I'm usually very wary of this kind of post, narrative building and all that, but I like this. And I feel like the honesty at the end of the authors success / path leaves room for the reader to put it all in context.
> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future.
> Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool.
> Next, find events where the people you want to work with are.
> Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it.
I might add a Henry Rollins quote at the end of "(then) say yes to everything but make it work for you."
Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.
Making (software) stuff seems easy. I do post about it on social media, but honestly it gets 0 traction since I have almost no audience.
> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some.
This seems like "rest of the owl" where it leaves out a ton of critical steps. Become good at marketing is a lucrative career if you are good at it. So excuse me for being jaded when "learn marketing" seems as helpful to me as "sell profitable services". Sure, but how?
The post recommends Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Code Academy. Only Wikipedia has info on marketing, but reading it is not the same as learning how to do marketing.
The filter is the skill of self-directed learning. It is a meta skill that can be built, which then increase opportunities dramatically.
When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.
> Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.
I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck.
When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more.
I'm a marine biologist, often when we fish it is in some difficult circumstances due to species or habitat of interest. A quote passed down from one of my academic great grandparents (that was probably in a discussion about the futility of it all) is that you definitely aren't going to catch any fucking fish if you aren't fishing.
This is actually very good advice from personal experience.
The best career results (promotions) I have seen came from people who built a prototype of some sort then evangelized it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete product, often just a good prototype.
First example: This guy took the Intel Edison and built a pretty cool project and brought it to our maker faire events. He ended up in conversation with the CEO of some company and ended up landing a $500K exec job. Just from building a skateboard hack and trying to tell people about it.
Second: I knew a guy who built this neat prototype of a compute service and then did a keynote talk at a Meetup. It didn’t really work as a product but the website was convincing. It was enough to “get bought” by a major tech co and land him a CTO job.
Another time I saw a guy leave a FAANG and build a compelling IoT type project in three months. Again, he ended up with a CTO level job after a few months.
My take away is if you want an executive job, build something somewhat cool, even as a prototype, and go try to sell it for real. Even if you don’t raise any money or make it work as a business it is often way better than submitting resumes.
There is something much more powerful about creating something that generates a lot of engagement and conversation, even if it is only half baked but looks decent and your storytelling is compelling.
I used to work at one of those body shop contracting places. A few years ago, I heard that the boss managed to sell the company, presenting themselves as developing an in-house blockchain product.
I asked around some ex-colleagues and as far as anyone knew, all they had were some fancy PowerPoint decks and a very rough implementation in PHP.
After getting bought, everyone still continued doing the same old body work jobs, except now for the parent company’s other subsidiaries. The website still mentions blockchain.
I lol'ed, because around 2017 is what I called the "sprinkle in some blockchain" era. There was so much FOMO from investors that blockchain was "the next big thing", that an easy way to literally double or triple your valuation was to "sprinkle in some blockchain".
It wasn't like the investors were really even being scammed, because nobody could succinctly articulate why blockchain was better for these particular use cases in the first place. All I ever heard was some marketing speak that sounded like it was from a markov chain generator, but it apparently had the effect of hypnotizing investors so they'd add a few zeros to the end of their checks.
At least where I'm from FinTech is harder, since there's a lot of regulatory hurdles that you are going to have to convince your audience that you've cleared.
Non-tech people don't know what it takes to make a blockchain viable, but they do know that you have to have licenses to operate a FinTech company.
Yeah, building stuff is generally the best way to get noticed. A warning sign should be added however that there's a hard survival-bias here.
On top of that, it's idyllic to imagine their tech skills were the only reason these three people got the great job. Did their class and heritage line up at all?
>what is there to be gained by attributing their success to all the forces that they can't control.
Supposing for a moment that there is truth to what the parent comment says, we would gain a better knowledge of how the world actually works instead of perpetuating old myths.
I believe there is definitely truth to it. I’ve seen first hand how Stanford/MIT or FAANG on your resume can give you a leg up in the hiring committee over many people without the pedigree who turn out to be far better engineers.
That said I agree with GP, there is not much to be gained from focusing on systemic biases. Just because a narrative is truthy does not make it definitive; the map is not the territory and all that. As an individual focus on what you can control and you have the possibility of achieving outcomes unique to you.
As a thought experiment, how far down the rabbit hole would you go?
