, no marketing ploys
This goes into the direction of something I heard of in the past as "slow business". I started a (now rather small) list, together with the lost manifesto: https://v01.io/2021/01/13/slow-business-list/
Check the link in my profile!
how do I join?
Oh, and if you're willing to leave the Web, there's also Gemini[4]. Here are some proxied links to aggregators, CAPCOM[5] and Spacewalk[6], where you can find all sorts of people writing about their intimate personal projects, technological and otherwise (although mostly technological).
[1]https://merveilles.town/public
[2]https://joinmastodon.org/
[3]https://pleroma.social/
[4]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
[5]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/cap...
[6]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/spa...
https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1348394004413620224?s...
When you share a codebase with 200 others, trying to get anything tidy and readable is such a yak-shaving exercise, you feel like the main character from https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
This is the actual emotional reason why I am now such a big fan of microservices (or rather, moderately-sized services): I want my own garden to tend alongside a moderately-sized team.