fullstackchris

Sounds like tech influencers even before ChatGPT existed :)

I swear if I see one more TODO app...

I mean the whole concept of "world's best" in terms of art doesn't even make sense. It rarely, if ever, makes sense in other areas or fields as well. (even sports, where it is is sometimes objective, records and acheivements are broken all the time again and again)

My 2 cents: monorepos try to solve what is actually a series of devops problems, by essentially abusing the way an organization or individual uses git (or VCS of your choice). These tools that were never designed for devops in the first place.

To elaborate: I think you are much better off, whether as a team or solo developer, developing small, isolated, and tested / reliable libraries and / or packages that can be combined as needed. Ideally, each package or library can build, test, and ship itself at the CI/CD level. Trying to encapsulate all that into one giant conglomerate of potentially different languages, file types, frameworks and much more sounds exactly what it is: a mess!

Yes, I continually dislike why engineers are so discounted in terms of parsing customer problems... we build the damn things, we also happen to know how to use the mobile apps, web apps, and desktop apps we build. I'm likely heavily biased and bitter at this point, but I've yet to work with a good "product manager" - and I still don't know what a good one would look like or do.

> The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild.

But this is exactly my point. I likely saw in 2018 word for word "The potential with blockchain technology if it can be refined is wild." Then everyone slowly realized - as you mentioned - "there's nothing you can do with a blockchain that you couldn't already to before". Same with chatGPT, it's just regurgitating what we collective know as a species. I just don't see how, if ever, any sort of AI system (even granted geometric improvement blah blah blah) is going to take over my daily type of work.

So I'm going to put a laptop on the stand when I go to trial? Give me a break.

If you're alluding to the notion "AI will take ALL the jobs!", well, here I am, still building websites for well established companies that still don't (in 2023!!!) have a web presence. Hell, half the worlds banking system still runs on COBOL!

Leading edge tech development is rapid, sure. But tech understanding, adoption, and implementation is painfully slow. Humans gon' be humans.

It's like the same thing every 5 years now, last time it was crypto "end of inequality!" "bank the poor!" "same global currency!" sorry to be skeptical, but I didn't see the quantum leap with crypto, and I don't see the quantum leap with GPT - what are essentially fancy NLP models

Did you look at the results? All models that were tested failed significantly (10%+) to acheive the passing range.

> At this point it's no longer a matter of if but when extrasolar life will be confirmed

There is absolutely no data to confirm this, simply because no matter what equations or variables you throw around, we have no way of knowing the probability of life. We have only earth, and we still don't fully understand how that all worked out. We do not know what (or if!) any filter is present that prevents complex life. From a philisophical perspective, we'd be much better off as a species that the harder we look, we should hope to find _no_ life: https://nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

While supabase could be considered a "technology" it's really more or less fancy wrappers around a postgres database. And even then, the wrappers it uses are rather well known:

- gotrue for auth, 3.2K GitHub stars

- postgREST to expost postgres as REST API, 19.8K GitHub stars

- kong as API gateway, 33.7K GitHub stars

I realized after commenting if it is specifically a product where you actually need / want these customers' data to "talk" to eachother, then actually your architecture might be a bit simpler - then you can expose what you need between all the tenants. I can't speak to this approach much more though, since I haven't done a project like that yet.

As an alternative, if you containerize everything in the stack, you can simply spool up another seperate and isolated stack of containers for each given customer. Then it's also trivial if they want it 'on premise' somewhere or 'in the cloud'. No need to try and add complexity at the schema level and make a monolith support multiple tenants.

Also, this list is quite literally supabase (https://supabase.com/) - I cannot recommend enough, especially if OP is solo, which it sounds like is the case.

Agreed. If you have a sharp grasp of most parts of the coding you'll need to do, the domain stuff is trivial (after reading a few articles and such). There is probably one small exception, and that is the horible esoteric world of SAP - esentially a bunch of made up production flows on top of more made up production flows, filled with alphabet soup that ultimately piles up to mean a whole bunch of nothing.

> You’ll need to work around incompetence

This one I am truly struggling with, and probably will the rest of my life. Sadly it hinders the success of all of us as software developers. I'm currently reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie and loving it, but can't help but thinking in the back of my mind that somehow all these rules and guidance he has for being a decent human with other humans are extremely challenging when (in some cases) you are FORCED to work with said incompetant collegue. I agree entirely with the authors wording around this point, including "frustrating", "exhausting", and "toxic". Call me an asshole but I'm an engineer, by definition I like doing things efficiently and to the point. Working with someone who can't be either is incredibly challenging. Would love to hear more strategies people have developed to deal with this.

Reading comments here, I want to be clear: I'm not talking about some ego-based notion of "incompetance" like "I can write code better than you". I'm talking about the bigwig guy on your team with a big wallet who tells you the product should be implemented in XYZ because he read an artical about XYZ in a magazine and thought it was cool.

> Dealing with people is hard. Dealing with uncertainty is hard. Dealing with uncertain people is harder. And that's what you're going to do as a software developer.

Also this, haha. This post is gold. Nice work!

I just started tracking the same stuff with myfitnesspal, but I did see Noom as well. Do you have any experience with both? Maybe I'll check out Noom, myfitnesspal sometimes feels overly complicated.

I've been saying for years now that we've already acheived keynes famous 15 hour work week quote possibly as much as a decade ago, but the workaday grind mentality has kept us all cooped up at desks for 40+ hours a week.

