My product is my garden | Hacker News Reader

My product is my garden

herman.bearblog.dev

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Pangloss, who was as inquisitive as he was argumentative, asked the old man what the name of the strangled Mufti was. ‘I don’t know,’ answered the worthy man, ‘and I have never known the name of any Mufti, nor of any Vizier. I have no idea what you’re talking about; my general view is that people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’ Having said these words, he invited the strangers into his house; his two sons and two daughters presented them with several sorts of sherbet, which they had made themselves, with kaimak enriched with the candied-peel of citrons, with oranges, lemons, pine-apples, pistachio-nuts, and Mocha coffee… – after which the two daughters of the honest Muslim perfumed the strangers’ beards. ‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk. ‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’ Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.’

-- Voltaire, Candide

The families I know who live best are permaculturalists. Visiting them for dinner is always a treat. It's hard work though, and like others they have supplemental income. I imagine this old man knows well the trick: an independent life is impossible unless you have enough healthy young people around to do the labour.

"an independent life is impossible unless you have enough healthy young people around to do the labour."

Or about $1 million stashed in index funds, give or take based on cost of living in your location.

Or around $600K in down payments in cash flowing rental properties in the US...

My wife and I spent around $75K to get approximately $1K a month in cash flow (5 doors, $200 each)...

I think the topic is independence, not being a parasite on others who are less well off than you.

It is kind of hilarious how often rent-seeking behavior is called out as evil when it comes to software companies, but actual rent-seeking with real estate is seen as virtuous investment.

$75k for five doors? Might I ask whereabouts? That seems ridiculously cheap per unit.

Not impossible in impoverished areas. A rural trailer park, some section 8 housing in a bad part of town, or maybe they scooped up some single-family units at the bottom of the housing market crash.

$65K for a 4 plex in Del Norte County, California, $10K for a single family in Lee County, Florida. Deals exist, it requires effort and action.

I believe they're saying the down payment was $75k

I agree it's hard work. Every project seems like it will take an hour at the outset, but ends up taking eight hours due to a wide variety of unexpected real world complications.

I traded in a beautiful city home for 106 acres at the beginning of the pandemic and am still glad I did. People have a fantasy picture of the tradeoff though... In reality, in rural places you have less social interaction and the people are of a lower caliber than urban areas. You can't make money farming unless you do it at massive scale, so I still work just as much online as before. Only now my free time goes into farming instead of golf or restaurants.

Supposedly, small market garden farms can be quite profitable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHwAfHQA9M

You can't make money commodity farming unless at scale, but growing boutique items can be profitable. You just need to find things that nobody else is providing, and build a market for them. Vertical integration is also a good way to make money without scaling up - things like pickles and other cottage foods have a much higher profit margin.

Love the quote and book, but only half-way agree with the sentiment, unless you stretch the analogy of what the garden is. Simple living/work won't in itself quench or stave off desire and passions. If that were true farmers would be a happier demographic. Desire never really disappears, it's at best channeled through engagement / flow, which dovetails with the fact that man's work is also the strongest predictor of his happiness. I imagine, but don't know, that those who want for nothing are not complacent, and those who are complacent can never consume enough.

I was reminded of Being There by Jerzy Kosiński:

> In a garden, things grow... but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.

> A gardener! Isn’t that the perfect description of what a real businessman is?

Haven't thought of that book in years but it's the perfect thing to cite here. Bravo.

And also check out the concept of the Epicurean garden, which is what Voltaire is referring to:

https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/cultivating-philosophy-in-...

Commenting, so I can revisit this later. Great excerpt!

You can favorite comments if you click on their timestamp.

Dang: why is the favourite button hidden like this?

Wow, 11 years on this site, and I'm just learning this... Thanks!

You should just read Candide, it’s fun and hilarious, and a true cultural touchstone.

Yes, fairly short as well. One of my favorites.

likewise!

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.

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 feel this for sure. I was in the "grinder" for a while, and this year I'm making my move into becoming an indie hacker myself.

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!

I feel the same way. Even if you have a lot of ideas, as I'm sure everyone has, how would you decide on the "right" one to pour all your energy into?

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.

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...

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 want government money in the EU for IT stuff you have to be huge, boring and inefficient ...

We can do better than Shibboleth.

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 BaseCamp is the best you can hope for with this mindset, so in an "aim high" kind of way, it's a good ideal.

> the software equivalent of Peter Frampton

Can you clarify this? Just curious. Heard of him, but no idea what you mean.

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!!!!

