chrisrickard

Good question!

I know ultimately I want my own product. A simple, niche, probably boring, product that myself and my wife can maintain, and ideally - pay for our living expenses. That's the big shiny goal.

My agency (of 8 years) was acquired late last year, and I'm currently a little burnt out. I have so many ideas, a smattering of self-doubt, and I think deep down a bit to prove to myself.

So at the moment i'm taking a break, and focusing on something a bit left-of-centre (for me at least).

I am writing all my experiences of starting and running a software agency up at https://devtoagency.com . It's oddly cathartic, and as somewhen who has never written before I am finding it a mixture of fun, exciting, nerve-wracking and again - sometimes self-doubt inducing.

For the first time in my life I am also part of a community (on Twitter). I am conversing, and helping new developers, and it feels good... It's not all about "me", and I think that's what I need this minute.

This just turned into a weird self-help exposé ;)

TLDR; I am focusing on helping others through writing and community building.

Back in 2011 myself and a few mates built our startup over 1 year. Mainly on weekends and sometimes after work, it was a long hard slog - but it ultimately got is into a startup accelerator.. which for me back then was one of my big goals.

We all quit our jobs when we got into the accelerator. I was young, and felt that had to be the way. In retrospect one (or two) of us could have continued working part time even at that point. The company slowly fizzled out over the following year. We failed to secure adequate funding, individually ran out of runway, with a splash of co-founder misalignment.

In retrospect we could have done a lot less, and figured all of it out sooner. Not sure if that was a helpful answer :)

Good for you taking the leap, it wasn't stupid.

It sounds like you still feel it's a valid idea right? And you undoubtedly got more headway on the project being full-time for the recent months, so don't be so hard on yourself.

Go and get just enough contracting work so you can pay for your lifestyle, and keep working on it. Talk to your previous employer and mention you now have a couple of days free a week and if they are interested you could help them out ;)

Very good to hear! I have only just started this and it sometimes feels like their may not be an audience, so that's great news :)

Dev to Agency (https://devtoagency.com) - I am writing on how developers can start and run their own custom software agencies. This is from my experience starting, running, and selling my agency over 8 years...

I have never written before this, and not sure if it's something I will after this - but at this stage I need to "get it all out of my head". I don't foresee this being a forever project because ultimately I would have said all I want to say. But at this stage, it feels cathartic :)

CRUD

Software developer.... Turned agency owner... But now I have sold my agency after 8 years I and am a "Technical lead"... But by the end of this year will be back to a Software developer (which I am looking forward to!)

Mainly HN, also I have a pretty curated Twitter following (tech and startups) so Twitter is second in line, then Indie Hackers, and lastly Tildes at https://tildes.net.

Tildes is a new one for me, but I am enjoying its simple UI and smaller community.

I hear ya, after my work day I find it very hard to do much more than chill. I am most productive in the morning, and try and find 1 hour before starting my day. I also recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear - as he has helped me try and build a habit I enjoy around my side projects.

I think this could work for me. I often feel stress around knowing I should catch up with someone, and then more people get added to that list, and piles up and up. Sometimes I think I put off socialising because there are too many people that I "should" see.I'm going to try something more regular like this and see if it helps.

Good to know, I just did some googling and the wider world seems to very much agree with your opinion!

I just finished read my first fiction novel in about 10 years: Dune.

Although it’s not quite contemporary - I really enjoyed it so you might too. There is also a bunch of follow on books I may delve into one day... but right now I’m back to business books :)

Sure, feel free to email chris at devtoagency dot com

Rails, PHP, or Django. Tried and tested, strong communities.

I ran a consultancy for 8 years (sold last year), and we focused on the niche of internal business software - that is, un-sexy software used by mainly boring businesses to get their internal stuff done. I feel focusing on a niche ended up getting far more leads than when we were just a generalist "We can do anything for you!" company. We had a tailored website to focus on business automation, and wrote quite a lot of blog posts on the topic - being quite specific on what we can do and examples. It took close to a year after niching down like this, but eventually we started getting some good leads from good old google search. Keywords such as custom software, business software, business automation software etc.

Having said all that - at the end of the day my consultancy also get it's best and biggest projects via word of mouth. In the end I realised it was very stressful for a small consultancy to work with too many clients, and we we small (5 people), so eventually I decided we need to focus on going deeper with our current client base rather than looking for new clients. This was ultimately a superpower, and took us to a consistent 7 figurers per year with a tiny team and a few key clients.

I sold my agency last year and have recently started writing some insights on my blog https://devtoagency.com - you guys may be a bit past this (as my target reader is a full-stack dev wanting to start a custom software agency), but you may find something insightful - I actually found it really hard to find good information on the internet about software agencies/consultancies, which is why I want to try and capture my thoughts.

Haha a freudian slip indeed

It's reasonably unexciting but I am writing an article about "What I wish I had known before starting my custom software development agency"...

I know, I know - those titles are kinda lame - but it captures it pretty well, as the piece is about a younger me (8 years ago) being visited by an older, wider, and slightly fatter me, and imparting some key learnings about the world of client services, and more generally running a custom software business.

It's for my new blog/newsletter/website Dev to Agency (https://www.devtoagency.com) where I am trying to help full-stack developers that may wish the start a software agency get started, and hopefully teach them a few things.

Oh really, weird.. Do you follow me? whats your twitter I will reach out.

I started out as a software engineer, but have spent the 8 years building and running a custom software development agency, which was acquired last year by a larger company.

I am now looking to help developers who want to start a software agency themselves, so have created Dev to Agency where I am writing about the lessons and insights I learned.

https://www.devtoagency.com

Breathing (techniques) seems to be a semi-regular theme on HN, but I must admit I have never given it any more than skimming the articles.

Just curious - has anyone seen significant positive changes from introducing something like pranayama?

Build with the Boring Stack! ™

Maybe take a peek at https://www.nocsdegree.com - there is a story on the frontend page currently "Getting an entry level cybersecurity job thanks to Flatiron School"

I have read HN every morning for the last ten years, and I think for the first 5 years of my HN life I felt a huge rush when _something_ new came out. That could be a new "groundbreaking" app, JS library, Mac distro etc.

About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.

Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)

Personally I am quite familiar with configuring JIRA - and I agree it is very customisable... but, as many have said - it is far too slow.

Serverside Rendering

* https://laravel-livewire.com

* https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

* https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor

edit: added blazor

Yup, so this is really for my use case - but essentially unpoly was great, but after a while I started having a lot of custom compilers for specific things.. And again, that's fine - but I was really trying to have less custom JS code off in seperate files. Turbolinks gave me the super simple ajax page-refresh concept, and Alpine allowed me to move my JS functionality inline.. which I actually like (for now!). I actually use Alpine with Laravel Livewire for some more server-side functionality that seems like magic (similar to Phoenix LiveView) https://laravel-livewire.com/docs/quickstart

Unpoly is awesome, and I think deserves more recognition. Having said that I recently moved to Alpine JS (plus Turbolinks) and I think that also deserves more recognition https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine

Unfortunately it's the same size as the 8 https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/why-upgrade/

My love of SE comes from its small the size... So i'm disappointed.

I dig Electron, and had always assumed by now we would have a multi-OS CSS toolkit for "native looking" styles. I remember http://photonkit.com from back in the day, but I think there is room for something more comprehensive.

And a Datalist polyfill in the meantime https://github.com/mfranzke/datalist-polyfill (somewhat seems to defeat the nojs point though)