semicolonandson

Vim has weapons-grade go to definition today using language server protocol, so multiple files is a non-issue for users running LSP.

I run an online marketplace selling digital study notes and taking a commission. It's provided most of my income for the past 10 years, often exceeding a developer's salary. I've got a YouTube video where I talk about the MVP and growing it in the early days: https://youtu.be/aKXlZz-wbmg

Best place to start is the Get Your First 1000 Users playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpkoC9yJXDKlGz7SPwofn...

My personal strategies are - investing in group hobbies that remain doable later in life (e.g. My granny in her 80s can't play piano anymore due to arthritis, but still sings in 3 choirs) - making it a yearly goal to make a new friend every year, so as to fight off attrition

Like video content?

I'm a programmer/marketer with a YouTube channel teaching the SEO, copywriting, and marketing techniques I used to earn a cumulative 7 figures with my Rails app (2—sided marketplace for college notes).

https://youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

I give each of these big ideas a folder on my computer and then fill that folder with markdown documents and think aloud via writing. The core idea is that I don't want to lose the momentum of my thoughts. Maybe that might be helpful for your use-case.

You specifically mentioned marketing/growth hacks etc.

I'm a programmer who bootstrapped a site 10 years ago and it's supported me since as an indie hacker. In order to learn about marketing, I held a monthly closed-doors growth hacking meet-up with other bootstrappers and founders to share our experiences about what works, so I've seen a fair amount of the territory.

Anyway I've got a YouTube channel where I share a lot of what I know, especially with respect to getting those first 1000 users. The focus is on marketing techniques that appeal to engineering types like me (e.g. scalable SEO generated from data; paid ads that you can leave running long-term etc.)

My context is scrappy (the biz only had between 1 and 4 employees), but what I know should be of interest to people in the early stages (less so for funded startups, where scale changes the game somewhat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzT-LQI6x0&list=PLpkoC9yJXD...

I was so disappointed when Gary stopped filming these videos that I started making my own screencasts in that style (non-beginner concepts, fast-paced, language agnostic, and terminal-first).

They are on my site here:

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

I'm not Gary, so the focus is shifted towards areas I have special interests in — namely: the day-to-day of running a software product business as an indie hacker/solopreneur.

There's a ton of useful ideas in Luke Prog's "How to Be Happy" post over on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-...

For those reading this thread whose products or ambitions are more along the "indie hacker"/bootstrapper lines, I've got a bunch of screencasts talking about my experiences over a 10 year period building and living completely from the income of a (Rails/JS) web app (Oxbridge Notes) I built as a one man show.

The screencast topics include everything from getting an MVP out, to a tour of my web app and its admin area, to SEO/Google Analytics/online marketing strategies, to some system design stuff to make maintaining the code easier.

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/series/get-your-first-1000-...

It might be worthwhile to figure out what brings you joy by randomly asking yourself how you are feeling from 1 to 10 throughout the day. You might be surprised, in that your joy rating in the moment may deviate heavily from what you predict. With this data you can start prioritizing activities and trying to change your situation.

I just have a git repo and bunch of markdown files put into folders that correspond to tags. A few people have asked me about it so I already started recording a video about it for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

I know this question is probably intended as a technical one, but from a pragmatic/empirical perspective, the number one use-case of the blockchain is to raise money in a way that side-steps traditional causes of friction (e.g. financial regulations).

(I make no judgement on whether these sources of friction are worthwhile or not.)

As someone who is now over a decade into their programming career, today I find more value in doing analytical breakdowns of my various success and mistakes. What were my oversights on a project? How could I have communicated better? What made one particular library a success, etc.?

Therefore, after years of Anki, I've stopped adding new cards and doing repetition; instead I now focus on keeping a code diary. I've published the first couple of hundred entries here so you can see what this entails:

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/code_diary

I see the relationship between my days of ankifying tidbits of knowledge and my current diarying as one of tactics vs. strategy. The Anki-stage was necessary to drill the basics. But now, a decade later, the focus is on the bigger picture — and trying to capture this bigger picture onto a double-sided flashcard is about as fruitful as trying to contain an ocean in a bathtub.

I went rather deep into ankification of computer science - 5500 cards deep. I've written up my experiences as a series of articles here for anyone interested

https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method

For me (neck and upper back pain) the trick is not so much the model of the chair but the presence of neck and head support. One of the standard Ikea models (Markus I believe) offers that and gives me essentially pain-free computing where thousand dollar chairs without that feature cause agony at the end of a day.

The Google Keyword Planner gives you an estimate of traffic for a given keyword, which is a proxy for interest.

1. A book holder. I noticed I got back pain from studying in recent years. This was entirely attributable to my neck position and buying a book holder stopped this. This, in turn, decreases the resistance to keeping a regular study routine.

2. A box of a 100 wax ear-plugs. Unwanted noise stresses me, and now I can reduce its intensity by 80%.

3. An electric moped. Allows me to zip between cars and avoid traffic, effectively cutting travel time by 1/3.

4. A collection of decent, second-hand suits. Most people underestimate the signaling value in dressing smartly. I've noticed that strangers are far more likely to strike up conversations with me when I dress like a gentleman - you seem much less threatening, more like a "civilian".

