[HN Gopher] My product is my garden (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
My product is my garden (2020)
Author : codazoda
Score : 144 points
Date : 2023-04-29 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (herman.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (herman.bearblog.dev)
| foreigner wrote:
| Nice if you can afford it.
| dorfwald wrote:
| "I want to make things that don't scale."
|
| In my experience, software built around this mindset is
| oftentimes better than software built by large corporations
| anyway. Software usually just gets worse with size.
|
| The platonic ideal is a piece of open-source software that a
| user-developer can understand completely in an afternoon or less.
| amiantos wrote:
| I recently built an iOS app that is fully stand-alone. No
| internet connection needed. It helps you build choose your own
| adventure books, and when you're done it exports a text file
| with your book formatted as JSON, so others can import it into
| the app to play it. This app is infinitely scalable, literally
| every person on earth could be using it at the same time with
| no infrastructure problems.
|
| So, I just find this sort of statement confusing ("I want to
| make things that don't scale."). Maybe I am defining "scale"
| wrong, my interpretation is that a product that can scale can
| be used concurrently by many users without structurally
| collapsing in some way. In that way, for much of software
| history, "scale" has not been a concern. Also, in this context,
| "I want to make things that don't scale"... doesn't that just
| mean "I want to make internet services that break if they get
| too many users?"
| scsteps wrote:
| I really like this analogy because I too would like to one day
| have a nice small garden of small products. I see this pursuit
| more as a fun hobby than a career path.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| My garden is my garden, specifically because if I had to "own" a
| product that other people worked on, I think I'd go insane. It's
| impossible to find people who think like me and would do things
| in a way that wouldn't bug me. With a product that real customers
| will use, I either care too much, or I have to stop caring at
| all. So my garden is my little universe where whatever happens
| (good or bad) is on me. The stakes aren't high. It's just for
| fun. And it's mostly manageable by myself. Oops, the squash got
| destroyed by squash bugs. Forgot to water the basil, it died. The
| slugs took out more tomatoes. Oh well! I can just go to the
| store, nobody's getting screwed except myself.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I recommend trying out real gardening, akin to what the author's
| girlfriend was doing. (Also, she sounds like a cool person! As
| does the author.) The parallels between virtual gardening and
| physical gardening became a lot more viscerally true for me once
| I experienced physical gardening.
|
| Here's my mini-story. SF has a bunch of community gardens but the
| waitlist for getting your own plot is comically long. 2-3 years.
| However, the community garden near me has a bunch of apple trees
| that are volunteer-maintained. I figured that would be a good way
| to scratch my gardening itch in the meantime. It's been great!
| The project leader has taught me a lot about maintaining trees.
| And I've really learned that weeding is a lifelong commitment.
| They will always come back, and it's a lot easier if you go out
| there regularly and pull up the small roots. Obvious, and I'm
| sure you've heard this idea before, but going through this
| personally with physical gardening really drives home the wisdom
| of this trite idea. I got lazy this winter due to all the storms
| and didn't go out there for a couple of months. There are FEET of
| weeds now. I've taken out 3 wheelbarrows of weeds and am still
| not done. Ironically I am not that great at keeping on virtual
| weeding either (fixing bugs regularly). But when I am out there
| weeding I have literally thought to myself a few times: "I really
| need to stay on top of my issues..." Also, there is a very
| interesting lesson to ponder through physical weeding: you do it
| because those weeds will compete with your tree for resources.
| Your tree grows less when there's weeds around it. Literal bugs
| will thrive in the weeds and eventually make their way up to your
| tree and damage your tree. I know that the makings are there for
| another visceral lesson but I don't quite feel that one deep in
| my bones yet... I guess I've been lucky to not have to work on
| projects with suffocating tech debt...
| preommr wrote:
| My foray into gardening turned into an engineering project.
|
| Figuring out the amount of sunlight an area gets, being able to
| mointor ph/moisture, drip irrigation, foldable greenhouse
| covers, proper tools to make tilling the soil and laying down a
| solid weed barrier, etc.
|
| It got to be too time consuming, expensive and doing it any
| other way seemed demoralizing. During that time, a lot of
| gadgets have come out that make those things easier. I am
| pretty happy that I spent my time enjoying other things and can
| come back to it now if I wanted to with the efficiency I wanted
| before.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| If you enjoyed reading this, I recommend checking out The
| Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Reading that book has changed my
| approach towards work and it has become more relaxed and I have
| learned to tap deeper into my intuition when engineering.
