DEV Community: devtouser432

Open-source loses a friend

devtouser432 — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 15:07:33 +0000

GitHub, a company used and trusted by the thousands of open-source projects whose reach and impact serves as the framework for modern technological society, has died. Tomorrow, Microsoft GitHub will be born, and thousands of open-source projects will lose a home.

Some of the world’s most important open-source projects—projects that build the very world you interact with every day—are hosted and propagated through GitHub. When a suggestion to change that software is made, it happens on GitHub. When a bug is fixed or a feature is added, it happens on GitHub. Developers building applications use package managers which, in many cases, utterly depend on GitHub.

Even companies like Apple and Facebook, which would in any other circumstance only conduct business with Microsoft under very explicit terms, host their open-source software on GitHub.

And yet even more chilling is that the infrastructure underlying the core code management and review of cryptocurrencies around the world, in most cases, lie nowhere other than in ~~GitHub~~ Microsoft GitHub.

As I read this to myself, I say, why? Why have we trusted GitHub with so much of modern open-source infrastructure? The answer, is, of course: we really like GitHub. And we trust it. They’ve been good to us. We don’t think of acquisitions, or if we do, we hope it’s precisely not one that would impede on what we love so much about it.

Today, many privacy and security oriented applications distribute their code and releases through GitHub, treating the entity as an independent middleman who is potentially less swayed by political influence. Cryptocurrency wallets which run in the web use GitHub to vouch for the integrity of their application in your browser: This website runs directly from compiled code hosted on GitHub. And as much as I don't want to, even I feel a small oozing of relief when I read that. I say, cool, yeah, I know how GitHub pages works, and this wallet is definitely being run directly from the source code I see, and the source code everyone else sees.

Decentralization is all in the name of removing trust in any entity (precisely for this reason), but in GitHub, we all foolishly saw a friend. We needed the ease-of-use software so we can focus on the other hard part of software. And—you won’t screw us over, right GitHub? You’ll…you’ll tell us if any shady business is happening with you and any political entity, right GitHub? Needless to say, the benefit of the doubt was collectively granted to them, and open-source prospered for it.

Today, open-source projects who rely on a dependable middleman to host and deploy software will need to ask themselves: am I ok trusting Microsoft to be that person?

This is of course not to neglect the business aspect of keeping a company as heavy as GitHub up and running. If not Microsoft, perhaps GitHub will have struggled to remain afloat and slowly began to wither through the course of the next several years? I don’t know. What is distinctly clear, however, is the sour taste I feel bubbling in my throat when I struggle to say, let alone think: A large part of the technology underlying modern software applications is now being distributed through Microsoft.

Even I have to start asking myself: am I ok having downloads for a privacy-focused note-taking app coming from Microsoft? ... No. I am, to my dismay at the avalanche of technical debt to come, not ok with it.

How to learn programming the natural way

devtouser432 — Wed, 30 May 2018 16:06:47 +0000

Some years ago, I had a fellow developer ask me where I learned to type on the keyboard. I said, huh? What do you mean. It’s a keyboard. You just tap on it, and eventually you get rally tappy on it. I’ve been doing it since I was three feet tall. He said oh. “I took one of those Mavis Beacon typing classes.”

Both of us, at that point, were equally proficient in typing on a keyboard and understood the super complex mechanics of hand placement and proper finger etiquette. I learnt it absentmindedly, and he learned it brute force. The result is the same. One method is just less exhilarating.

As I’ve stretched through my expanse of time, I’ve found it somewhat increasingly difficult to teach myself new tricks. As a kid, learning is a thing you’re always doing. As an adult, learning is something you need to make time for. Today, programming is as gushing a prospect as gold in the old west. And right before you are all the tools you can possibly need. Tragically, the burden lies on you: will you put in the time?

But as I’ve heard from others, and read on blogs about people’s journey to learn programming, two things are mentioned very often: it’s very hard knowing where to start, and it’s very hard even after you know where to start.

So lots of people give up.

I’ve given up on many, many things in my life. Programming was not one of them, and I’m grateful to my past, clueless self. But that’s exactly it: I learned programming not because of some grand insight and keen forethought. I learned it because I wanted to change the damn color of some rectangle to red.

That’s it. That’s all that's needed to learn programming. You can read hundreds of blog posts and watch a dozen videos on how to program, and at the end of it still be completely incapacitated. Or, you can feel your way through it. From an end result, work backwards, rather than forwards. That is, rather than starting from the absolute beginning (which is completely maddening by the way; blank slates are the most uncomfortable point of any project, even till this day), you start with the end result already in front of you, and you tweak some tiny variable, and you see how it behaves.

