jhunter1016

This is why I love weekend HN. Articles like this don’t often seem to make the front page on the week days, but they are fantastic.

I will say my 10-year-old son wants to be a youtuber. So I got him set up on OBS and it is incredibly easy. He still struggles with the settings sometimes, but he’s 10. It’s really impressive software.

No live streaming for me. My coding style wraps around my family life. So when you have two kids doing remote learning, a dog barking at every passing Amazon driver, and a significant other sharing your home office space, you learn to code around the chaos. Not sure I could find a way to stream or record videos around the chaos. What I do instead is tweet (less so now) and write a lot of blog posts. Every time I learn something new, I’ll write about the experience. Then I also post periodic updates about my progress on IH.

This is incredible. Reminds me of the phenomenal book The Plutonium Files. If you are interested in the history of the first atomic bomb, definitely compliment this reading with that book.

It’s cool to see building in public become mostly mainstream. I’ve always felt like transparency was a far better approach than hiding behind a curtain. That still runs counter to the way a lot of traditional and VC-backed businesses operate.

I’ve taken to building my current project (https://perligo.io) in public on Indie Hackers as I’ve pulled back on my Twitter use. It’s a decent enough place to share what you’re working on.

I used TextExpander every day at an old job and it saved me a ton of time. This looks really nice. Congrats!

Also just realized you wrote it in Go. I’ve been slowly trying to pick up Go myself and digging through your source could help.

Really love this. I try to keep my contracting work time tracking as simple as possible, but I really hate using the spreadsheet I use now. Going to give this a shot!

Mine is Perligo (https://perligo.io). It’s a digital writing critique group community I’m building simply because of my experience with software used in my Master’s program in creative writing. The program used discussion forums that were not designed for the types of collaboration and communication that happens in a writing group.

My goal is to launch this and have as many writers as possible use it. But if that fails, I know my old MFA cohort will use it with me, and I’m happy with that.

I think utility is all relative. Your contract has utility among those who want to use it. It’s sort of like what my dad used to tell me about baseball cards: they’re only valuable if someone wants to pay you for them.

My contract was more traditional. We needed to mint NFT and sell them in a single transaction. Normally an NFT is minted and transferred then the user can sell it to other people later. In our case, we were selling a very specific asset that demanded payment before (or at the same time) as the NFT was being minted. So I wrote an ERC721 contract that also included Escrow payment capabilities.

It was definitely a good experience, but if I was doing this on my own and not for my job, there’s no way I’d pay almost $300 to deploy a smart contract.

This is an interesting read. I just deployed my first contract to mainnet last week and despite my best optimization efforts, it still cost us almost $300. There is a lot of work to do still for Ethereum to be usable in a cost efficient way. In a perfect world, I can deploy as many contracts as I want for less than the price of cloud storage. Decentralization cannot be the only selling point. There has to be competition on price at some point too.

It has likely become not just unprofitable to focus on UX, but downright detrimental to the company’s bottom line. I say this without the evidence to back it up, but the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. I see it all the time as I preach UX improvements.

If my theory here is right, then the problem can’t be solved by preaching UX to businesses. I think it can only be solved by reminder end users that they deserve better.

Coming up with ideas is a people watching process combined with a life experience process. But ideas aren’t businesses. They aren’t even side hustles. I keep a list of ideas in a note pad and add to them as they come to me. Most have been sitting there forever, likely never to be worked on. However, one idea stood out to me.

Here’s where the my path and yours might diverge. I had already done the startup thing-both bootstrapped and VC-funded. I currently have a job that pays well and I enjoy. So, this idea, I specifically didn’t want it to be a full time job. And I went about building it know the goal was to maybe make a bit of supplemental income, but nothing more.

What that did for me is it took the pressure off of having to find time before and after work to work on it. I worked on it when I truly wanted to. That’s worked well for me, and it’s about to launch (It’s a writers critique group community, if you’re interested - https://perligo.io).

If you aren’t in the same boat as me and are looking to find motivation and time to work on a product you want to end up as your full time job, my suggestion would be to stop trying to work on it after work. People, in my experience, tend to be more focused in the morning before work. Even if you have to get up super early, I’d bet your output is significantly better than anything you do after work.