What were the factors involved in ones outcomes?
- Was it his "class"?
- Skin color?
- Family connections
- Country?
- Education?
- Genes?
- Moon's gravitational pull?
- A butterfly flapping's it's wings?
Not saying it's not relevant, i'm saying it's not practical. If there's any lesson to be learned from the story, it's definitely not from the X factors that cannot be controlled.
The only outcome of such discussions would be to complain.
Speaking of perpetuating myths, people attributing the success of other people to anything else other than competence would be up there.
It's demonstrably not true that we have no control over societal prejudices, nor is it true that attributing success to anything other than competence is a myth. Moreover, comparing the effects of bias to the flapping of a buttery's wings is laughably dishonest.
If you wish to ignore these things, that is entirely your prerogative, but your thesis isn't convincing.
Bit hammered but I'll try explain. Being creative and pushing that energy is great, and will put you into a better bracket than your peers. However, that bracket is still going to be made of thousands of people, so it's worth understanding that we are not measured strictly by our technical ability. We're judged by how we smell, how we look, our fashion, our projection and others personal interpretation of our trustfullness.
I didn't mean to say, don't try unless you're a certain race. I tried to say, understand the factors that work in your favour and the ones that don't.
This reads a bit like that LinkedIn inspiration porn from yesterday[1], honestly. These people may have other qualifications not listed here but working at a company where this is the path to being CTO sounds a bit like my nightmare :)
A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do.
Then I went on to draw a comic book about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend. https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It managed to get cover quotes from Phil Foglio, Charlie Stross, and Peter Watts. You can buy a copy of the printed collection if it tickles your fancy.
Now I’m working on a space opera comic. https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ It’s still in progress, you can’t buy a copy. But you could support me on Patreon if you have a lot of money from your software job.
> A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do.
I don't know if it is the blocker but makeplayingcards.com has a `high gloss` finish and does print on demand.
Doing a full gloss is pretty easy. Doing spot gloss, where only spots of the print has another material (typically a gloss material) requires special printers or has to be done by hand, as I understand it (I'm not an expert).
Finding places that does it can be tricky. I remember going down this road a few times in the past, too.
It's also commonly known as "spot varnish" or "spot UV coating" and it's a very commonly available finish from offset printers, similar to foil stamping. It's just another layer in the separations.
Special printers and another step or three in the printing process, yeah. It’s a cool effect but it’s a thing you have to go to Serious Printers and set up a large run to do, no print-on-demand shop is ever gonna do this.
Fine. I'm starting Severus, which actually deals with "contacts, business cards, email addresses", but with some interesting privacy mechanisms. I haven't quite launched yet, but I've seen this topic come up frequently on HN, and I never talk about it. I need to get out of my comfort zone and talk about it.
Okay, here you go. I have an amazing day job. But I always wanted to build some software utility that others found value in. So I shipped a forum platform. Because I can’t bring myself to share this with my friends and professionals network, it has no users: https://discoflip.com/
I'm building a tool called MicroKeys. It's a macro program, for Windows right now. It uses MicroPython as the script engine to let you register hot keys that do things. It's very much a work in progress right now.
I'm writing it to fill a very specific niche I have, but if it's useful to others, I'd love to hear feedback on what it could do to be better to help it come to fruition.
"Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.
Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.
In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.
NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” (pdf article here) — and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”
Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others."
This is good advice for techies, who are usually good at the “do things” and but not the “tell people”.
The same principle applies to a startup/side-project. At supabase we call this “ship and shout”, which is about as simple as it sounds (Ant wrote about our full “process” here: https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch )
The other one that took us some getting-used-to was being repetitive on platforms with a short “half-life”, like Twitter. It made me uncomfortable at the start since the general advice is that “reposting is annoying”. But any given tweet probably reaches only 1% of the audience i thought it would, so not many see the repost. Sometimes we will talk/tweet about something we shipped months ago and we still have developers commenting that they just learned about it from the tweet.
> techies, who are usually good at the “do things” ...
But since they don't tell people, they often end up building useless shit. I've experienced this a few times when I spent weeks or even months working on a feature, then showing it to customers, and realising that they don't get it, or that it doesn't fix their problems, etc. I try not to get too attached to my ideas, so if something doesn't work, I throw it away and try a different approach.
