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scattered-thoughts.net

313 pointsluu39 comments

I've been lucky enough to be independent for 10 years thanks to a web-app (Oxbridge Notes)

Along the way, I learned a lot concerning both system design (e.g. dependencies, CI testing, monitoring) and also the marketing side required to channel enough customers into the business to generate revenue.

Lately I've recorded 25 or so videos about these topics — basically a day in the life in small tech. If this is your world (or if you plan for this to be your world), these videos should have value to you: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/

That's impressive that you've been able to be independent for a decade; congrats!. As I'm looking at your site, it appears you only focus on Law schools. Why haven't you expanded to include B schools or Med or others?

Previously the website did focus on other areas, but it wasn't worth the increase in stress. I studied law in university so I have a good eye for what makes decent law notes. The same isn't true in other subject areas.

Had no idea that SQLite is actually created/"owned" by a company, I figured it was just a group of people or small foundation that was sponsored by a lot of companies. I find it kinda funny that in the same page where they list SQLite as one of their products[0] they also have a Java applet from 1996 where you move blocks around to get one of them in the right spot[1]. It's pretty fun though, works great with the CheerpJ Applet Runner extension for chromium.

[0] http://www.hwaci.com/sw/index.html

[1] http://www.hwaci.com/sw/puzzle/ex7.html

You might enjoy this interview with the creator Richard Hipp: https://changelog.com/podcast/201

They go in-depth, not only wrt how and why SQLite happens, but also how it's possible that it's in the public domain and still built by a (mildly) profitable company with employees and all. I found it a very inspiring listen.

This is a lovely collection of role models.

However, as lovely as Maciej's talks are I cannot support the inclusion of pinboard the service in this list. It used to be amazing, and no longer is. Three of my support emails have never been answered. Exporting your archive no longer works (2 of my unanswered emails). Search does not reliably find my bookmarks (1 of my unanswered emails). Multiple times I have had to resort to scrolling through my bookmarks to find bookmarks I knew I had pinned, after searching on some substring of the title failed to return the bookmark.

Maciej is an absolutely brilliant writer, and it feels like that's where his passion lies. I agree that it might be time to either hire someone to take care of Pinboard for him or wind it down gracefully. The world needs his incisive, empathetic writing, and I don't think he has time for both.

That’s a shame, because the article led me to listen to this talk:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c

Which I thought was amazing and inspiring.

This was fantastic, thank you for the link

I don't know if you've visited @pinboard on twitter recently, but it seems like Maciej's priorities may lie elsewhere at the moment, and I for one am OK with that.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard

That is the main problem with Small Tech. People suddenly lose interest.

I don’t agree that that’s a problem with small tech. Startups get bought and are shuttered; big companies change priorities and drop products. I don’t see a big difference.

Sure, but getting ignored or people moving on is hardly exclusive to Small Tech. In my experience, it's far more prevalent in growth-heavy startups than in small businesses.

There are a lot of big tech products where the megacorp has lost interest. Google has websites dedicated to listing their abandoned products or services.

Or people have multiple interests!

I'm reading those tweets and I don't understand the context. Could you clarify what are those priorities?

US elections by the looks of things.

Exact same problem here. Archive backup doesn't work, mails are not answered. And it's not the first time.

When he was having fun dabbling in US politics, Pinboard was regularly misbehaving.

Archiving didn't work for weeks and months, after repeated mails, archiving worked again, failed again three weeks later. I went through that cycle several times.

There doesn't seem to be any monitoring or canaries in place, it's always "my account misbehaves, he does something, and the problem is manually solved". For me, not everyone else, presumably.

For god's sake, set up two or three dummy accounts and have them re-bookmark the same site again and again, see if it works. Have them export their archives every week, see if it works.

It became much more reliable when election season was over, but now it looks like he's lost interest in Pinboard again.

My subscription renewal is coming up and I'm thinking hard about leaving Pinboard. I like the interface, I like the features, I hate that it breaks all the time and the operator doesn't care.

You should check out Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation. It's what pushed pinboard to success, and it's what will eventually be its downfall.

I understand your frustration, but a funny thing here is I get these comments the most when I'm actively working on the site. Doing this stuff solo means not being able to work on every level at once. I just spent a month out in California during the fires setting up a boatload of hardware to add capacity to the site, in part so that even very large archives have a truly remote backup, but that's not a benefit people see in their day-to-day use of the site.

At this point the only accounts that can't get an archive download link are the truly big ones, on the order of 100GB. Raising that threshold (which I believe affects you) was another reason to schlepp out to California.

So I get why it's frustrating to not have pet features like substring search built for you, or unanswered emails, but find it equally frustrating from my side sometimes. It's an old, complex site, and I'm an old, complex guy running it.

