62 karma · joined October 23, 2014
Dunno if in the end they also put in place some kind of blacklisting for leaked certificates
I was (and probably am to some extent) burnt out. The hardest thing was caused by the fact that I asked for help. Help to reduce my workload, help to have some kind of support, whatever.
What happened is that many if not all the people I knew always reacted with "Yeah, you'll be fine".
And this is because of two major things 1. I always solve problems. People expect me to do the same so when I ask for help, they don't consider this a threat. 2. People don't want to face pain: I was the only one in a team noticing that one of our teammates was on the edge of burnout. We don't want to face the pain because it's hard, because we don't know how to fix pain easily and sometimes we also can't fix pain.
In the end I decided to do something like Maya. Tell my story.
I documented myself for the burnout part, asked a friend that's expert on psycology and wrote a piece to help people understand how complex this topic is. (here it is in italian, for those who care: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vogliamo-parlare-di-burnout-o...)
Result? Many people reached out and shared how much critical was this problem. We need to fix it and learn both how to see this in ourselves and in others, and how we can help them (and to me the fist key element is being able to face other people's pain and suffer with no fear)
It often lacks polishing and features, I truly do hope that with the many users migrating they'll put some extra work to make it first class
The terrible part is mostly because I got too many roles and zero help to grow (I'm often the icebreaker of a tech or role), which lead me to myself doing the actual criticism to ensure I'm doing my best.
On the other hand this kind of continuous self-doubt is stressing, so reading a comment like yours is a relief :)
Thanks for writing it :)
Right now scheduling calls diminishes time on the people you involve, so if it's a simple update why not give them the choice?
It might be a result of our former structure that leads to this issue I am experiencing (or it might be an issue I only have :) )
Create it for you, solve your problems, chances are you are among a group of people that share the same issues and the work will be "where do this people group together?"
Creating a company in a cosmetic field was challenging, but I do believe it's something feasable for everyone as long as you accept the fact that you must delegate part of the work.
I still think that this might be true for the dev field, so yeah, as many other pointed out: Build a decent MVP that solve a problem, share it with the people who care.
Obviously, for me, turning into a product means "making some money", otherwise you're simply testing. So, the process to get from "I have an idea" to "I have a product" might vary a lot.
I started saying "Scratch your own itch" because if you are not solving something you care about and you are infatuated by an idea, doing the market research, finding what the ideal customer really wants is hard. Instead, if you are the first customer of your product and use it daily it's much easier to find pitfalls, problems, defects and so on.
From there, a good advice I always found is trying to sell it to the circle of people you know even before selling online. If none of them buy the product (note the word "Buy". don't give it away for free) there's a good chance something is off. Yes, they might not be your target user, but I would bet that you should at least have a friend that shares part of your interests.
As for how to choose ideas: We have limited time, so I invest in the one with the higher probability of success and leave the others in a list. What happens is that, from time to time (rarely but not so much), I'll see someone else came up and made money with a similar idea. I'll bite my finger, smile, and move on :D Afterall what counts is not the idea alone, it's the execution. That will -always- make the difference.
The only solutions was to install linux and it worked.
So, even though I'm fully committed to the ecosystem and I love each and every apple product I still do think that having to trash a machine after 10 years isn't so good considering that those machines are usually still capable to work daily.
I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers". So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer)
Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things. Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio. After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer. That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage.
Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch? The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer. If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast.
If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense.
In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg
PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public.
At the time we weren't that much experiences so we also implemented migrations (whereas today I would have chosen flyway or something similar).
Customer data was text based so we didn't have that many custom fields but at the sime time we had many migrations during the years.
So, would we still do it? Yes and no. It was amazing because it let us isolate each user. With Filesystem backups we could restore just in time the data from each user without having to reset the whole database and with little to know system knowledge.
At the same time it restricted our choices when improving the product. If we had to do a whole refactor of the project we always thought "How do I migrate all the users together?" We had to think about versioning, upgrade in different times and so on.
From a tech standpoint it wasn't much of a problem, but it burdened the project a little bit. Bigger refactorings are harder and you need much more depth when you think about big new features.
I still think it was a nice solution, but this solution came also because we didn't knew a thing about partitioning in databases and we weren't expert in clustering. All in all it allowed us to create a product sustaining a decent customer base with low knowledge for that time.
With today technology I'd test if we can do it other ways.
Dunno if you're interested in the whole process, but I documented it on a blog post in case someone is after the same solution (https://givemethechills.com/why-did-i-start-working-part-tim... )
BTW I first got the idea right here on HN and the good thing is that I think, as developers, we have one of the best jobs that allows reducing our working time.
To improve it even further I'd love to do this kind of work entirely remote, thus givin me some extra time to spend with my family and removing the commute. That'd be the max :) I can't ask for this now because we're not a remote company and I know for sure that if the company is not fully remote I'm gonna fail badly (mostly because I'll be the only one doing it ).
In any case, after doing it for many years I can say that it's amazing and I love it
It was the best decision in my entire life. I came to the conclusion that our work will not linger in our memories the way family, love, friends, do.
It entirely changed my way of thinking and I can't see myself going back to a 5-days week.
If anyone is interested I also wrote what were the drawbacks for me on my blog ( https://givemethechills.com/why-did-i-start-working-part-tim... ) I don't want by no means hijack the thread, but if anyone wants a inside look I think the post might help, and in any case I'm open to question.