That’s sort of how machine learning algorithms work, isn’t it? You try this statistical possibility, observe the result, and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Eventually, it finds a way. You, a machine learner, do the same: find the source code of a complete project, set up the environment (here be dragons), and get the app running. Then, find one thing you want to change about the app, like a color, font, width, height, and figure out what file you’d need to change to do that.

Changing a green rectangle to red might take you hours on the first attempt. Maybe even days. You’ll have to google yourself to exhaustion, in ways you’ve never googled yourself before. Eventually, of course, it becomes common to you. So you give yourself harder and harder tasks. “Ok, I can change the rectangle to any color I want. Can I make two rectangles appear side by side?”

Follow that path, continually make new challenges for yourself, and eventually, you’ll know how to program. Programming isn’t a bunch of rules you need to learn in some strict order, and even if it were, it might take the rest of your life to learn them all. Programming is just this language you learn to speak in varying degrees. You never quite master it. You entertain yourself with how expressive you can be with this newfound language.

But you learn to speak it, just by speaking it.

My wife gets notified of new blog posts, read this one, and said that it inspired her. She said, however, that it might be helpful if you included some resources in the post. I said, well that's the whole point: you don't need any resources. You just need to find an opensource project, and run it. She said, run it where? I laughed. Ok, so obviously, there are different levels of expertise here. But, the point is, you should struggle a little bit. It's ok not knowing. As long as you have an end goal, and are determined, you will find a solution. You can start with running the encrypted notes project I work on called Standard Notes. It's in JavaScript, and setting it up locally is not too bad:

standardnotes / app

Think fearlessly with end-to-end encrypted notes and files. For issues, visit https://standardnotes.com/forum or https://standardnotes.com/help.

Standard Notes

Standard Notes is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking app for digitalists and professionals. Capture your notes, files, and life’s work all in one secure place.

Why Standard Notes?

End-to-end encrypted sync. Only you can read your notes.
Fast, free, and encrypted cross-platform sync on unlimited devices.
Public source code with ability to self-host your own server in a few easy steps.
A strong focus on longevity and sustainability. Learn more.

Creating your private notes account

Launch the web app at app.standardnotes.com.
Click Register to create your private notes account.
Download Standard Notes on your devices.
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- iOS
- Android
You're all set. Standard Notes comes out of the box with end-to-end encrypted sync on all your devices.

Publish a Blog

Standard Notes is a dependable environment to do your most important work, including publishing your ideas to the world. Listed allows you to create an…

View on GitHub

Hardcoded.

devtouser432 — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:14:31 +0000

There is one recurring aspect of my life that always shackles me. My dependence on external activity. Notifications.

Notifications of themselves carry no meaning and have no inherent value. I had been in one very particular setting so uncontrollably enamored by the interfacial beauty of a notification, that I glorified and fell weak at all the powers it had on me. Is it the font color? The way it says that word? No, it’s the dopameaning we’ve ascribed to that particular shape on a screen.

I don’t have to go into detail about which nature of notifications have me personally enslaved. It’s arbitrary. But we all know the sort. Some days, I live wholly notification-to-notification. I smoke them more habitually than a stone-hooked three-pack-a-day smoker. In between, it’s that scratching anxiety. When will I have the next one? How about..now!

Of course, it’s all glory and self-ejaculation until you flip your phone and…nothing. A sour punch in the face. Really?

Any reasonable person observing this behavior in themselves would immediately be appalled at its inelegance and correct it at once. But, I never notice it. I never notice it’s happening, until precisely all the damage has been done. Knocked out, misshapen, and heavily inclined to the ground, I start to figure something must be wrong.

And it’s painfully glaring once you notice it.

Earlier today, I took steps to cull the notifications that make it to the fore of my attention. I don’t need to know everything the second it happens. It can wait. I’ve replaced my real-time reports of business activity with daily reports that email me once in the morning everything I need to know. I figure this way, you can only be insulted once.

I’ve even hardcoded positive messages like “you had #{num_signups} yesterday, which is fantastic” and “your recurring revenue total is #{total}, which is excellent, and means you can continue doing this for a long time to come.” I've even made a weekly report with a postscript that reminds me something I so easily forget: "Keep doing what you're doing. This is it. You're already here. Just do the best work you can, every day."

I figure, if we’re so gullible as to be furiously enthralled with a bubble on a screen, might as well spin the story and craft a nice little narrative around it. My petty brain will fall for shit like that any day of the week.

Debugged

devtouser432 — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 20:52:10 +0000

I’m feeling a little delirious today, after having fully exhausted myself the past two days hunting down a dreadful bug. The most dreadful of all bugs: mobile crashes that occur on launch. Fortunately, this was just a beta build, and it was detected quickly by early testers. But, I was absolutely bewildered. What could it possibly be? The crash reports showed nothing. The changes I made in all were inconsequential. So unaffecting, in fact, that I pushed them straight to master. What could possibly go wrong?