Maybe hire another person?

Thanks for the response! I was hoping that putting this somewhere public would be the way I find out you're still working on it :)

> but find it equally frustrating from my side sometimes

Yes, I've tried in my requests not to come off as mean or indignant, I understand you're a single person supporting what's now a rather large project. You probably don't get this enough: thank you for building pinboard and maintaining it. For many years it was a shining beacon of excellence that you didn't get enough credit for.

If you say you're working on raising the limit (the site claims mine is ~90GB, I guess it's just on the threshold) then I believe you and I'm happy to stick around a while longer. My complaint comes from not knowing what you're up to. Until this comment I hadn't seen any signs of life for quite some time. I know you've chosen to keep this a one-man thing, which limits the number of emails you can respond to, but even a twitter account with updates about the service would be appreciated.

> I get why it's frustrating to not have pet features like substring search built for you

I think I chose the wrong phrasing for this, I'm not asking for a new feature. Say that there's a bookmark with the title "COVID Recovery", a search for "COVID" might not return that bookmark. I haven't found a pattern to it, search usually works, but if I can't rely on search that sharply reduces the value in having a lot of bookmarks.

Another succesful small company is Cockos funded by Justin Frankel who develops REAPER.

https://www.cockos.com

https://www.reaper.fm/

In the digital audio world at large 1-3 people teams seem to be the norm. I suppose it's because it's a relatively small market with demand for highly niche products. Simple tools with an insane attention to detail is doable for one person, while large teams may fall prey to too-many-cooks situations.

Great list. I would suggest the addition of Overcast by Marco Arment. It’s a great podcast player with two revenue streams Premium (remove ads and upload your own files) and ads that are mostly sold to podcasters and don’t do any creepy tracking.

The Reddit client Apollo also comes to mind for me. There are many Reddit clients out there to be sure but I find this app to be in a league of its own. I truly envy its developer with their large, well engaged userbase and creative freedom. God forbid Reddit tightens up the API someday or forces ads to be displayed.

The thing to note about all these small companies is that the founders incrementally made improvements over many years.

This is contrasted by startups relentlessly chasing hyper growth asap, and bailing if they don't get it.

I personally tend to feel more zen just thinking about these small tech endeavors, and more agitated when thinking about startups chasing unicorns.

Or you could get a job at a startup, a small business, a non-profit, the public sector, or academia. Plenty of options besides "start a company" or "work at a big company."

Indeed. I was in a position to make that choice a few years back and decided to go non-profit/ed-tech and have been so happy ever since.

Here is how Aral Balkan is defining Small Technology: https://small-tech.org/

He's working on various projects in this category like https://sitejs.org

I hear more about pinboard as a Twitter activist, but I don't really know anyone who actually uses the service.

When I tried to use it myself, it felt like a 2005 web relict. In both a good way and a bad way.

I don't mean no ill will; if people want to use it, power to them.

I tried it for a while; I think the browser extension needs work, but my main gripe with it is that I don't really have a use case for it. I've got a list of browser bookmarks but I don't really do much with it other than the frequently accessed ones. I get on with my day job and don't really spend too much time on more 'academic' work, i.e. gathering resources and collating them or whatever the use case for building a collection of bookmarks is.

I use it. I just have it as a pinned tab which I save the odd page to (probably 2-3 per week). Ocassionally use it to search for stuff.

Like the other thread here says this site has suffered some neglect. I had a bug that latest 2 years (no idea if it affected others) before it was fixed.

I got one of the lifetime accounts back when it first launched which is why I stick with it. If I was paying $22/year I'd have to consider my options.

My main use case is longevity. I use it as part of the extended brain idea. Along with my notes I want my citations to be around. Link rot is a serious issue and this solves for it.

I bookmark in pinboard and every couple of months download the offline archive and back it up, meaning I never have to worry about important things I've bookmarked going away.

I'm a little over the top though... https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/longevity.html

I noticed a broken link in the article: under Sublime for how the team is making enough to "hire an extra developer," the anchor is pointing to the blog post itself. I didn't see anything on either the Sublime or Sublime HQ site about an opening. I'm guessing that the position has already been filled, but that's not definitive.

Aside from that, excellent post.

Any examples of tech companies that are doing well, making money for investors while keeping employees happy _without_ chasing hyper growth? I vaguely recall reading that Salesforce is such an example (I could be wrong).

Maybe the company behind ArcGIS?

Honestly? Most companies are like that I think. Just look beyond the top 10 / 25 of listed companies, beyond the 'angel investor' companies, beyond SF.

Bandcamp has struck me as seeming to be healthy in this regard. They only raised one round of funding a decade ago so they don’t seem beholden to investors and they contribute to a number of charitable causes (including regularly waiving their fee to support artists during the pandemic).

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