He's still rocking out.

> 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...

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.

Me too, friend. Me too.

> 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.

> As a result he seems to be constantly arguing and lecturing people on social media to a point where it feels difficult to watch.

I think that's just his personality, regardless of his perceived success or lack thereof.

I quit my job at Google a little over a year ago to work full time on my product. I still don't make near half the salary, but that connection to my users using a product I built is something that, prior to this last year, I didn't know I'd be so attached to.

Users message me to appreciate some small look & feel improvements, they leave feedback and I fix things for them, I get excited about a new feature and it brings value to their work. I let them vote on the more experimental ideas.

I get happily excited for each new subscription, and it all feels earned, a stark contrast to how I felt about my biweekly paychecks at corporate life.

The product [0] launched on HN a year ago, and I've worked on it almost every day since then, and after having reached some threshold of MRR, I've since felt that I can keep working on it forever.

Tonight, I'm up late releasing another feature [1]. The motivation to do so feels effortless, as, it's my garden.

[0] https://terrastruct.com

[1] Sync diagrams with a github repo, ~hacking the README as a presentation tool (https://github.com/terrastruct-bot/Demo)

> Users message me to appreciate some small look & feel improvements, they leave feedback and I fix things for them, I get excited about a new feature and it brings value to their work.

This is great. But if you thrive on this kind of positive feedback, I'm curious to know, if you ever get the occasional bit of angry/negative feedback (e.g. from a user who is really pissed off about a feature change that broke their unique workflow), does it demotivate you? If not, how do you avoid it getting you down? Or is it just so rare that it's not a problem?

I do get churn, and have users unhappy about things, but it's just as valuable feedback, if not more, than the positive ones.

The only demotivating thing would be silence. In the Show HN post, quite a number of people said it wasn't what they were looking for or it was lacking xyz. But that's a whole lot better than languishing in 3 upvotes and no comments at all.

terrastruct looks really awesome! Been looking for something like that for a while, I think I’ll test it out. The landing page is very well put together.

Wow! This product is making my day. Great job.

I am still hacking around on it. I would like to sign-up as a team, though I only have need for 3 seats.

Thanks! If you send me an email (in my profile), happy to make that work for you

Wow. This looks extremely slick, and the landing page is awesome. Going to give it a whirl.

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.

[1] https://24hrstartup.com/

As long as you select the right product to focus on, that sounds an excellent plan.

I think OP's point is that you have to focus this way to get to the point of knowing if a product is the right one to focus on.

Not focusing this way only guarantees that you'll move on before even finding out.

What is your main project?

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.

(1) https://buzzvid.com/members.html

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 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

Where can I join this? :)

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.

Check the link in my profile!

Discord invite seems to be invalid now?

Got a new one in there, you can try again now.

Can you invite me to the Discord?

Popped a link in my profile, trying not to be spammy!

It says "link invalid"?

Oops, try the new one, sorry!

Count me in! I’d very much be interested in joining such a community.

I popped a link in my profile. It would be good if it were a nice smallish community so I am trying not to spam it around.

Sounds awesome!

how do I join?

Popped a link in my profile!

Sounds great, where can we join?

I popped a link in my profile :)

Looks like the link has expired. Do you have a new one?

Yep, try the new one! Thought I would limit the first invite but it's already expired.

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).

[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...

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.

A very appealing concept. I hope people doing this succeed in generating sufficient income to make a living.

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...

thank you for sharing the link, very interesting to see a similar idea discussed within another community.

> This is my garden, and I intend to putter.

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!

"putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I'm from the U.S. and the phrases "potter around" and "potter in the garden" are new to me. I have always used "putter".

My pronunciation of putter is "puh-ter" (same sound as under) and potter is "pah-ter" (same sound as father).

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.

Before today, I’d only ever heard ‘putter’ used to refer to the golf club you use for ‘putting’...

This is a beautiful analogy.

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.

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 :-)

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.

Literally used it to make digital grass as well:

https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1348394004413620224?s...

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Love the length of this post. more interesting than what could be said in a tweet, but didn’t belabor his best points. Excellent piece.

There has been a growing movement around the thought that one's website is their digital garden, for example: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

https://medium.com/@cmaitchison/are-you-a-software-gardener-...

I finally have words to describe the kind of programming I like to do in my spare time!

Thank you for linking to that article.

This article resonated with me quite a bit. I very much dislike the fast, throwaway software culture of much software development. A revolving door of technology, platforms and methodology. The first few years you're excited by the pace of learning, and that prospect of new projects is really alluring as it's a new and exciting problem to solve.