I spent the next few days agonizingly trying to reproduce this bug, but no matter what I tried, no matter how much I tortured the application to show any signs of weakness, it excelled. I was actually impressed. Of course, it’s all a front by the application, which knows it’s being observed, so puts on its best behavior.

This bug, I was certain, would be my last. My entire life flashed before me. What if I never figure this out? I know you say that every time, but for real this time. I began carrying a heavy and fearful state of mind, overly sensitive and prickly to every negative thought. During times like these, it’s best to avoid introspection. Your incisions will be harmful. I went home early, and seriously began asking myself, what am I going to do? I’ve done everything I could.

I decided, out of raw desperation, to just brute force it, by walking through every single new line of code and interrogating it. First, I needed to undo the biggest wrong of all, and redirect the new version commits from master into their own branch, so I can easily review the changes. I thought this would be a catastrophic task, but turned out to be as simple as git branch 2.1, git reset HARD~12 (remove 12 commits), git checkout 2.1

I went through every line, tweaking it around to see if making it behave at its worst would have any fatal repercussions. Almost nothing did. But then I found it.

And really, that’s the end of the story. I’ll repeat this episode probably some time in the next few months. Each of these lucid nightmares instantly takes years off my lifespan, and propagates powerful seeds of negativity that, if not immediately severed, stand to contaminate your future. It’s a subtle, but beating effect.

Originally published on listed.standardnotes.org

Pricing cannot be an afterthought

devtouser432 — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 16:31:43 +0000

I wrote yesterday how the notion of app ideas is still fairly romantic, and challenged anyone exploring building one to really give it some thought before actually doing so. I don’t mean this to say “don’t experiment and hack things,” but as someone legitimately concerned for your well-being, how are you going to survive, dude?

If a friend came up to you and said he wants to write a book and get it into Barnes & Noble, would your first piece of advice be: Dude. Just start writing. Go. Now. Start writing.

It might depend on the audience. But my first reaction to that would be: Now wait a minute. You sure you want this? You sure you know what you’re getting into? Not a lot of authors make money.

As someone who has hacked away on hundreds of (failed) projects in the last decade, I can, based on my experience, wholeheartedly tell you: Now wait just one minute. Before you start hacking away, there are a few things you need to know. Not a lot of indie developers make money.

The most important thing I always, always got wrong was making pricing an afterthought. Because why spend time on pricing if you’re not even sure the project is going to take off? No, I’m going to build the app first. Then if it does well enough, begin introducing a revenue model. Right?

Here are a few reasons why this is a dangerous mindset to have, and why pricing cannot be an afterthought:

Having a pricing model at first launch can affect whether the project is successful or not.
Besides supplying you with the fuel needed to continue doing work on the project, having a pricing page and revenue model can also have subtle psychological effects on both you and your users. For one, a customer may be willing to take you more seriously if they know you’ve thought about the long term plan for your company. You say “I’m going to build this app that a user will use for the next five years,” but a customer says “How can I trust you’ll be around five years from now if you don’t even have a revenue plan in place?” Customers are smart. Personally, I take companies with revenue models far more seriously than those who just have a free product without any clue how to monetize it. I trust paid products more.
Believe me on this: you will lose the motivation to build new features at some point, including pricing.
This may not be permanent, depending on your level of perseverance, but your levels of motivation for building new features, especially something as uncomfortable as pricing, will waver tremendously. Because in most cases, at least for me, the initial response to a side-project launch is always underwhelming. You need to amass users over time, through lots of hard work. It’s definitely achievable. But when you’re down in the slumps, not having acquired enough users and certainly not making any money off this, the last thing you’ll feel like doing is the hard and laborious work necessary to integrate a payment and subscription system. I know so many startups and small companies who put out a free product thinking they were going to monetize it later, but lost the motivation to do so far quicker than they imagined. If building pricing seems tedious compared to the rush of building the actual app, do it first, as early as you can, and, if at all possible, always, always launch with a revenue model in place. Future you will thank you.
Strategizing around pricing models teaches you to be a better entrepreneur.
At the end of the day, in order for your project to be successful, you’ll need to learn to be more than a software developer. You’ll need to learn to be an effective marketer, accountant, strategist, and operations manager. These are very hard things to learn, and something I still struggle with as a developer. Mostly, I struggle with these areas because I have no practice in them. All my shipped projects have only been technical feats, and not marketing or business problems. If I had practiced optimizing pricing and keeping users engaged with all my products, I would have had a much easier time doing the same thing now. And make no mistake about it: marketing (including user acquisition, retention, and churn) will be absolutely essential to master for your company.

