Ask HN: How did you break out from being a lone developer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41129335

15 10 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a software engineer of 15+ years. Something that I struggle with is outside of work collaboration. Making pet projects and learning skills alone only gets someone so far.

On one hand there is no external eye to validate or to challenge. On another hand the likeliness of a sole average(!) developer building something significant is very little.

I've had the experience in being part of open source communities before - through work. The depth of problems and speed of bootstrapping was substantially higher than any solo work.

The advice I've got is always the same: - just start contributing - just pick a popular project with a great community - just start something with a friend

Not to hide behind excuses - as I'm still lucky enough to find couple of hours a week to doodle on personal projects - but family and life puts these hours to places that are either hard to sync with other people or just makes you impatient waiting for a reply from a community.

Anywho - I was wondering if there is a great story anyone had starting from this solo-dev lifestyle and being able to work with other smart folks outside of work on something fun. Are there better communities/project than others? Are there unobvious lifehacks?

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

I went through a phase of making demos and trying to pitch for the development of a product. I got burned out from that and got an ordinary job.

I got back into side projects involving programming, photography and art that I was doing totally on my own.

This year, collaborators found me. I was posting to Mastodon with and about my smart RSS reader and that got the interest of a person who is trying to develop his own pitch for a business idea. That's changed the direction of my "second brain". I also met a seamstress (IRL) who I'll be collaborating with to take advantage of on-demand fabric printing.

One answer to the problem of waiting for people is to have a few projects going. At most times I have 3 side projects that I've "committed" to but I am really making progress on 2 which I feel is OK. I think the most important management practice is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)

which basically means you have to limit how many projects you are working on at a time. If you have 15 projects going you are probably going to get diverted in too many directions and not finish any one of them. If you have just 1 you have to stop working as soon as you need to get a reply. If you're just slightly under- or over-subscribed you can just work on project #2 when #1 is blocked on someone else. (e.g. slight under-subscription lets you provide a high SLA to customers/collaborators, if you're slightly over-subscribed on your own projects you're the only person who will get mad.)

al_borland• 2 years ago

For me, I leave the big stuff and major contributions to work. I know that after work I don't have the energy to making anything world changing on my own.

I read about digital gardening / digital puttering[0] several years back and that resinated with me a bit. I don't necessarily need major projects in my free time; that would feel like a burden on top of my job. What I do instead is have some relatively simple stuff I can putter around with. Add a feature here, refactor some code there, etc. It's not going to change the world, but they are things I find useful or interesting, even if they aren't a big deal.

I ran across an interview[1] with James Thomson (developer of PCalc) a while back. If I remember it correctly, it seems like PCalc started out like, and still serves as his digital garden, even though he does make money off it. He needed a project to learn on, so picked the humble calculator as the idea. Then just kept going. Any time Apple released a new technology, he'd use PCalc as his test bed to learn it. Even when he wanted to learn 3D graphics, he ended up making an About screen for PCalc (as it's own app), that was basically a little 3D playground (a bit like the easter egg from Excel 97[2], but with more).

That would be my advice. If you just have a few hours here and there, and are already making an impact at through work, don't let the FOMO eat you up, just tend to your garden. Maybe it will turn into something others will use, maybe not, but don't stress about making that a goal.

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_ZbWVTQNk0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM

dtforgettocache2• 2 years ago

Thank you for sharing digital gardening. No idea how did I miss this all along. I always kept a bunch of lists with evolving ideas and evaluations and they do help figuring out some next steps. And I feel this digital gardening could give it a way better shape.

Your point on keeping serious stuff for work makes sense. I do "recreational coding" often - and that's fun indeed. Though specifically I'm trying to get into system level development, and as a business layer engineer I feel the gap is way too big to get there with the usual-suspect home projects (compiler, vm, etc) - without experiencing what makes a toy project a production-quality one.

(I'll def binge watch those How It's Build videos, thanks for that too!)

DarrenDev• 2 years ago

I don't have a great story, but from my own experience I see the key as being a willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Do (if not embrace) the things you tend to avoid doing as a lone developer.

