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Discussion on: Advice for a solo developer?

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Feargus Brickley

Having never been in your position, and your post doesn’t include a lot about your work setup, these are just my gut feels on what might help:

  • (de)prioritise: there’s no opportunity to reallocate resources flexibly, so you are going to need to identify what’s most important to work on right now. Plenty of articles out there about this but I always find urgent/important is useful, along with value vs effort. Be cutthroat.
  • work on minimising work in progress. The more there is the less you’ll get done overall, so focus on small, regular deliverables, moving at speed from ‘not started’ to ‘done’. Cut the fat from every task. In general, work started is much, much more important than work not started.
  • communicate with stakeholders: expectations, constraints, surprises, what you need from them, discoveries, successes, setbacks. People appreciate working with genuine, honest people. Hopefully you’re in a situation where you work with, not for.
  • be unavailable at times. You need to have hours of unbroken coding time

Hopefully this helps, doesn’t miss the mark or condescend too much! Good luck