Ultimately, there’s still a lot of room for blind experimentation and hacking, but only if you truly don’t care about the outcome. If you do care about the outcome, namely, that you want the project to be successful and provide you with a little bit of income, you can’t defer pricing to the future. You can’t defer the “business” stuff. Build it in from Day 1. And on Day 365, you’ll have a well-oiled, functioning business machine. Worst case on failed projects with built-in revenue models: you become a far better entrepreneur.

There's no such thing as app ideas

devtouser432 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:30:02 +0000

I realize that most people are distracted by cryptocurrencies to be bothered to think about app ideas anymore, but I still get the occasional “hey, I have an app idea!” from the casual layman, be it at a family dinner or reunion of friends. Of course, out of sheer dumb curiosity, I’ll say, “what is it?”, but I’m finding it might be time to start telling these people the truth:

There is no such thing as app ideas.

It’s a fable. A fantasy. A story passed down from generation to generation. That all you need is an app idea. And fate handles the rest.

*Leans into mic* Wrong.

App ideas are not a thing anymore. When you think “app idea” you hear $$$$$, but try rephrasing it as such and see if you’re still interested: “I’ve identified a gap in the market, and believe I am uniquely suited to build a solution. I am willing to spend the next 5-10 years of my life slaving completely in the dark to build this product, and no matter how difficult it gets (it will get difficult), I will not give up. I realize that the product I build at first will probably suck, and will not be what customers want, so I will spend the next several years painstakingly refining it, talking to customers, poring through books, consulting with experts, all while confessing that I had no idea how difficult this was going to be. I’ve also accounted for the financial costs associated with building an app business, and am ready to quit my full-time job when needed to focus full time on this endeavor. Here is my product, here is the problem it solves, here is the market, and here is how I plan to acquire customers.”

Not so sexy now, is it?

How 'bout that Ripple? Been goin up like crazy.

P.S. I wrote a follow up here that expands on this a little more: Pricing cannot be an afterthought.

Be Intelligent For Your Users

devtouser432 — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 16:09:03 +0000

I was talking with a friend yesterday about my experience with Apple’s AirPods and how, despite the price, they are one of the most magical pieces of technology I’ve ever used. You really wouldn’t expect a pair of headphones to delight you in this fashion.

It’s more of a feeling, so I can’t describe it perfectly. But it's by far my most futuristic self. It improves your day, and makes something you couldn't imagine being any simpler infinitely simpler. But surprisingly, the magic is in not just the hardware, but the content itself. It feels like raw information is entering your ear wirelessly through the ether, through some seamless sorcery. I’ll be on the bus or walking on my morning commute and a stream of knowledge (through podcasts) will be entering my ear directly. It doesn’t really feel like there’s technology involved. It's like a gush of wind blew in some high-fidelity wisdom. That’s why it’s magical.

But, there’s also the little things. If you’re listening to something, and you see someone next to you trying to say something, you naturally remove one of the heads from your ear and say “Pardon me?". Well, the first time I did this, the music stopped immediately on its own. When I put the pod back in my ear, the music resumed.

That was damn magical. And I was reflecting to my friend, that essentially, these things have no buttons whatsoever, so they’re forced to make decisions on our behalf and assume our intentions. By removing buttons, they’re forced to become intelligent for us. The iPhone X is a fantastic manifestation of this. It is by far the most magical iPhone device I’ve ever used, and so much of it has to do with the lack of the home button.

I really admire Apple’s ability to trap itself in a corner and come out with seemingly magic-based solutions. I don’t know of another company at this scale that’s able to constantly pull feats like this. Apple essentially removes variables from the environment—variables that millions of people depend on, mind you—and asks, how would this look now? And the solutions are often times stunning.

The grand lesson here is, how would you be forced to innovate if you were trapped in a corner? What kind of constraints can you create for your product that would force you to become intelligent for your users? The key seems to be removing decisions from the user and offloading that to intelligent assumptions. My friend noted that it’s easy to cross the line between intelligent assumptions and annoying, or even invasive, coercion. Indeed it is, but I imagine most products are so riddled with decision-making points that this line is no where in sight.

Really, it seems that the feeling of magic that Apple’s products so frequently create is based off their correct assumption of how I want to use their product, which saves me the time of figuring it out myself.

Originally published at listed.standardnotes.org/@mo.

You’ll get there faster if you slow down

devtouser432 — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 17:29:44 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time in the fast lane, traveling at speeds that are dangerous but feel good. Life in the fast lane is ultimately not a way to live. And when you find yourself drifting off from a comfortable 70mph and into the left most lane, you should really consider how much time you spend there.