So I think doing things and telling people after the fact when you are done is not going to lead to success. You need to tell people early, so you can adjust what you're doing to make sure it's actually something interesting.
I just want to add there are a lot of "business people" who are good with coming up with ideas but then those ideas are useless.
So it is not only techies.
One of company owners for example did not understood market our company is in and mandated that we built in Stripe integration. Well it was useless burning of money and he did not read "do things that don't scale", where our market worked you have high touch sales and send invoices and no one ever signed for payments, I removed the code last year and we are growing with customer base.
I wonder how one generates interesting ideas to work on. Maybe I should look up product ideation as I am not really great when it comes creative idea generation.
Don't worry about that, perhaps ever, but at least not now. Just do something you want, perhaps fix a bug or whatever. And write about it. Get in the habit -- it will make you feel better.
Then you will discover that there are other people who are also interested in X. Also you'll discover that what you consider obvious info isn't obvious to others -- and they are smart people too.
I used to be shocked by some posts that made the front page: "that's just trivial stuff everybody knows". That was pure snobbery on my part: I only knew that stuff because I'd been exposed to it decades ago (and there's of course tons I don't know, and never will). And the posts that made it to the front page were good explanations -- and many started with "I didn't know this at all so I looked into it and this is what I learned"
You'll be amazed what support and interest you get from simply showing up.
And don't bother to try to have a readership in the instagram-influencer zone. Better to have a group of people who are interested because they are interested in things you also are.
It's eye opening once you realize that most interesting ideas are simply iterations or slight improvements on existing ones. Simply releasing a similar product with one additional feature, or at a cheaper price point can excite the right people. In my experience most ideation comes from building a product. Spend enough time in a product space or market and you will naturally come across "interesting" ideas. I put interesting in quotes, because when you are in that space, the idea of iterating on a product may seem obvious or mundane, but if you can execute, and convince the customer, it's anything but.
I think about this a lot. I have a good sense of how much time I spend working on things (say, editing photos and videos) but can often lose sight of how often evidence of that work is seen by others.
I might film a location, spend ages editing content from that location and upload it somewhere, but until I share that location, it doesn't count for much. It won't lead to sales, win new clients or build my profile. I often find myself going through the process and sharing the link with a friend or one client, and sitting back satisfied as though I'm finished. Have to then remind myself that I reached all of one person when I need to reach hundreds.
I need a dashboard tracking visitation to projects on the web, how often I talk about them on Twitter, or post examples on Instagram, etc.
This is very similar to my advice to people just starting out in whatever industry they picked to work: say yes more.
The unbelievable amount of opportunities I see people say no to put of insecurity in their abilities, out of social pressure, out of image concerns, etc… is absolutely baffling to me.
Say yes more. Be smart, keep your wits about you, but say yes more.
In a very meta twist of fate, I just heard about this article today on a podcast, and then realized Aaron (from the podcast) is the OP! If anyone wants to get some advice on how to use Twitter like a human being I recommend a listen. It was a great convo: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e
In the spirit of the post, a thing I did last year is build a minimal video editor (https://getrecut.com) focused almost exclusively on cutting out silence. And then lately I’ve been building a cross-platform version of it with Rust and Electron.
‘Round here a lot of people dislike Electron, and I kinda count myself among that crowd, so it’s been a fun challenge to build an app like this that defies the idea that Electron apps have to be slow. Turns out you can get a lot of performance out of it if you write most of the heavy lifting in native code, pay attention to the algorithms, make things cache-friendly, keep an eye on the profiling and optimize as you go. So far the Electron app is on par with or faster than the native Mac app, which is exciting to see! Hopefully I’ll have something out in the next month or two.
Both are built on Flutter/Nim/Postgres. I actually also want to build an NLP project too, which I started on, but it's such a huge endeavor that I can't figure out an MVP which won't take 10 years! Plus I can't do too much at once.
Nim on the back-end. The UI is defined in Nim (back-end) and sent to Flutter for rendering.
I'm trying to figure out what to do with this part, because it could be useful for others. I'm thinking part Open Source and part commercial, maybe what Qt does. It could work with any back-end, e.g. Python, in theory.
If you want to be notified of when I do release something, please email me (see my HN profile).
This is down to earth advice that matches my own experience. Here is a workflow app intend for work-from-home "gig economy" workers and contractors intended to be as easy to use as a search engine.
