Hacker News Reader

elmers-glueon I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)

I suspect that, when it comes down to it, the cake-iest of all apps is a "todo" app :)

My contribution is https://www.chronos-desk.com/

Personally I wanted a task app that was local-first[1] (integrated with my desktop; one-time license/no subscription fee; no saas/web browser), had great keyboard shortcut support, and had first-class support for task estimates.

--- [1] https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf

elmers-glueon I was stuck on a side project for 5 years – how I finished it (2020)

I’ve made two side projects so far. The first was a visual JVM profiler that was very complex and educational/intellectually satisfying to build but when I finished it I had little interest or know-how or capital to invest in growing + marketing it.

The second one was as simplest as I could possibly make it. I had basically 2 hours per weekend in 2021 (kids & all) and I rigorously stuck within my estimated scope. I was really focused on making cake. I use the app all the time; it’s at least cake to me. In 2022 I’ll have to figure out if other people think it’s cake, too. But at least no will able to say I over-scoped it, or over-estimated it.

elmers-glueon Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

> I don't want to have to watch three previous movies and two TV shows to fully enjoy the movie that's in front of me.

And then you still won't enjoy it, I promise you.

elmers-glueon Tour of our 250k line Clojure codebase

Most static time type systems can enforce that a voting age is an Integer, say, but can't validate that any value is at least 18, for example.