The fast lane is when everything needs to be rushed. You’re perpetually running out of time to supersede your competitors or yourself. Everything needs to be finished yesterday, and you forgo any social priorities, like life and family, to get things done. Going so fast, your peripherals are completely blurred, and you fail to see the destruction you cause around you.

I’ve worked a majority of time under this fast-paced mindset of “I’m running out of time. I need to finish this immediately.” The problem of course is that “completing" software always exceeds the time you give it. You put on your racecar helmet, strap in your seatbelt, and say, I’m going to drive 100mph and get there in a week.

Of course, a week turns into two, and two turns into four. Before you know it, you’re still driving 100, and you’re two months in. Your rear bumper has fallen off. You’re running on two spare tires. Your passenger side rearview mirror is hanging on for dear life. And you’ve been going so fast, that you’ve passed up great people and an opportunity to live the nice life you’re speeding towards anyway.

In a word, speed is healthy in moderation, but not as a lifestyle. I know a friend who has been in the fast lane for the last six years, destroying relationships and forgoing a calm life to ship a product he thought would be finished in under a year. And really, the fact that he’s driving so fast contributes greatly to the perpetually missed deadline: you can’t comfortably and precisely steer a vehicle traveling 100mph. So you sort of just end up where the speed takes you, and it’s always towards chaos.

I told this dear friend that you might actually get there faster if you just slowed down for once. Take it easy. It’s taken you six years, but if you went at half the speed, you’d have double the product in half the time. You’d have held on to the people that mattered.

I speak of my friend, but I’ve spent my fair share of time in the fast lane, and can confirm that it’s no way to go about building products. You know you’re in the fast lane when you can’t seem to get yourself to step away from the problems. You have this one bug or feature, and you must complete it by the end of the day, no exceptions. So you skip lunch, you skip the date you had planned, and you work incessantly until 8pm, but figure out this still needs another 12 hours. So you repeat again tomorrow, driving at breakneck speeds and destroying your psyche in the process. Not only is it a poor lifestyle, it’s also a poor way to create quality in your products.

As for me, I’ve long merged into the middle lane. There are cars going faster than me on the left, and cars going slower than me on the right. But I’m able to enjoy my drive at a nice 70mph. I’m in full control of the steering, and can go left or right anytime I please. I easily walk away from problems and let both of us rest. It’ll still be here tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, the problem is almost always easier to solve with a clear mind.

It turns out, if you slow down just a little bit, you might just get there faster.

Originally published on my blog listed.standardnotes.org/@mo.

Growth Articles That Make You Feel Small

devtouser432 — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:27:00 +0000

I was speaking to a friend a few days ago about how frustrating it is to work really hard for months and months to make gradual progress, only to see some article about “How We Got 300,000 Users In 2 Days” or “How We Got To $1 Million Monthly Recurring Revenue Selling Toothpicks”, and other articles of this sort. You know the articles I’m talking about. They invalidate all the work you're doing and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong, or not doing enough.

I’ve been in this industry for many, many years and know, by fact, that startups struggle principally to attract users and to make money. They’re better at buying users and taking money a la venture capital. So, these sort of articles would confound me. On the one hand, I could simply discredit them by saying they’re not real, or fabricated, but that might be a “loserish” attitude towards something that I seemingly want for myself.

On the other hand, there is definitely something off about articles of this sort.

They all have the same format, don’t they? Nice, easy to read paragraphs no more than two sentences long. Fluctuating header styles, random boldness and italics sprinkled in, and a few fifth grade level line charts. This is the de-facto style of all SEO bloggers, which I’ve long been wary of. SEO bloggers tend to be what I consider scummy in their practices. It’s a sort of pyramid scheme. Their work essentially boils down to “How I Got 500,000 People To Read This Article”, which attracts you to reading it, and then counts your visit towards the headline. It’s all sort of a meta-recursive, self-ejaculatory pyramid scheme.

These easy-to-read high-result blog posts aren’t exclusive to SEO or marketing bloggers. I discredit any article or help post which counts my visit as a stroke to its grand ejaculation. But let’s instead consider articles with an honest nature written by seemingly honest people, that don’t have this format.

You have a nice guy or gal who doesn’t have a history of shady marketing practices, who has humbly put out a product to wild, wild success. The article is written honestly, has proper paragraph lengths, and doesn’t water down the reading to a fifth grade level. And in this article, this person claims to some hyperbolic result that is both inspiring and deflating—perhaps “How I Increased My Sales By 50,000% Overnight”.