Still experimenting. https://workflow-magic-svelte.vercel.app/
It’s been a a long road but I’m finally at a point where I can definitively sat that this advice is some of the best you can give anyone in or out of tech.
Writing about software I’m building, errors I run into, and situations I get into (and often stumble through) has been huge for my own development and my career (https://vadosware.io).
Doing this has led me to habitually bite off more than I can chew which seems to be the only way to really grow:
- A managed services provider for smaller clouds/infrastructure providers called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com), which came out of all my blogging about Hetzner and kubernetes.
- LoginWithHN.com from how often I write about cool stuff on HN that was built for HN
- A salary sharing site for Accountants (https://nomorepizzaparties.com), which came about due to trying and investigating Baserow and NocoDB.
Outside of tech there’s awesome collectives like MoonMusiq (https://moonmusiq.com/), a collaboration of musicians that I was made aware of via HN actually -- its obviously an outlet for people to do these two things, in that order. Make cool shit, share it.
I can’t agree more… I graduated from an average university with average GPA, so I decided to do some personal projects to make my portfolio stand out. I always wanted to be a mobile app developer so I picked up Flutter and made some apps using it, most recently I have made a Hacker News client - Hacki: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki
Thought this was a wonderful article. Thanks for sharing.
I figured to get in the spirit of sharing I'd share a little passion project I've been working on for sometime now:
https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker
It's an app that allows you to accurately track your commitments via hardware hooks(audio, mouse and keyboard). The UI can definitely use some work, but figured some people might find it as useful as I do.
I tried building a break enforcing app once: Locks the screen. Asks you what goal you want to accomplish and how much time you need. Then unlocks the screen for the requested duration. I stopped using it because of the very issues you mentioned. Pure time based solutions just aren’t practical.
I use pomodoro for this. Writing software doesnt always require you typing at the keyboard. Most of the time I sketch the solution/design using pencil and paper
Got me inspired to bring my tiny tech blog portion of my site back. It's been a while, but you made me realize that it would be good to reflect on my work again. Really enjoyed this post.
174 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future.
> Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool.
> Next, find events where the people you want to work with are.
> Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it.
I might add a Henry Rollins quote at the end of "(then) say yes to everything but make it work for you."
Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.
> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some.
This seems like "rest of the owl" where it leaves out a ton of critical steps. Become good at marketing is a lucrative career if you are good at it. So excuse me for being jaded when "learn marketing" seems as helpful to me as "sell profitable services". Sure, but how?
The post recommends Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Code Academy. Only Wikipedia has info on marketing, but reading it is not the same as learning how to do marketing.
When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.
I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck.
When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Unfortunately I don’t remember who to attribute it to.
The best career results (promotions) I have seen came from people who built a prototype of some sort then evangelized it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete product, often just a good prototype.
First example: This guy took the Intel Edison and built a pretty cool project and brought it to our maker faire events. He ended up in conversation with the CEO of some company and ended up landing a $500K exec job. Just from building a skateboard hack and trying to tell people about it.
Second: I knew a guy who built this neat prototype of a compute service and then did a keynote talk at a Meetup. It didn’t really work as a product but the website was convincing. It was enough to “get bought” by a major tech co and land him a CTO job.
Another time I saw a guy leave a FAANG and build a compelling IoT type project in three months. Again, he ended up with a CTO level job after a few months.
My take away is if you want an executive job, build something somewhat cool, even as a prototype, and go try to sell it for real. Even if you don’t raise any money or make it work as a business it is often way better than submitting resumes.
There is something much more powerful about creating something that generates a lot of engagement and conversation, even if it is only half baked but looks decent and your storytelling is compelling.
This isn’t interviewing it’s auditioning.
I asked around some ex-colleagues and as far as anyone knew, all they had were some fancy PowerPoint decks and a very rough implementation in PHP.
After getting bought, everyone still continued doing the same old body work jobs, except now for the parent company’s other subsidiaries. The website still mentions blockchain.
Fake it till you make it.
It wasn't like the investors were really even being scammed, because nobody could succinctly articulate why blockchain was better for these particular use cases in the first place. All I ever heard was some marketing speak that sounded like it was from a markov chain generator, but it apparently had the effect of hypnotizing investors so they'd add a few zeros to the end of their checks.