| codazoda wrote:
| This is an interesting read. It seems to be relatively old but
| still relevant. Because it's old I did a search here first. It
| has been posted here before but it's been a couple years and I
| thought it was worth surfacing again.
|
| Previous:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26012189
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Nice warp-back to HN pre-GPT era.
| zubairq wrote:
| Such a nice perspective, I've actually felt this same way for
| several years now too
| avg_dev wrote:
| I agree with the ethos of the article entirely, I think. I
| personally love taking an organic and experimental and highly
| incremental approach to pretty much everything.
|
| I feel like the word "putter" has some connotations associated
| with it that make it misplaced in the article, though. I looked
| it up in the M-W dictionary and I think that the appropriate
| definition was the verb:
|
| 1: to move or act aimlessly or idly
|
| 2: to work at random: tinker
|
| And the "especially" part of the definition of tinker has
| "unskilled or experimental manner" in it.
|
| Experimental I can get behind. Organic, not necessarily pre-
| meditated, even. But unskilled? I think that is not what is being
| aimed at here. This is careful, painstaking work, with attention
| to details.
|
| A minor quibble to be sure. I still don't actually know what
| bearblog.dev is but it must be some kind of place for devs at
| small software shops to write about their work is my guess, based
| on the two or three posts I've read on the domain name. I've
| enjoyed them all so far.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| Re: _putter_. I don 't know where the Bear Blog dev hails from
| but it's a word used a lot here in the UK.
|
| We p _u_ tter around. Sometimes (more commonly) we also p _o_
| tter around.
|
| Commonly used to explain how we somehow combine aimlessness and
| mindfulness in one action to casually, and almost as an
| accidental by-product, spend time achieving some wistful off-
| hand goal to varying degrees of satisfaction.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| That's a brilliant perspective - I love it! I hadn't thought of
| it in quite those terms, but I have one project where I'm
| constantly trying to keep the code footprint round about the 12k
| mark, and I've come of think of that as "bonsai programming" -
| patiently and meticulously trimming and shaping to avoid sprawl
| and bloat!
| jpjp wrote:
| Bonsai programming is a great way of describing this! It makes
| the project sound more naturally peaceful and beautiful
| kcartlidge wrote:
| Thanks for the phrase "Bonsai Programming". It explains
| perfectly why after many decades of dev work I still spend time
| on one particular codebase I started working on in 2005 purely
| for my own use.
|
| I've done iterations/rewrites of it, in order, with C#, Ruby,
| Python, Go, Free Pascal, and have been back with C# for the
| last few variants. Each time the code gets smaller, faster,
| neater, clearer, more powerful, and better documented.
|
| It will probably never be seen by anyone else (I use it for my
| own stuff), but I get the same satisfaction after almost two
| decades of working on it that a gardener might get when pruning
| and tidying a long-lived and long-loved bush or tree.
|
| Very apt.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| I'm 7 years into my own bonsai software project. As I learn
| more about CS and SWE I get to slowly introduce new concepts
| into the code to improve it. "Each time the code gets
| smaller, faster, neater, clearer, more powerful, and better
| documented" is such a wonderful feeling.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| I really like the idea of bonsai _languages_ , too. Rather than
| growing across various dimensions as new features are demanded,
| they stay small, concise, and focused just getting tighter,
| neater, and more performant. Of course, this isn't always
| practical nor desirable. I'm not sure if there are many bonsai
| languages, though. Perhaps something like _awk_?
| gscho wrote:
| This is exactly how I feel about my side projects. Sometimes our
| day jobs are not exactly what we'd like to be working on so it's
| nice to "putter" on a side project to scratch that itch. If
| someone else finds it useful one day that is a nice bonus but is
| ultimately not what drives me to work on it.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| That's what kept me going for years in my own. Now that I
| finally quit my tech career to focus on my own apps, I wish I
| had been more ambitious earlier on. I learned a lot in industry
| but controlling my own time and reaping the full reward of my
| own labor is glorious. Not to mention the ability to seek
| "promotion" is far more understandably under my control and
| ability to achieve.
| ziolko wrote:
| I love this perspective. And I love these moments when I demo
| my project (people can request a demo on the home page) and
| people realize that it actually solves the problem they are
| struggling with for a long time.
|
| I also deliberately choose not to do things that I don't like
| (like content marketing) even though they'd for sure bring me
| more revenue. It has to be enjoyable because otherwise it'd be
| just another job.
| ozarker wrote:
| I'm glad others feel this way. My coworkers look at me like i'm
| a psycho when I talk about coding on side projects on the
| weekends.