Let me first say that articles like these are very hard to come by. I mean articles that are well-meaning, written honestly, and do not have some ulterior motive, like selling you the meta-product of growth for yourself. (As a rule, I discredit any articles about growth that aim to ultimately sell me growth.) These sort of honest articles are, by my browsing habits, the exception and not the rule. They do not trigger my bullshit alarm, but the results are so shocking, that I might have to work for the next five years to see similar results. And that’s sort of the goal, isn’t it? To make you feel like you’re doing something wrong,—very, very wrong. But let’s not be completely closed-minded: sometimes, we are very easily doing something wrong. Most times actually. But it’s important to be careful in how we approach articles that claim wild, exceptionary success.

So, I was telling this friend of mine that progress has been going pretty well since we last spoke. But, I mentioned, it doesn’t help the situation when every day I read some new article about how this person has made twenty million dollars in the time it takes me to make my morning coffee. Or how that person got a million users through some arcane marketing strategy with a touch of some Salt Bae level fashion.

My friend makes a funny, devilish look, as if he had figured it all out. He’s an entrepreneur himself, and has certainly come across the same species of articles. He said, “It’s important to recognize when someone is pitching a viable, reproducible marketing strategy (rare), and when someone is ‘backsolving’ their luck to make it seem non-coincidental.”

Intrigued, I asked him to elaborate.

“Well, it’s very easy to connect the dots looking back, isn’t it? Once an event happens, you can easily start connecting dots and telling a story. It’s what humans are good at.”

He mentioned the story of how he himself was able to solicit an external, six-figure contribution from a public company towards his startup without any working product—only an idea. And when I say “contribution”, I mean literally free, non-equity, non-debt based capital. He was a phenomenal salesman, and I myself attributed this legendary story to skill.

“You can easily contribute my results to some wicked skill, and I can easily connect some dots and backsolve to come up with a strategy for how you might do the same for your company. But the truth is, I got lucky. So many of the dots I’m connecting sound reasonable and reproducible, but happened by some chance encounter. I run in to this guy at this event who tells me to meet with this lady who tells me to email this person, and several traversals down this endless chain of events led to some magic. Could I try to inspire you and teach you how to do the same? Sure. But could I replicate my own results again with another company? Probably not. A lot of luck was involved.”

His message seemed to be, don’t discount luck in articles of success you see. Sure, often times there are nuggets of strategy you can observe and keep for yourself, but don’t approach these articles emotionally or enviously. If a person claims they grew an email list to half a million subscribers over night, and claims they can teach you to do the same, this is easily bullshit: this person could make a lot more money selling and performing this reproducible tactic to early startups and companies. Instead, they’re here trying to get you to give up your email for a “free no-bullshit eBook series on how to achieve similar results in half the time.” You can read and digest these articles, and suck out any bits of truth that might be helpful, but to be envious is to be mislead. To feel small is to be mislead. To feel like the work you’re doing is useless and pales in comparison is to be mislead.

The truth is, a lot of articles promising wild marketing success and growth are bullshit, and many more consist of backsolving luck. Very few honest, canonical articles remain that contain pure, reproducible strategy. Your goal is to differentiate between these three classes when reading an article, and to respond appropriately. There is something to be learned from all three classes of articles. But envy is not it. Self-deprecation is not it. What you want instead is to be a sort of neutral extraction algorithm designed to extract nuggets of strategy from articles of this sort. An algorithm is unemotional. It does not feel discouraged when an article is inflated. Instead, it seeks out the truths it has been trained to seek. And it throws away the rest. You can train your mental model to find whatever it is you seek, but as for me, my ruleset is:

If selling growth as a product, discredit almost completely.
If wild, exceptional results, then keep the luck factor in mind. Luck is inspiring just as well. The role of serendipity in our lives is something to be appreciated and humbled by. A feel-good story makes you feel good, and feeling good does good for you.
Of the little honest and reproducible content that remains, study extensively. Advice like this is typically buried in long books, as to not be saturated and already over-deployed in the market.

Ultimately, the only measure of how well you’re doing is, “Well, how do you feel you’re doing? Are you paying your bills? You getting sleep? You feel good about what you’re doing?” There is no objective measure to tell you if the progress you’re making is good. Yes, you can compare your progress to the progress of others, but progress is infinitely-faceted, and two comparisons are almost never valid.

When you want to know how well you’re doing, simply ask yourself.

Be absolutely resolute in what you do

devtouser432 — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 15:24:17 +0000

When you’re doing something big, let’s say like approaching a big shot entrepreneur at a conference, or reaching out to someone via email and asking them for coffee, be absolutely resolute. Don’t wish-wash. Don’t waver.