Non-tech people don't know what it takes to make a blockchain viable, but they do know that you have to have licenses to operate a FinTech company.
I would class that story as deception.
Yeah, sure, I'll get right on that
On top of that, it's idyllic to imagine their tech skills were the only reason these three people got the great job. Did their class and heritage line up at all?
I really dislike this argument. Surely, the world is not that simple and there are many variables into ones success (and failures).
However, what is there to be gained by attributing their success to all the forces that they can't control.
Instead, take it as it is. A story, from the perspective of one person, that you may or you may not learn from.
We become better by sharing with the collective.
Supposing for a moment that there is truth to what the parent comment says, we would gain a better knowledge of how the world actually works instead of perpetuating old myths.
That said I agree with GP, there is not much to be gained from focusing on systemic biases. Just because a narrative is truthy does not make it definitive; the map is not the territory and all that. As an individual focus on what you can control and you have the possibility of achieving outcomes unique to you.
What were the factors involved in ones outcomes? - Was it his "class"? - Skin color? - Family connections - Country? - Education? - Genes? - Moon's gravitational pull? - A butterfly flapping's it's wings?
Not saying it's not relevant, i'm saying it's not practical. If there's any lesson to be learned from the story, it's definitely not from the X factors that cannot be controlled.
The only outcome of such discussions would be to complain.
Speaking of perpetuating myths, people attributing the success of other people to anything else other than competence would be up there.
If you wish to ignore these things, that is entirely your prerogative, but your thesis isn't convincing.
I didn't mean to say, don't try unless you're a certain race. I tried to say, understand the factors that work in your favour and the ones that don't.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215183
A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do.
Then I went on to draw a comic book about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend. https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It managed to get cover quotes from Phil Foglio, Charlie Stross, and Peter Watts. You can buy a copy of the printed collection if it tickles your fancy.
Now I’m working on a space opera comic. https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ It’s still in progress, you can’t buy a copy. But you could support me on Patreon if you have a lot of money from your software job.
I don't know if it is the blocker but makeplayingcards.com has a `high gloss` finish and does print on demand.
Finding places that does it can be tricky. I remember going down this road a few times in the past, too.
There was an analogy about the area of a rectangle where one axis was doing things and the other was talking about things.
Can anyone find it and link these parallel discoveries together?
I'm building a tool called MicroKeys. It's a macro program, for Windows right now. It uses MicroPython as the script engine to let you register hot keys that do things. It's very much a work in progress right now.
I'm writing it to fill a very specific niche I have, but if it's useful to others, I'd love to hear feedback on what it could do to be better to help it come to fruition.
https://github.com/seligman/microkeys
https://sive.rs/zipit
"Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen.
Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.
In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.
NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” (pdf article here) — and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”
Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others."
You are criticizing “tell people, do things.”
The same principle applies to a startup/side-project. At supabase we call this “ship and shout”, which is about as simple as it sounds (Ant wrote about our full “process” here: https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch )
The other one that took us some getting-used-to was being repetitive on platforms with a short “half-life”, like Twitter. It made me uncomfortable at the start since the general advice is that “reposting is annoying”. But any given tweet probably reaches only 1% of the audience i thought it would, so not many see the repost. Sometimes we will talk/tweet about something we shipped months ago and we still have developers commenting that they just learned about it from the tweet.
But since they don't tell people, they often end up building useless shit. I've experienced this a few times when I spent weeks or even months working on a feature, then showing it to customers, and realising that they don't get it, or that it doesn't fix their problems, etc. I try not to get too attached to my ideas, so if something doesn't work, I throw it away and try a different approach.
So I think doing things and telling people after the fact when you are done is not going to lead to success. You need to tell people early, so you can adjust what you're doing to make sure it's actually something interesting.
So it is not only techies.
One of company owners for example did not understood market our company is in and mandated that we built in Stripe integration. Well it was useless burning of money and he did not read "do things that don't scale", where our market worked you have high touch sales and send invoices and no one ever signed for payments, I removed the code last year and we are growing with customer base.
Then you will discover that there are other people who are also interested in X. Also you'll discover that what you consider obvious info isn't obvious to others -- and they are smart people too.