Eventually you realise everything you pour your heart into only matters for a year or two before it's inevitably thrown away, replaced by the new kids on the block.

I can see why VC land can support the irrational churn of technology, and that's fine, hell even entire companies are ephemeral in the startup universe. I think it doesn't make sense for any other kind of project. We shouldn't need to rewrite something every year or two, it should have been built to be a stable platform with boring, fundamental technology from which you can grow the product over years to come.

This was a good read. I've read about personal websites being digital gardens, and describe my own as "more of a functional vegetable patch than an ornamental floral garden". However, I've not seen bootstrapped side-projects compared to gardens, and like the analogy between gardening and farming, where gardening is more fun and less scalable than farming (but that being a good thing in this context). I wonder if a smallholding might be a more appropriate analogy for side-projects though, given gardens and personal websites are usually for personal use while smallholdings and side-projects are more likely to have a small commercial element.

I like the idea of being a custodian of the things I do and have done, which sort of align with the idea in the article. Of course I don't always have the opportunity to do so with clients pushing for new features and so on. But when I can, I do.

It makes the things I make just a little better every time by adding small new features or making small improvements on existing ones. No one asked for them, but they are nonetheless thankful that I did them.

I don't think I could work in an environment that would not let me do those things, there's very little that makes me more unhappy than producing garbage work and 'shutting up'.

I love this analogy. I had a conversation with someone (a non-tech person) recently.

Them: What are you doing?

Me: Making a website

Them: Why?

Me: Just am.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VPSlfz65h8

Some of my products are experiments. Just experiments, I want to check if some thing is possible.

Some of my products are challenges. I don't know how to do it, and just wish to know if I can figure it out.

Some are personal needs. I need something, I can't find a solution that meets my need, I solve it.

Some are art and therapeutic like gardening. Working on them gives me joy and relaxes me.

Some are business. The intent is to make money.

I'm sure folks can find many ways to think about their products, at the end of the day, it's all in your head.

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.

[1] - https://remoteleaf.com

I love this analogy. I enjoy programming as a hobby and as a result, I like taking my time creating a product that I enjoy using.

My garden is currently 2 open-source projects focused on developer efficiency and ease of use.

dev-utils: A simple publicly facing website (that can be run locally) that can do simple encoding, decoding, hashing, pretty printing, etc. All of these are performed using javascript so data is exfiltrated to third-parties. I found that I was using utilities online and I did not trust them so I decided to make my own. You can find the website here: https://utils.andrewcopeland.dev/

zk: A simple not taking application that is written 100% in bash. It follows the zettelkasten note taking method which implements small notes that can be linked together. All notes are written in markdown files and can be auto-synced to a public or private github. You can find the project here: https://github.com/AndrewCopeland/zettelkasten

I only water these projects when I need to and I have no intent on commercializing them. I water them because I like them not because I want to monetize them.

Hey I'm also into permaculture and treating my products like gardens.

I see you are running blogbear I wonder if we could partner somehow.

I'm the founder and creator of Remarkbox a hosted comment service for static sites.

I just made Remarkbox free: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

All are welcome to use the service!

Beautifully written && definitely hits home.

Putter on, my friend.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996780

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/

For gardening buffs (just in case you were wondering) the granadilla vine is also known as the passion fruit. Which was kind of appropriate for building something you're passionate about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passiflora_ligularis

Maracujá is its name in Brazil and coincidentally, is said to have “calming” properties. We have a saying here that passion fruit juice will make you relax - or sleep if you’re already relaxed.

Not sure if there’s scientific basis for this or just an ancient meme.

For twenty years I tried to build products and sell them to others, to no avail. "Marketing is the problem" - I always told myself about my failures.

I still have one product up from those days. FileSculptor is a file converter used by non developers to automate CSV to XLSX conversion. What was the last time I used it myself? Excluding testing before new releases or support issues, never.

I decided that my next product should be something I really care about. Something that scratches my on itch and that I would use on a daily basis. I should be the first one to find bugs on my product, not my users.

I always kept track of my expenses, but was less so with my budget. I used a spreadsheet and would update if once or twice a month. So I decided to create an app with the budget and expense tracking I wanted. I always had lots of ideas of how it should work, how it would forecast transactions automatically from a detailed budget and how it would deal with credit card purchases, hitting the budget on the month they'd appear of the credit card statement. It would support credit card purchases with installments, something always missing in the apps I tried.