In the past, I'd been so nervous reaching out to people that I would hide my request in a little “P.S.” at the bottom of the email. Here’s the kind of wimpy email I might have sent:

Hello Person,

[Some text about some previous work this person has done, and why I find it relatable. Sometimes a little too humbling.]

P.S. You don’t know me very well, but if you have time in the coming weeks, I’d love to have coffee and learn from your experiences.

You may not think it, but this email is pathetic. It lacks confidence, it lacks incentive, and most of all, it lacks resoluteness.

The email is of course a symptom of my inner self, and not just a writing problem. It wasn’t that I was particularly insecure, but that I sort of didn’t know what I wanted. Did I want to meet with this person? Maybe. Everyone else is saying you should meet with people. But I wasn’t entirely convinced. I was sort of just filling in. So my emails would reek of hesitation. And the rate of interest from recipients was equally wishy-washy.

Damn. I was hoping they would figure out for me if I actually wanted to meet with them.

Like I said, pathetic.

Doing things irresolutely is really bad, because you decrease your chance of success tremendously, and destroy your self esteem in the process. I would do things half-assed, get results that matched my pathetic effort, then be bummed out and discouraged to try similar things in the future.

What you want instead is full conviction behind every action. You want to leave no doubt in anything you do. If you’re going to reach out to someone you don’t know, you need to exude so much confidence as to humble the other person in prostration. I don’t mean arrogance. But some sort of indication that you know what you’re doing. Or at least know what you want.

Most importantly, don’t reach out to someone if you don’t know what you want just yet. Don’t throw a hail-mary hoping someone—anyone—will catch it. A hail-mary is an act of desperation. Desperation is the opposite of confidence. Desperation on you is like a snake with yellow stripes: it’s an indication to stay away.

When you know what you want, ask for it with all the conviction and confidence you can muster. Optimize for success, not chance.

You can send a pathetic email like the one I sent, and hope to get lucky, but odds are, you won’t, and you’ll have missed your opportunity to get what you want. Or, you can send an email with characteristics like this, and at least increase your chances by 25%:

Hello Estimable Colleague Who's Probably Pooping Right Now,

[bla bla bla]

I know you’re busy, but I’m confident we can greatly benefit from each other’s experiences. I’d love to learn more about x from you, and in return, it might be good for you to meet an entrepreneur building a budding company that shares a similar philosophy to you. Do you have time this week or next to...

It’s not perfect, but really, I’m trying to check off these characteristics:

No excuses (“You don’t know me very well”)
No wavering/hesitation/irresoluteness/vagueness (“If you have time in the coming weeks”)
Proper two-way incentives (i.e you get to learn from me as much as I learn from you)

Most of all, it’s firm. It’s resolute. I know what I want and I know that I want it. There’s no hesitation.

Really, the trick to all of life seems to be, if you exude confidence, people will consume it without question.

And, if you're sure of Newton's third law, then it would be a mistake to give it anything but your all.

P.S. I write daily about topics that might be of interest to developers starting out in their career or graduating to build their own company. You can subscribe here to keep up to date.

When you're stuck, bash things together.

devtouser432 — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 16:39:38 +0000

I’ve been stuck in a loop of non-progress for some time. Things are going well, but not as well as I’d like (I’m pretty sure that remains the case at every level of progress). In any case, the hardest part of building something new, especially a company, is that the road is unpaved. There are no signs, other than a few warning and “Dead End” signs here and there.

I’ve found myself extremely stuck as of late. Not knowing what to do next. I’ve scoured through books, through the web, through my mind, and have found some direction, but not enough. My questions are so particular, that I feel there’s really no way to solicit help from anyone. This of course is a problem of its own: when you’ve gone too deep, and the questions become so abstract and particular that you don’t even know up from down anymore, it’s time to step away from the problem. When you’re solving a problem that’s impossibly hard, it’s best to wait until the problem represents itself in a simpler form.

But of the most fundamental problem—what to do next?—where does one begin? This problem reappears at every level of entrepreneurship, if not life, and is one I struggle with more than any other problem.

What. Do. I. Do. Next.

This question aches every centimeter of my body. I feel nothing but pure resistance to it, because of its paradoxical nature. Imagine being in the center of an underground tunnel system, except, there are no outlets. The walls are made of dirt, and in order to move forward, it’s not a matter of choosing left or right, but instead, you need to dig a passage through any of the thousand options.

What’s the right answer?

If you approach it like this, you’ll be paralyzed of inaction. There is no right answer, or if there was, contemplation is not the right shovel. Instead, you better begin digging in a direction—any direction—and repeat until you find the tunnel that feels like progress to you.

This is what entrepreneurship is like. Instead of forks in the road, there is no road—there are just walls encircling you, and you must chisel at some arbitrary direction in order to move.