Theres a few sentiments sneaking in though: you often now hear of those stories of people working from home doing probably 1-2 hours of real work and doing just fine. Same is even for some desk jobs, at my old enterprise job between meetings, coffee brakes, random discussions and so on, I'd say on an average day only 3-4 hours was real constructive work actually _doing_ something.

> Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.

This little tidbit caught my eye. I think the author underestimates how non-trivial these types of integrations are. We tried doing something similar at a previous startup I worked at, and the whole integration took more than two weeks to get just right. Even once we did it, it was clear the content (by merit of sheer mass alone) was auto-generated. I think there are relatively easy ways for platforms to discount and not rate content that (even if the language of the content itself is discenerable from a human) is in _amount_ clearly batched and automated.

I'd agree with this and in a bit more bitter sentiment, I don't understand why absolutely everything has to have an extremely low learning curve. If you can drive a car or bake some bread, you can take the literal 30 minutes it takes to learn how to use a (brilliantly designed, in my opinion) UI/UX tool like 1password.

I agree entirely. Some of the stuff SpaceX has done is nothing short of incredible (regardless of the involvement of Musk). Imagine if just 20 years ago you said something like "You know, we should make a rocket reusable!" You would have been laughed out of the room, even at a place like NASA.

Humans have an extremely bad habit of discounting future tech.

Also don't forget that code (including the complexity you want to add to it) will probably have only something like an aggragate ~1/3 chance of still being used in a production scenario 5 years or so away anyway (for any number of reason, product change, feature removal, company bought / sold, the list goes on and on...) of course these numbers are anedotal but the point is it can be detrimental to think your code will run as is for the next million years, especially after the first draft

Would love to hear more about (1) but an extended stay in latin america probably isnt in the cards for me. But anyway I love the coworking / maker / incubator places and I think the world can always use more.

The author anyway had this mentality:

> If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve.

Also replying to my own comment shamelessly, but 7-8 years software experience is NOT to short too be a CTO

For me, the real question here is why haven't you started your own company? You claim you can be a CTO... so go be a CTO. You then claim at the same time you "lack a lot side skills that would be necessary for that job". So go learn those skills THEN go be CTO.

It's like you're trying to say you want to have your cake and eat it too, but you don't have the cake yet.

Yeah, sounds harsh, but I'm just repeating what you are saying.

Thanks for this. It seems to be clear enough: if you get in touch with your specific niche customer that matches your product the best, your conversion is sure to increase.

Perhaps since many broader (less niche) bases are covered by the innumerable products out there today, maybe this is a good way to go for solo people.

ugh, this so much, the cringe cofounders at my last startup were so painstaking annoying about how "perfect" the design had to be (for all 500 of our monthly users) that it took us MONTHS to ship new features.

my wisdom: if a product is good, people will use it and pay for it, regardless of minor design problems (that can always be fixed later!)

> uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth

What exactly do you mean here? because I'd argue depending on the product, each of the 3 could be the way to go over the others. Are you trying to say one is the best way of growing? Curious to hear your thoughts.

This hits very close to home, so I'll provide as much advice I can give.

First: don't focus solely on the huge product launch / startup mentality. As a solo dev this is a recipe for a depressive disaster. Instead, I recommend you do a mix of things, like creating youtube videos, software courses, software consulting, and so on. This way you cast a wide net and if any one of those areas doesn't do well or hits a rough patch, you can put more effort into the others. Yeah, it's a grind, but that's kind of the social contract we sign when we go indy / soloprenuer.

I have a modest following and I very often repeat your warnings about these so called digital nomad gurus and entrepeneuers, at least those you see all the time on socials. I hate that whole scene - the crap those people push out is mind bogglingly useless banter. It even drove me to delete my Twitter completely a few months back because I kept seeing like 6 of the same software accounts upvoted to the moon just by repeating stupid trope without any hands on advice, implementations, or anything of any real actionable value. Those people either got lucky or were first to market, but the overwhelming majority of them don't know a damn thing about software, let alone building full stack products or apps used by real customers.

However, as you've said yourself: building any successful startup is extremely hard, time consuming, and can be extremely frustrating at times.

If it helps further, I was exactly where you were only a few weeks ago and I posted nearly the same thing here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33835532. This industry is unforgiving and we all have weeks or even months of dark times. I had just felt cheated by a few people I had otherwise trusted (so a slightly difference sense than your post I guess, but same discouraged theme). Fast forward two weeks later and I'm working for myself again and loving it.

and usually, once you're an entrepeneuer, it likely won't go away ;) just don't force it, who knows, you may return with a badass product weeks, months, or years from today!

Hope this helps and that you can enjoy the holiday season with whomever you may have in your life. Take a break! Best of luck, happy holidays, and best wishes.

I really liked this post, it's what so many entire COMPANIES fail to do in the early days. IMO, ideally every startup should sit down basically the day after founding and ask exactly this: how can we make money (i.e. prove the business point) within a MONTH?

Also have to chime in to the fact you mentioned getting banned due to self promotion on reddit, samething happened to me and really rubs me the wrong way. I also used reddit to get my first sales with my product and then was also banned from some of my favorite subreddits. Such a weird conundrum since the reddit hive mind leans so heavily into "we hate huge companies and corporate slave life!" and whenever someone goes out on a limb as an indy dev or solopreneur to make something themselves they likewise are berated. I just don't get it.

Anyways, great post, couldn't help but mix in my sourness at reddit.

I wonder what the performance would be if the whole thing was thrown into a postgres instance with a full text index...