I created Pleke to be the personal finance app I always wanted, and use it on a daily basis. For the last six months its been the only source of truth about my finances. At my day job I work on a product used by others. I'm grateful and want it to work well because it pays my bills. But with my app, its quite a different relationship. I'm always proud when I input data in it and it works as designed. When something breaks, I want to fix it ASAP. I have a text file with planned features for version 2, version 3, 4 and 5.

Pleke is the app I want to work on for the next ten years, even if others do not value it as much as I do. "Marketing is the problem" - I will tell myself, to their loss.

Be the first user of your product! A person who takes good care of their garden will work on it and admire it on a daily basis. So should we with our products.

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.

This strongly resonates with the idea of a pure authentic self-expression. In part, bigger companies and the system in general take this away, because of their underlying incentives - “scale quick and break things” instead of just “have fun building something valuable”. I think this is what every side project / idea should be about in long term because that’s how it starts anyway, it’s just transformed into this artificial process full of vanity metrics later on.

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.

This was really awesome! I think that many people are so focused on success we don't take the time to enjoy our garden! The best part of building is the being so hands on, especially when it comes to talking with consumers and hearing about problems, or even building out the product and putting your special touch on it. I will make sure to enjoy my garden this week, and observe how I help it grow to ensure what I'm doing is truly sustainable!

This is a little off-topic, but related: I've done hobbyist webdev for a long time, but only HTML/CSS/JS/PHP. I have an idea for a web app I'd like to build--would you folks recommend Rails or Django, and why?

I have very little background with either Ruby or Python, so the language choice itself isn't a deciding factor for me (although I have slightly more interest in Python).

Both are pretty similar to one another, basically filling the same niche, just with different languages. So if you're more interested in Python, then by learning Django you probably won't be missing out on much w/ Rails (and given their similarities, learning one makes it easier to learn the other).

You're been working with PHP, why do you want to switch to Rails or Django?

Because it's been a very long since I've even done anything with PHP, and I'd like to play with one of the frameworks. I'm much more interested in learning Python or Ruby than I am in learning PHP.

Oh, cool – I understand! My first thought was that if you're already familiar with a language like PHP why not use that to build a webapp.

It made me remember of this game, simcompanies. From what I understood, it is made by a single developer and some help. It has this feeling of community among the players and him included that is really cool. And no pushing hard to buy things.

https://www.simcompanies.com/

I'm a fan of Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden idea: https://maggieappleton.com/garden

It's a "ideas as a garden" metaphor, not necessarily a "product as a garden" metaphor, but the sentiment is the same.

Sounds good to me.

I always wanted to do my own product, but I had the impression all startup communities sucked in some kind of way.

I want to go slow and if I didn't get an MVP out of the door in the first few months, I don't care. I have a flexible job as a freelancer on the side and can wait.

Still, it's hard to find a likeminded community...

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.

I too "cultivate my own garden".

Like the "Turk" in Vaoltaire's Candide, working on my product (garden) insulates me from the wants and worries projected by todays internet.

Here is my garden: https://www.gorelo.io/

Firstly, Very well written and articulated. i wish to have people like these around me while I'm WFH.

bearblog.dev is great, minimalistic, bang on with usages.

Just signed up. Will be using it for sure and will definitely have some contributions as well. Few ideas to chip in.

Kudos great work.

I'm too feeling like this more and more. I get an email every time a new user signes up and I will manually check how they are doing on my site.

If I see they may need my help, I email them (people really love this kind of proactive help).

Working at an ISV developing, providing and supporting software for a specific industry. This is how I work. I love the product, the customer contact and immediate feedback and like that I can put most of my ambitions into it.

Happy gardening!

Hits home! One of these days I'll join you and have my own garden.

Disclaimer: I posted this link, but I am not the author of the blog.

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.

Interesting! Like, leave your plants alone and let them live? (while still occasionally watering them?)

This is beautiful.

Permaculture influencing developers (and vice versa for that matter) will be key for the future of this planet.

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

Love the garden analogy in software, especially when faced with complex systems that can't easily be managed by rigid IT project management styles.

Was reminded of another short piece going way back to 2007: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-g...

You did well to retrieve that one from the memory banks! Must’ve left an impression.

I think I read it too.

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

Beautiful analogy, Herman!

Great perspective IMO.

Does he mean `potter`?

Potter is for the majority, putter for the happy few :)

"Putter" is an alternative spelling.

Anyone else tired of the word 'product'?

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