| routerl wrote:
| On a recent thread about a shortage of electricians, several
| commenters talked about taking on electrical work themselves,
| in a way that passed every inspection, by working on the scale
| of months instead of, as the pros do, days. This tracks exactly
| the distinction between _my_ garden vs. _the_ garden, and the
| analogy is great for software.
|
| I'm currently working on something, "using AI" (read: the
| ChatGPT API), and it's coming out perfect in a way I couldn't
| have done without this API, but I also couldn't have done _at
| work_ ; there are too many efficiencies involved when you're
| making software for yourself.
|
| For one thing, the feedback loop between implementation, UI and
| UX is a dot instead of a loop. For another, I'm infinitely
| willing to sympathize with my user, and will take all of their
| suggestions as if they were gospel. And my budget, while not
| infinite or even large, is extremely generous.
|
| I guess it's also worth mentioning people whose recent pet
| projects became their main project, the most salient of whom,
| for me, is AngeTheGreat on YouTube
| (https://m.youtube.com/@angethegreat).
|
| There's something to be said for dogfooding _first_ , then
| releasing something.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I run FPGAjobs.com as a fun side project, and this describes my
| relationship with my product to a T.
|
| I love the "Fuck around and find out" aspect of it. I can goof
| off and do fun things that occasionally add value to the
| business. Case and point: my all time most viewed page is a page
| that shows you a random FPGA meme. I threw it together with a
| bunch of FPGA memes that had made me laugh that I saved locally
| in a folder on my desktop. Net result: tons of backlinks, high
| engagement, and regular conversions of email list sign-ups.
| (https://www.fpgajobs.com/dank)
|
| Funnily enough, ChatGPT has helped immensely with my ability to
| both putter about. ChatGPT can bang out Django features that'd
| take me a week in 10 mins. Most of that time is me copy/pasting
| and fixing the odd variable name that didn't translate. It's all
| the fun of creating with none of the docs spelunking or
| fundamental mistakes I make in Python or HTML.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Hah that meme collection is awesome. Wish we can see them all
| at once though, I had to refresh a lot.
| cushychicken wrote:
| If you email me at fpga.rtl.jobs@gmail.com I'll zip the
| folder and send it to you.
| stevesearer wrote:
| I find the same for my projects.
|
| I usually get them just far enough to work well, but the time
| commitment ends up becoming a grind for the more advanced
| features that are just out of my memory wheelhouse.
|
| I recently figured I was stuck with an Elasticsearch feature
| since I didn't know what to google. ChatGPT got it working in
| 3-4 prompts with me feeding error messages to it.
|
| So I'm finding that I'm not only faster, but have new skills
| and can make features that were impossible before due to time
| commitment/ grind limitations.
| cushychicken wrote:
| It's soooo cool and soooo much more fun.
|
| I enjoyed the hunt and peck of figuring out features one step
| at a time when I started, but my wife and I had a baby in
| Jan, so my long stretches of dev and debug time have gotten
| muuuuuch shorter.
|
| I've become that guy who needs results, and _fast_.
|
| I have become... Management. :,)
| stevesearer wrote:
| It kind of feels like when I first started goofing around
| editing html or css colors and how much fun that was and
| how much power that felt like it gave.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| Are there any resources you'd recommend for learning how to
| build Django features with ChatGPT? Reading your message and
| some of the replies is the first time I've felt interested in
| using ChatGPT.
| elptacek wrote:
| This tracks. As a gardener, you also have to be comfortable with
| things dying and general risks caused by events that are beyond
| your control. The weather, municipalities trying to kill
| mosquitoes and inadvertently killing pollinators, fauna that are
| hungrier than you are... the list is pretty long. It feels
| roughly the same to write 10K lines of code and then walk away
| from it when things don't work out.
| willismichael wrote:
| Thanks for saying this. I'm trying cold frame gardening for the
| first time this year. My plants were doing really well, but
| this week I didn't keep as close a watch on it. My spinach and
| lettuce completely dried up. The peas and radishes are still
| really happy, so at least it's not a total loss.
| elptacek wrote:
| Losing plants is still a bummer. I think I average over my
| lifetime ~60/40 for survive/die over here. The soil here is
| hard clay, which is not helped by decades of previous owners
| mowing the grass and setting the clippings out for
| collection. I've seen plants slowly push up and die because
| the roots couldn't work into the soil. Even with nearly 2
| decades of amendment, it's nowhere near ideal. Weeds don't
| seem to mind, though. Funny how that works.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-29 23:00 UTC)