Back to the 20% raise topic: No, I wouldn't take it unless it'll improve my quality of life dramatically.
Spring in java is pushing somewhat on functional programming and lambdas are now another way to work in java, which means you can achieve a some kind of real func programming.
We have some beautiful newcomers like Elixir which are trying to fill a gab, so yeah: I think the JS world does seem like it's going faster (and it sure does until it reaches a "mature" state), but at the same time we have great evolutions across all the stacks.
Obviously not everything changes, some things stay the same, that's because we're looking at some mature technology and not the bleeding edge, but if we look at the outliers, I think you could easily pick at least an innovator around each backend language.
The Power of Vulnerability by Brenè Brown and Quiet by Susan Cain.
The first is not a real book since it's audio only, there is no written counterpart but it changed the way I see, connect, live in the world entirely. I _never_ found something along those lines.
While the second book, Quiet, although a little boring in some sides, made me accept my introversion (although I don't appear like an introvert).
If I had to pick only one then it would be the power of vulnerability, such a shame it hasn't a paper counterpart (you could read all brene brown books probably and get the same message, but that audio book is so great).
My paycheck is less but I get to enjoy life a lot more and I have more time to replenish my energies. I remember that before this I always felt out of breath at work. Too much high paced, too little time. After this change I got more efficient (and I was efficient before) and that feeling of time missing to do things has gone away.
For anyone reading: if you have a decent pay and have been employed in the company for some time, consider this option. Chances are they'll agree to moving onto part-time with no trouble and the benefits are well beyond the change in the money you earn.
The sad thing is that it became useless with OSX. Safari couldn't be updated nor any browser, thus leading to the inability to browse the web because of https certificates compatibility.
I had to install (with a lot of tricks) linux and it works flawlessy.
It's sad to see that a working computer has become obsolete in only 10 years, and while I will probably continue use Apple products I feel like there something _wrong_ with this. That's one of the reason I am worried about buying an apple watch. Obsolescence.
All in all I get it and I know that it'll probably pay off for them, just like it did with the dvd player removed, but it'll take time (for me) to get used to the fact that, at least on the apple ecosystems, things last more than usual, but they also become useless more than usual.
He was the spark that ignited my interest towards getting out of the usual "let's not discuss difficult topics", and as usual his post is a fantastic example of how to be honest without being a jerk.
Aside from this, it's great to see him on a different journey, although I'm sure leaving Moz must've been hard.
I think we often treat libraries as voodoo blackboxes, but they're more often thatn not created by normal people with great skills. Sometimes it's a great way to learn a way to code, or even better, to understand the behaviour of a library.
I found myself doing it more often when the IDE itself downloaded and linked the sources. (Lazy, I know).
It's a pain to ship outside US (because of taxes/shipping prices) , but aside from that you make great products. keep going, and it's nice to see some bootstrapped examples too.
I remember that to me the solution was remote work. I dreamed of it and coming from Italy it seemed like an impossible request.
I had this idea that even though our job might be good/great, our life isn't defined by our job. I still think this today. Our life is what we do after our job. Friends, family, travels.
In one comment a guy discussed the benefits he gained moving from the 9-5 job, to a part time job. I thought about it for a couple of months and decided to give it a go with my boss.
It went well, and even though I'd love to have the flexibility of remotework right now I'm really happy about this choice. To me nothing is comparable to being able to spend more time with the people you love.
Side effect of it: some other coworkers started evaluating part-time job as a possibility to increase their quality of life, which is amazing :)
Here's my personal experience. I've tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general searches.
6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I've been pleased enough to use it both at work, at home and on my smartphone.
The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly when I feel there's something missing (which doesn't happen that much) or when I need to find a very selective piece of information.
I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn't always "answer" your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was like "wow, it's getting interesting".
So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess there's a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and using it constantly.
While it would be naive to say "I wouldn't go back to google", I'm now an happy user of DDG, and I wasn't expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very skeptical).
I remember it was considered one of the highest quality services out there (never used it personally, though).
Aside from this thing office has always been the de facto, but it wasn't until office 2007 (ribbons? I don't recall if it was 2007 or 2003) that the office suite was revamped from an UI point of view. That really was the moment microsoft made a difference that wasn't matched (and still isn't). Before the 2007, even though the open office suite was inferior because of the compatibility issues, the interfaces weren't so superior (IMHO).
The ribbon bar (loved or hated) was the first step towards the recent UI improvements. The same OneNote has vastly improved.
Also, I am specifically not talking about feature-richness. It's obvious that there are not so many competitors to office in this regard, but still with many features comes complexity, and complexity comes at a price. Microsoft found a great way to reduce that complexity without sacrificing features. (a totally different way compared to apple, which _usually_ start with less features and adds them over time).
I wouldn't have imaging that in the past, mostly because the microsoft product were so unpolished that were terrible to use (although sometimes very advanced).
microsoft IS changing, and I think they are moving in the right direction. (I don't agree in all of their choices, but I like the result).
I don't use apps, just follow my personal practice.
If someone ask me advice on this here's what I say: Start small, like 5 minutes. Although "serious" meditation is a different matter, a small meditation about mindfulness will surely change a lot of things :)
Keep it small if you don't have enough time and don't judge yourself if you can't make it through 20min easily, it's fine even if you do 1 min.
In the beginning I used an iOS app called InsightTimer, nice app.
Headspace is another great start.