I think I’m beginning to understand that, when you’re stuck, and you’re not sure what to do next, the only possible answer is: try as many different things as possible. Create new reactions. Observe the effects. Repeat. Grow. Observe. Study. Repeat. Grow.

That’s sort of the evolutionary method: it doesn’t really know where it’s going. Instead, it tries things, and if beneficial, enlarges that trait, and if detrimental, phases out the trait. This is the nature of the universe at large, isn't it? We've sort of been trained to think "there is a right way, I just need to figure out what it is." When really, the nature of the universe is smashing things together until something acceptable happens.

This is a grand revelation to me, because I have been stuck in a loop of doing the same things over and over again expecting unique results, and am shocked when nothing new happens. Not only that, I’m adamantly resistant to new experiences that don’t have a direct, obvious yield. I’ll only do things if I can measure their immediate results. This sort of mathematical approach to problem-solving will yield some results, but has a very low upper limit.

What you want instead is a sort of chaotic, serendipitous method of progress-making. I know a business-minded guy that would jump at every “want to have coffee” opportunity that came his way, and it confounded me. “Aren’t you afraid it would be a waste of time?” I would always ask. But now I get it. He was experimenting. He wasn’t being biased. He was creating experiments, and studying their reactions.

As for me, I'm putting away my contemplation chisel and putting on my safety goggles. When you’re stuck, and don’t know what to do next, bash things together until a reaction occurs that you’re happy with. Then head in that direction. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Why You're Resistant to Being Productive

devtouser432 — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 16:31:19 +0000

A friend was telling me yesterday that he’s been struggling to get daily tasks done. He’d rather just put them off. But this friend might as well be me, or probably you. Sometimes we go through periods of absolute demolition of our daily tasks, but other times, we go through seemingly longer periods filled with reluctance to work.

In observing this behavior in myself in the past, I’ve noticed that it usually comes down to three reasons why I don’t feel like doing the work I should clearly be doing. The way I’ve been able to observe it and get at its root is because it felt physical. There was a definite obstruction preventing me from doing the work. I could squeeze and squeeze, but could not get past this obstruction. What gives? For me, it’s always one of:

1. I don’t care about the work

This is a hard one and one that I’ve battled with constantly throughout my life. This was especially hard in college where I could not summon a single fuck to give. I couldn’t care less of the topics, and I was always entangled in some side hobby that was far more interesting. If you don’t care about the work, you’re not going to feel like doing it, no matter what productivity system you have in place. The moment you begin caring about the work, you’ll get tasks done so quickly that a productivity system might even be a hindrance (an exaggeration of course, but it truly does become automatic).

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this one. If you don’t care about the work, it’s going be a long and agonizing journey to completing this task and its descendant tasks in the future. The only solution I’ve found is to find a new line of work altogether.

2. I'm not sure how doing that work will take me to the next step

We are future-minded beings after all. You have someplace you want to be in the future. There are things you need to do today. If you can’t draw a direct line between the present task and where you want to be in the future, you’re going to have a hard time summoning the will to complete the task.

This one can be solved through brainstorming: you need to find a way to draw a line from this point that you’re stuck at to where you want to be. As soon as you connect the dots, you can begin to find meaning in your tasks, and feel like you’re working towards a goal.

3. I'm not sure what I would do after I finish that work (what the next step is)

This is the hardest one of them all to detect. Because you like the work. You know what your long term goals are. But you just don’t know what you would do after you finish this task. So this innate friction arises. This happens to me mostly in releasing software. I love building software. And of course I have a long term goal of building a successful software product. But in the moment, I’m not sure what I would do after I release the project. And until I figure out what that next step is, there’s going to be huge friction to move forward.

This one is probably the easiest to solve: just figure out the next few tasks after this task. If all you have on your to-do list is “Release project”, you’re never going to release. If instead you have:

Release project
Email 10 journalists about it
Post on Product Hunt
Reach out to first 5 users

Then you’re going to have a lot easier time, since releasing the project wouldn’t be an existential dead-end. It’ll just be the beginning of your future.

The Final Reason

If you’ve gotten all three of these potential productivity resistors already locked in place, but still find yourself unproductive, you may just simply be tired. I know this was the case with me a few weeks ago. I had been working so hard that I was simply out of fuel. A few days recharge did the trick.

While we were made to work, there is an entire economy of resources residing in our bodies, a lot of it beyond our immediate control. Rather than taking the advice of another person in matters of personal productivity, just listen to yourself. What are your whispers saying? Ask yourself “Why am I not doing the work I should clearly be doing?” and listen to the answers your mind starts shouting. The right answer will always be echoed. It’s just a matter of listening.