Web developer's love of programming is what wins them (potentially) fantastic salaries in regular work; it's also what cripples their attempts to diversify their income.

Time and time again, I see programmer friends investing 6+ months of their time getting an "MVP" out the door. Instead they should be applying their problem-solving skills to figuring out how to test their market hypothesis an order of magnitude more quickly. For my business, that meant a plain HTML website — no JS, no backend — and a PayPal button. (If you care to hear the full story, I have a video and transcript here: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/MVP-&-Origin-Story)

I've founded and been running an independent software product for 10+ years and have lately recorded about 25 screencasts on lessons learned. Watch them at Semicolon&Sons https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

Topics include:

— The consequences of your attitude towards dependencies 10 years down the line

— Systems to reduce errors (and alert you of them when they do happen)

— Lots of command line fu (+ vim)

— Monitoring production services

— Softer stuff related to the commercialization of software (my screencasts come from the point of view that software is a means to an end). Therefore there's stuff on MVPs, SEO, Analytics, etc.

— Continuous integration testing systems and optimization

I try as best I can to make the screencasts language agnostic.

Creating screencasts about advanced programming has been my mission since discovering and falling in love with the (no-longer-active) Destroy All Software series.

On my channel (Semicolon&Sons), the focus is on:

- concepts with a tech shelf-life of approximately "one career" (e.g. unix, SQL, system design) rather than on fad frameworks (e.g. whatever JS framework is popular today)

- production codebases (real users, real money, real legacy) rather than toy examples. I base my screencasts off lessons I've learned running my software product over 10+ years.

- tradeoffs rather than overconfidence in trending principles

- I also add in a softer, more business-oriented twist, based on my own background as an independent software entrepreneur: my screencasts have a strong focus on what it takes to market a piece a software, to help the users who'll benefit from your software actually discover it and take a chance with it. This translates into videos on SEO, Analytics, AdWords etc.

My YouTube channel is: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

I have double as many videos, along with show-notes, on the accompanying website: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

Well that was an unexpected compliment — thanks to a bug in the algorithm I got 11.2.

Given that many readers of HackerNews have an entrepreneurial side and are therefore interested not just in software — but in the business of and marketing of software —, you might get value out of my channel.

Basically my story is that is that I solo-bootstrapped a web-app and have lived from it independently for over a decade. Because of these circumstances I face no red tape in showing the code, the analytics, or the online advertising campaigns I use on screen, and this makes for a more concrete, example-filled treatment of the full gamut of what goes into running a web-based software business.

So if you're an indie-hacker or software founder that does (or at least _should_ be doing) online marketing, I think you'll get something out of my story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOE_sQTyQOo

Previously the website did focus on other areas, but it wasn't worth the increase in stress. I studied law in university so I have a good eye for what makes decent law notes. The same isn't true in other subject areas.

These screencasts had such an impact on me that they inspired me to have a go at making my own set of screencasts aimed at non-beginners (a rarity with programming videos)

My guiding principles when recording my (now over 25) videos are:

- prefer timeless technologies (e.g. unix, testing, C) over fad frameworks

— focus on trade-offs — every idea in CS has a cost

— don't be afraid to peel off one layer of the stack

— set everything in real production code rather than in toy examples

- emphasize actual workflows (showcasing vim and bash and all the associated keyboard shortcuts)

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

I've been lucky enough to be independent for 10 years thanks to a web-app (Oxbridge Notes)

Along the way, I learned a lot concerning both system design (e.g. dependencies, CI testing, monitoring) and also the marketing side required to channel enough customers into the business to generate revenue.

Lately I've recorded 25 or so videos about these topics — basically a day in the life in small tech. If this is your world (or if you plan for this to be your world), these videos should have value to you: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

These companies came to Ireland not because of this but because of lower corporate taxes and an English speaking population; they arrived long before privacy regulation was on the table in Europe.

This study is for parents born in the 1910s to 1920s. The reasons for being childless then are vastly different to today, so I doubt the results carry.

1. I vlog about my 10 year perspective on maintaining and growing my software business (a web app marketplace I bootstrapped in 2010). Things like architecture, stability, performance,seo etc. I'm a strong believer in ignoring the fashions and searching for the timeless in software, and this is my attempt.

2. Once a week at the moment. It's a lot of effort but I hope to monetize eventually (similar to railscasts or Laracasts).

3.Self-hosted (to avoid platform risk) plus YouTube (for organic inbound)

4. https://www.semicolonandsons.com/l/rails

Becoming proficient with tools that allow me to pry into running processes and see what they are doing under the lid

e.g.

lsof to see files and ports opened up by a process

strace to look at what system calls to the Kernel by program is making (and ltrace for library calls)

pstree to see subprocesses spawned

gdb to inject myself into infinite loops of programs written in c-based implementations (e.g. Ruby)

I'm a collector of aha-ish moments so if you want more, my YouTube account is linked to in my profile.