An example: I never liked meetings with new people, but I knew I needed to talk to people in my industry about what I was building and about what their problems were.

So I set up "office hours". Zoom meetings where I talk to one or two people a week. Randomly, anyone in my industry who wants to talk to me can book a slot using Calendly.

I promote this occasionally on LinkedIn and on my website, and it's led to many interesting conversations and collaborations.

Same with making videos, giving presentations, putting yourself out there and telling people what you're working on.

Generally, do (some of) the things you don't want to do.

lakotasapa• 2 years ago

Where you located? I feel the very same. Have a toddler, unemployed by choice although hate the loneliness that comes putting family 1st then realize you have no mental energy, motivation for yourself. All of my friends are also busy and geolocated too far for f2f. Trying to find/figure out how to get out of conundrum. I'm the S. Bay area if you wanna connect.

dtforgettocache2• 2 years ago

When I got my kid some time ago I remember how quickly I realized my productive time in life just got reduced by magnitudes. For sure, probably it's not the late night debugging sessions that I'll remember when I'm old - but still. Anyways this freaked me out in a way that suddenly all personal growth had to count. No more making "another web app" or "another game". It has to be deep and dense. And that made me realize that the decade of business app development experience is quite far from system level software. Which is the reason I'm looking for ways to contribute - where a community can help with the context.

muzani• 2 years ago

I've done group projects since I was 12. They're okay, but IMO it's overrated and until now, I haven't really found anyone who clicks with me.

What works for me is paid classes. Doesn't have to be in person but should have at least a Discord. The overpriced ones are also dead community, often someone buying something in the heat of the moment and not committing to it. The modestly priced ones are good. You meet people of your skill level and interests and it comes with a mentor. It doesn't have to be tech, go on and learn something outside your comfort zone.

swah• 2 years ago

Any examples / kind of titles of said courses? I'm in a few about software projects and another health related, and 90% of the action is from the founder / OG - if they go quiet, there is nothing left.

austin-cheney• 2 years ago

I have never had trouble finding this extra time and extra bits of focus. I find I get bored easily otherwise. I have a wife, kids (that are about to be out of the house), two jobs (the part time job I am in middle management), 3 dogs, and 2 cats. I still find lots of time to write personal software and play games with 2-3 hours left per day for the family. Working from home helps.

I only need about 5 hours of sleep per day and a 15 minute nap in the afternoon. If you talk me to death I can easily make time for additional naps.

I learned to program while traveling across Afghanistan on a year long military adventure. Most of programming actually occurs outside of work, so at this point I have an extra career’s worth of programming experience most long experienced developers don’t have.

The solution to finding the extra time is really about being in good physical heath and being obsessive about learning and/or building something original. That’s it. When you obsess about something you will continue to think about it while doing your job, showering, and jogging. You will choose jobs that don’t waste time with a bunch of stupid repetition even if that means less pay. With an obsessive focus you will produce what other people cannot. You will have a level of initiative that most people cannot dream of.

There are downsides to thinking and living like this. You will tend to be ultra focused on product delivery and produce superior quality work, a real 10x developer. Not wasting time on unnecessary bullshit is a huge incompatibility when most of your peers can only reproduce repeated patterns. It super harms career mobility because you are not at all interested with impressing people or justifying your existence. You will believe the quality of your work speaks for itself because it solves its stated goal directly with minimal code. Most people don’t think like that and find it repulsive.

People will also have trouble understanding you. Being obsessed about a subject most people don’t understand, even when those other people do it professionally, results in bizarre social results. Family won’t understand. You have to really go out of your way to find people who enjoy hobby work with a greater zeal than they put into their actual day job. Surprisingly, church has been a huge vector for encountering other people like this, but then this kind of learning/involvement are social encouraged by my church.

bilsbie• 2 years ago

Having this exact problem! Feel free to connect. (Email in profile)

One solution I was mulling is joining a team on a kaggle competition?

Ask HN: How did you break out from being a lone developer?

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