luthfur

I have been able to get some traction via subreddits. They are a good source of early beta testers.

Other than that, content and email marketing would be an effective approach to consider.

I recommend checking out the book E-myth revisited: https://a.co/d/5cWuuDP. I think you will find it helpful here.

How are you different than a Klayvio or Attentive?

Ordergroove | Engineering Manager | REMOTE | FULL-TIME | https://www.ordergroove.com/jobs/?gh_jid=6653210002

We are looking for an entrepreneurial Engineer Manager to take over the Frontend platform team at Ordergroove. If you love building great self-service Control Panels or Admin Panels, you will thrive at this role.

Ordergroove is a fast growing SaaS that enables DTC merchants to provide their products as a subscription. We are used by some of the top brands in the industry such as Dollar Shaving Club, P&G, L'Oreal, KIND, and many more!

Feel free to apply here: https://www.ordergroove.com/jobs/?gh_jid=6653210002

Or email me directly if you have any questions: luthfur.chowdhury@ordergroove.com

Reminds me of Josh Waitzkin's concept of "investment in loss". Such a great and rewarding approach if you are able to suspend your ego and practice it.

Got a chuckle out of this.

"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away."

How many of us had to hardcode those one off "if" blocks to handle an annoying special case and get the damned thing shipped. Maybe the section has a nice TODO comment that stays in the repo for posterity. No one wants to take the effort to clean it up lest there be a hidden dependency somewhere that would break.

One way to deal with it is by being a producer instead of a consumer. That way you are forced to curate what you consume based on what benefits your "production".

For me that has been to start a blog, build an app etc.

Another approach is to go deep instead of wide. By that I mean, as you read, capture and take notes, start spending more time with your notes instead of capturing more.

Your feeling is shared by many. One way is to curate a set of tools that are your very own. By this I don't mean you build all your tools from scratch. Rather create a mix of "off-the-shelf" open source tools, custom scripts and methodologies that are your very own. You should have deep familiarity with them and improve your tool chain with time.

Keep this tool chain stable over the course of your career and over time you will see your effectiveness and personal velocity improve.

My personal examples:

- I maintain some simple scripts and tools of my own for dealing with AWS deployments and logs.

- I have my own flask app skeleton/scaffold for creating a new web app or web tool from scratch.

- I stick with vi for any kind of text or config editing

- I maintain a bunch of simple bash scripts for common tasks etc...

Came across this during some research.

Three principles stood out to me:

- Match the message to the moment

- Never Stop Adapting

- Prepare to win

When you no longer feel you are learning or when the projects no longer stretch you with challenges.

A stagnation of challenging projects can also indicate a general stagnation in the company. That will eventually show up in business results. If see this, it makes sense to start looking around and joining a business that is more driven and aims high.

I know how you feel, I just completed and released a beta version of my latest indie product. There were definitely ups and downs on the road.

My recommendation is that what you work on has to have deep purpose and meaning to you. My recently released product is a productivity app that I had to build for myself. Once I started using it, it was game changer for me. Next step was to productize and make it available for others.

The point is what you work on as your side project has to have a clear payoff to yourself. That will drive you, and pull you forward.

Good luck!

So I can kind of see what you are trying to get at with your product. There are 3 books I recommend you read to help you further:

1. "Competing Against Luck" by Clay Christensen https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...

This book will teach you how to look at the market from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. People don't want products, they want progress. They will hire a product to do a job for them towards that progress. It will help you understand where your product fits in ie. you should be able to answer the questions "what job can my product be hired to do?", "what progress does it help make? and for whom?"

2. Obviously Awesome https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning...

This is a book on Positioning by April Dunford. It's absolutely fabulous! It will help you understand how to position your product in the market and how to clearly communicate your benefits to them.

3. Demand-side Sales by Bob Moesta https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progr...

This is a sales book that explores things from a jobs-to-be-done perspectives. I have found his frameworks extremely helpful.

These 3 books taken together will help you understand your market better, communicate with them more clearly and position your product in a way that the market gets it. More importantly, working with your target market in this way will help you reshape the product towards something they will eventually want to buy.

Hope this helps!

Just posted my reply when I saw this. Yup, I have the same advice. Avoid SPA overhead, keep it simple with server-side rendering and pinch of javascript for some interactive UX.

You have sufficient skillset to build what you need. If you want to stick within them, you can go with Flask for Python. You can keep things simple by going "old-school" and rendering most of the UI on the server-side.

For more interactive UI on the frontend, you can go with Vue.js for a lightweight framework or stick with pure javascript. As you mentioned the tradeoff is more familiarity with the code. I find that is important to keep things maintainable.

For simple crud apps, often pure javascript with server-side rendering is sufficient.

Have you checked out: https://www.indiehackers.com/?

Great tips.

So you are assigned to write tests which you consider tedious, but you want to work on the main code base presumably on features. Here are my thoughts:

1. Always deliver the goods: Execute your assigned work to the highest quality. To help with mindset, instead of thinking of your work in terms of "effort", think in terms of "contribution". Great tests contribute substantially to the quality of the product and prevent future regression. Find ways to deliver some bonus improvements, for example: improving coverage, improving test speed. Demonstrate that you create value in the team beyond what is assigned. Again thinking in terms of your contribution helps ie. contribute above and beyond what is asked.

2. Document the value you add and highlight it to your team and manager. Don't be passive about it. Building a reputation of quality and reliability as an engineer will help you navigate this project and beyond.

3. Be direct and clear about asking for work that you are interested in. Don't be passive. Passive is weak. Top performers are not passive, they are clear about their goals and direction and go after it directly.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Hey folks, I have been helping out some beginners pick up web dev basics and started encountering a pattern. This post simply list them out with my thoughts on why they are mistakes.

Ah yes, entirely true. I wouldn't have come across this news if I didn't go down this container rabbit-hole.

Btw those who click through the link thinking this is about Docker containers..... well...sorry hehe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, this doesn't help things: "Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck"

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/world/middleeast/suez-can...

100 ships stuck behind it.

When it rains, it shit pours...

Got curious about the reasoning behind the global container shortage. This post has some explanation.

I have been wondering what's the root cause of this sudden container shortage.

Found this blog post with an explanation: https://www.hillebrand.com/media/publication/where-are-all-t...

I am sorry but...Front-of-the-side-of-the-up-of-the-what?

This is division of labor gone out of control.

Complexity doesn't get simplified by merely renaming things. Bloated javascript frameworks and associated "infrastructure" keeps requiring more and more people to manage them.

"I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat"

This right here is a very important organizing principle for indie devs. It's more effective than say doing both coding and promotion in parallel by dividing the the day into two.

Really enjoyed this description of the creative process that I came across in Geoffrey West's book.

This was the 16th loss of 3% or greater in the S&P 500 this year. Not to mention the major drawdowns in March when the virus became real.

Hardly historic, and not worth any attention or consideration.

Move on.

Congrats! Looks interesting. Do you plan to record similar videos for other languages?

Decades ago, the average person considered AOL as the "internet". Today it's Facebook/Google etc. In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?

My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.

I am in the Bay Area.