stevoski · HackerTrans

To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.

It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:

> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

stevoski

há 8 diasdiscuss

> Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!

Thank you!

The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.

Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.

Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.

If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.

stevoski

há 8 diasdiscuss

I have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”.

The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.

https://killthehippo.com/

stevoski

mês passadodiscuss

Linear was simple and fast. Unfortunately it is has become an example of creeping complexity.

They keep adding new features at a steady pace, each slowly making the UI more confusing.

stevoski

mês passadodiscuss

We switched to Valkey after the Redis license kerfuffle happened, discovered we were saving money on our AWS bill, and have no motivation to go back to Redis.

So we’ve stayed with Valkey.

stevoski

mês passadodiscuss

> Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans

And indexes. Many times in my career, adding the right SQL index has solved a serious performance problem.

stevoski

mês passadodiscuss

I’ve been evaluating PostHog for our company.

I’ve now made our decision. We won’t be using them.

If they are going to position yourself as the non-slimy no-BS guys, they can’t pull this nonsense.

stevoski

há 3 mesesdiscuss

What are those decent alternatives to Akismet?

I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.

stevoski

há 4 mesesdiscuss

Well-written article, manages not to sound rant-y while describing the problem well.

I feel like part of the blame for the situation is that JavaScript has always lacked a standard library which contains the "atomic architecture" style packages. (A standard library wouldn't solve everything, of course.)

stevoski

há 4 mesesdiscuss

Flickr was the first site I saw where you could edit some text on the screen inline, without a complete page reload to get an “edit” form.

Today this is utterly ordinary. At the time, it was remarkable.

stevoski

há 4 mesesdiscuss

I think this “story” started when The Economist did a filler article about it. The Economist article was based on some pretty weak understanding and knowledge of Kiwis and their culture of spending time abroad.

From there the usual YouTube “experts” started stories on it. You know the type - they sound authoritative but they are basically regurgitating stuff from Wikipedia (or some Economist article) with some pretty screens and clickbaity thumbnails.

Ultimately, there’s nothing behind this story. As has been the case since Pakehas arrived, lots of Kiwis go abroad and spend lots of time abroad, some go back, and some don’t, and meanwhile NZ’s population continues to grow.

The trends grow and shrink based on relative health of the Aus and NZ economies.

stevoski

há 5 mesesdiscuss

My daughter spoke four languages at age 3. Not because she is gifted, but because she grew up in an immigrant environment. One language with me, another with my partner who speaks a different mother tongue than I do, and the two local languages where we live.

And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.

When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.

She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.

stevoski

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Oh those Slicehost articles were excellent. I felt like I could actually do my own sys admin by following them.

stevoski

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Fogbugz, if the first version even existed in 2000, was not a SaaS. Nor was Jira, by the way.

Both products were initially once-off purchases that you had to install and run on your own infrastructure, and with new, major versions packed with new features that you had to buy if you wanted, but could ignore if you didn’t.

The move to a SaaS model came years later for both products.

stevoski

há 5 mesesdiscuss

For many of us, the way we manage software projects has changed has changed so much since the days when Joel wrote this.

It was a different age, with different products. I’m sure there are still products built the old ways, but Joel was writing before SaaS and CI/CD and endless roadmaps.

stevoski

há 5 mesesdiscuss

> What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.

Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.

He argues much what you’ve described.

Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.

stevoski

há 6 mesesdiscuss

“Damn”, this is good.

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.

stevoski

há 6 mesesdiscuss

A fine time to acknowledge Scott Adams’ remarkably simple and clear financial advice: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

I think it is pretty good.

You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.

stevoski

há 6 mesesdiscuss

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price.

This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

stevoski

há 6 mesesdiscuss

As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

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