That's so sad to hear. I only met him once about acquiring my High Scalability blog. That didn't happen, but it was obvious he was one of those wise people who was both kind and very smart. Not a combination we see often in this world. A real loss...
I have the same pair of glasses. My first paid programming work was dBASE II and later FoxPro. I don't look back on MySQL + Perl with the same affection. You could really get stuff done in those environments.
The thing is, it's real. Or it was for the golden era of cheap tokens. When tokens get expensive, we'll see how that changes things. With AI, you can think in terms of features rather than implementation; that's a totally different way of working.
I first programmed in C on a PDP 11 many years ago. I'm curious what you mean by "public vs. dev mode"?
I've always sucked at marketing. For HN, I decided to be honest because that's the kind of people who read HN.
And it really does do a lot. That's not hype. It's full-featured as I could make it without turning into something it's not, like a calendar or "productivity system."
At the heart of it is the mechanic of a rotation list, not forgetting what's next, but that's just the beginning.
According to app store optimization theory, that means you were never a potential customer anyway. If that's true or not, who knows?
None of my other apps have ever had a hard paywall, and success was not a result. So I tried something different this time.
In the end, I just couldn't go with a hard paywall; it's against my nature. So, on the paywall at the bottom, there's a "not now" button that lets you use all the features of the app without paying for 7 days.
You got the gist of it. Then it just kind of took off.
The TLDR:
Where it started: me standing in front of a long aisle of dog food bags at Costco, racking my memory for which kind I was supposed to buy next for my finicky golden retriever, Kilo.
How it ended: me building Rotation List, so nobody will ever have to forget again.
You have to wonder how agreed upon these targets really were. Perhaps milestones are being missed because they were driven top down and were never realistic to begin with? Developers with ownership are more likely to work to complete their goals. If they aren't then that's a symptom of problems, not the cause.