I used to be shocked by some posts that made the front page: "that's just trivial stuff everybody knows". That was pure snobbery on my part: I only knew that stuff because I'd been exposed to it decades ago (and there's of course tons I don't know, and never will). And the posts that made it to the front page were good explanations -- and many started with "I didn't know this at all so I looked into it and this is what I learned"
You'll be amazed what support and interest you get from simply showing up.
And don't bother to try to have a readership in the instagram-influencer zone. Better to have a group of people who are interested because they are interested in things you also are.
Unless you're not talking about the self-improvement path outlined in the post, but rather a startup. In that case things get a little more difficult.
I might film a location, spend ages editing content from that location and upload it somewhere, but until I share that location, it doesn't count for much. It won't lead to sales, win new clients or build my profile. I often find myself going through the process and sharing the link with a friend or one client, and sitting back satisfied as though I'm finished. Have to then remind myself that I reached all of one person when I need to reach hundreds.
I need a dashboard tracking visitation to projects on the web, how often I talk about them on Twitter, or post examples on Instagram, etc.
The unbelievable amount of opportunities I see people say no to put of insecurity in their abilities, out of social pressure, out of image concerns, etc… is absolutely baffling to me.
Say yes more. Be smart, keep your wits about you, but say yes more.
In the spirit of the post, a thing I did last year is build a minimal video editor (https://getrecut.com) focused almost exclusively on cutting out silence. And then lately I’ve been building a cross-platform version of it with Rust and Electron.
‘Round here a lot of people dislike Electron, and I kinda count myself among that crowd, so it’s been a fun challenge to build an app like this that defies the idea that Electron apps have to be slow. Turns out you can get a lot of performance out of it if you write most of the heavy lifting in native code, pay attention to the algorithms, make things cache-friendly, keep an eye on the profiling and optimize as you go. So far the Electron app is on par with or faster than the native Mac app, which is exciting to see! Hopefully I’ll have something out in the next month or two.
1. A project to help people start businesses. The idea is to give founders the structure they typically lack. https://cxo.industries.
2. An automated crypto trader based on technical analysis. https://tradecast.one
Both are built on Flutter/Nim/Postgres. I actually also want to build an NLP project too, which I started on, but it's such a huge endeavor that I can't figure out an MVP which won't take 10 years! Plus I can't do too much at once.
I'm trying to figure out what to do with this part, because it could be useful for others. I'm thinking part Open Source and part commercial, maybe what Qt does. It could work with any back-end, e.g. Python, in theory.
If you want to be notified of when I do release something, please email me (see my HN profile).
Writing about software I’m building, errors I run into, and situations I get into (and often stumble through) has been huge for my own development and my career (https://vadosware.io).
Doing this has led me to habitually bite off more than I can chew which seems to be the only way to really grow:
- A managed services provider for smaller clouds/infrastructure providers called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com), which came out of all my blogging about Hetzner and kubernetes.
- LoginWithHN.com from how often I write about cool stuff on HN that was built for HN
- A salary sharing site for Accountants (https://nomorepizzaparties.com), which came about due to trying and investigating Baserow and NocoDB.
Outside of tech there’s awesome collectives like MoonMusiq (https://moonmusiq.com/), a collaboration of musicians that I was made aware of via HN actually -- its obviously an outlet for people to do these two things, in that order. Make cool shit, share it.
Looks like you’ve just given me my next rolling TODO item. Somehow I don’t think it’s even occurred to me.
For now please use google search with site:vadosware.io :
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUE...
[EDIT] for those like me on the DDG default train:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HER...
I figured to get in the spirit of sharing I'd share a little passion project I've been working on for sometime now: https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker
It's an app that allows you to accurately track your commitments via hardware hooks(audio, mouse and keyboard). The UI can definitely use some work, but figured some people might find it as useful as I do.
I tried building a break enforcing app once: Locks the screen. Asks you what goal you want to accomplish and how much time you need. Then unlocks the screen for the requested duration. I stopped using it because of the very issues you mentioned. Pure time based solutions just aren’t practical.
Previous discussion from when it was published, a couple of weeks shy of a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640
I write about React (same as thousands of other developers) at https://maxrozen.com, get 10k readers a month now
I started an uptime monitoring service despite 200 others already existing (https://OnlineOrNot.com), getting around 75 users a month.
Now about to do the same with feature flags at https://deploywithflags.com - writing is everything.