LikeAnElephant

Really happy to hear this. I was tinkering with Dagger soon before the pivot to AI, and assumed this would not be solving my CI woes anytime soon.

Focusing on CI would still enable the AI stuff too! But my use case is CI, no AI.

mayflies debating politics

Well said to that person. I think about this a lot, and have wondered if it's the advent of code school? Which itself was a result of the insane FAANG hiring sprees + salaries (where was a result of 0% interest rates among other things).

A developer going through code school in the last ~decade was taught React, GraphQL, Redux, or whatever the cool framework was at that moment with the goal of getting hired (not learning how to build well).

I'm fortunate to have entered the market in the early 2000's juuuust before that wave started. I'm only now getting a few gray hairs in my beard and am glad I was taught to understand _all_ parts of a system. I don't know if that'd be the case if I started in the mid-2010's.

Love audiobookshelf! Though I've struggled to find good copies of audiobooks that aren't ~$50...

Sounds like you've got it figured out then. Best of luck!

My broader point is that if you want to build a business there's a ton of opportunity if you're not overly picky on what that opportunity looks like. B2B, B2C, mobile, web, node, Python, PHP. None of it really matters.

You are looking at a business-to-business.. which is where we said there is still opportunity, in large part thanks to those collecting angel money.

You might be mixing up opportunities within the tech industry with using tech to build a business within other industries. Angel money isn't really a "thing" for the latter, and that's where I'm pointing to opportunity.

But by all means keep on pushing B2C if that's your passion

I respectfully disagree that there’s no business opportunity that people are willing to pay for.

If your only target are developers or the tech industry, maybe, but there’s a whole world of non technical business people with problems that have extremely easy (and boring) technical solutions.

I’ve recently signed up my third customer paying $49/mo with a simple CRUD app. No targeted ads or landing pages. I literally walked into offices in my town and asked what the most annoying part of their job is and I made a prototype. They signed a 6 month commitment.

They’re amazed at my “computer skills” only because they don’t know any better.

Not saying I’ll become insanely rich, but my goal is a reasonable living ($200-$300k) within 5 years.

All this to say I think the opportunities in this market are there, but they look different.

Totally with you. If the plumber in my neighborhood can start a business with all their overhead, then why can’t I on a $5/mo Digital Ocean server?

It really comes down to being willing to start small and grow within your means (even if that means a SMB loan or small investment).

But if you can’t find even 1 customer then it’s likely you’ve started building without talking to actual customers.

Or, you know, build a business that customers are willing to pay for…

Spend less than you earn. Maybe get an SMB loan if the numbers work. This approach is older than the tech industry.

Can you say more about your LinkedIn approach? Are you posting content or cold outreach? Something else?

That's my understanding as well.

Definitely will follow this, I was really disappointed when Maps.Me started getting enshittified. Hope it doesn't happen to Organic Maps as well.

Yep, I do. It's a baseline expectation in my experience when working within less technical industries.

Can you tell me more about your Portainer setup? Does it just update your app from an image or is it checking out code from a git repo on deploy? This approach sounds very interesting

Axiom 2: You’re optimizing over a business, not over a codebase.

Well said. Ultimately I think this is where much of the communication breakdown occurs when discussing Framework A vs Framework B online.

If you’re optimizing for _code_, sure. Stress about the ms it takes to load this or that thing. Client vs server. All of it is valid discussion from an engineering standpoint. Go nuts!

If you’re optimizing for _business_, then choose something that gets the job done. Fewer moving parts - and fewer resources needed to maintain it - the better.

Sorry for your friend, but this is what you call anecdotal evidence.

Do you have an example? I’d love to learn more!

Fully agreed on all counts!

...but even zoomers are not tech savvy these days.

Though I would actually challenge this. The idea I'm (slowly) building out deals with owners of a small blue collar type business.

These people aren't "tech savvy" in that they're not tech nerds. They don't know about coding languages or SPA vs server rendered. They don't give a shit TypeScript vs Python vs Go vs Kotlin.

But they absolutely know how to use their phones. They know how to use apps and websites. That's as tech savvy as is needed to build a small business.

They're also working daily with these TERRIBLY outdated systems that were made decades ago and only work on 1 single Windows machine they have sitting somewhere in their shop, covered in grease.

Just show them a responsive web app that addresses their frustrations and they'll be shocked at how much of an insane genius you are. And they won't even ask about the tech, because they don't give a shit. They just want it to work.

IMO this approach is where the next wave of small business SaaS ideas are. YMMV

IMO many viable niches are not being discussed online at all.

I’ve recently stumbled on an exciting niche that’s showing a lot of traction. The customers know very well how to use technology but the notion of joining forums / discussing their frustrations anywhere online just doesn’t seem to be something they consider doing. It’s all word of mouth.

My “luck” completely shifted when I stopped trying to find these users online and instead physically walked into a shop and started asking for opinions.

All that to say: I’m coming to feel that niches can more easily be found offline, even for SaaS type businesses. Just walk up and ask a business owner what they find annoying!

I think this mindset is vastly more harmful than an open source resume builder.

True - but I’ll choose to err on the side of being sad about the loss of life even if I don’t know all the details.

You absolutely can - so long as you don't get other people killed in the process. The CEO of this company convinced customers to join him on his death march, which IMO is a worth crying about.

Completely agree. I honestly always thought Django Templates mostly were Jinja2, until I looked more closely and realized how wrong I was.

Since then I exclusively use Jinja2 in my Django apps and my life is so much better.

FYI I get a security error when going to the https of your site. I get an Apache message when going to http. Can't wait to check it out though once it's up!

Amen. Mild weather + usually gray > extreme weather + usually sunny. Though I'd never fault someone for making different decisions.

The fire season of the past few years are changing the equation for me though...

I only recently stumbled across your podcast, and I LOVED it. I really appreciated that many of your guests weren’t playing the startup game (ie VC funded) but were just people with an idea and were making a thing. I loved it! I listened to each episode and was really bummed when I noticed you weren’t making more episodes.

Can’t help you in terms of marketing advice. Count me as someone who truly enjoyed your podcast, and it was my intro to the concept of SaaS as a lifestyle business. A breath of fresh air amidst a world where everyone’s looking for the next round of funding.

There's the standard Hacker News response I was looking for

Another question: what type of placeholders / tokens does this support? I see ICU Message Format, but what about `%d` or `%s` type placeholders

It's almost universally bad practice to reference your TMS at runtime. There are always exceptions in G11N, but typically the best route is to either dump your translations into a property file or cache the translations somehow (in memory or in a DB, etc)

This looks interesting. I've been a globalization architect for ~5-6 years and have used many of the major TMS vendors (and developed my own for internal use).

I see you have support for ICU Message Format. What does the UI look like for a complex ICU string? A big issue I come across is that translators aren't typically technical enough to understand the syntax.

I've dreamed of a TMS that understands an incoming ICU Message Format and spits out a non-technical UI for translators to use. Then after translation it merges it all back together into a single ICU Message string.

Regarding monitoring: I've come to rely on healthchecks.io to ensure my cron jobs when like I expect.

I'm constantly badgering my non-technical partner to try random tech shit & apps that she doesn't want and didn't ask for. She tells me no sometimes, and usually for good reason.

Please tell me internet person with zero insight into my personal life: should I end my longterm relationship just like you're advising the author to?