Good luck!

This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit.

The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.

Failure is part of learning. The failure of my project Graphite Docs (https://graphitedocs.com) crushed me too. I had built something new and exciting for a niche community, but I had failed to leverage the community that already loved it. Instead, I tried going after the “bigger” fish. The ever-elusive enterprise clients. That, in my opinion, is ultimately what did me in.

I did an interview on Failory that goes into a lot more detail: https://www.failory.com/interview/graphite-docs

But the biggest lesson I learned is how and when to validate things. Validation doesn’t stop once you’ve launched. And validation should also not be so intense that you never launch. It’s a delicate balance that I feel much more equipped to manage now.

Just rolled my own auth...yet again. Next time, I’m using this. Been following Userbase since it was first announced and it is now at a point where I’m comfortable using it on a project. Nice work!

I started Graphite Docs (https://graphitedocs.com) while working a day job. I put in the work mostly before my day job every day. And on weekends. It was successful from a usage standpoint. Tens of thousands of people used Graphite. And for a period of time, it was successful from a revenue standpoint. I was getting about $20k per month in grant money from the protocol Graphite was built on.

I’m hoping to recapture that with my new side project, Perligo. I haven’t launched yet, so we’ll see how it goes. But my main advice would be start small. Small things don’t take a ton of time. Graphite was super small at first. Grow as your time allows.

My very first side hustle was a sports blog. In blogging, especially about sports, the content needs to be there when people wake up, head to work, and first arrive at work. That’s the peak reading time (at least when I was doing this). That meant, I had no choice but to get up super early and work to get my writing out before I headed to my day job.

That constraint stuck with me. I cannot work on side hustles after work. I always work on them before. My second successful side hustle, Graphite Docs, started that way. It eventually became a full-time gig for me. I shut it down last year, started another company, left that, contracted, then eventually got a day job again.

And now, I work on yet another side project in the mornings before starting my day job. Perligo (https://perligo.io), a digital critique group platform for creative writers, is mostly a passion project for me, but even still, I don’t think I could muster the energy to work on it after my day job.

So, that’s a long-winded way of saying try working on your side hustle before work instead of after :)

I read this as harmful to the company building task management software more than harmful to the person using the software.

This is such a fantastic example of what’s possible in the browser. Awesome work!

Start printing the red Make Software Great Again hats.

Of all the organizations out there to support web technologies, I would have expected Firefox to be at the forefront of this. Sure, the Chrome team at Google push PWAs, coin terms, and lead many new feature pushes. But that’s all opportunity for Firefox to help standardize the idea of PWAs and make them something more. Web apps with native functionality can help break up monopolistic practices...but only with support from a wide range of actors.

I’ve been wondering how Telegram would survive after their token fell apart. I’ll admit, I didn’t expect ad-based revenue to be the solution. It makes sense in theory, but at the same time it might be a hard sell for existing users. Most people I know that use Telegram use it because it’s not WhatsApp. They appreciate privacy. While Telegram promises to protect privacy while serving ads, that’s become harder and harder for companies to stick to.

Then again, network effects. Telegram could probably do anything they want and still retain a sizeable chunk of their user base because of their current network effect.

The comments can be so funny on HN sometimes. You built something and committed to it for a decade. That’s so freaking cool! Take all feedback with a grain of salt. You’ve been around longer than most apps that launch on Show HN. Keep it up!

Productivity is important, sure. But as with all other professions in which people interact, the interpersonal skills and behavior tend to be more important IMO. Productivity can be massively impacted (positively and negatively) by how well people communicate and get along with each other.

I love seeing tenacity start to pay off. The way I view things like this is if you like doing it, keep at it. The slow growth over time models is one that gets buried in the flashy SV-style startup stories, but they are equally (if not more) important.

I love the site and I only have two points of feedback:

1. I’d move the example player up higher. I suspect many artist will want to know what their link or embeded track will look like. Having to scroll past pricing for the example might lose people. 2. Pricing plan naming can be tough. In this case you may want to look at renaming the plans simply because artists who should be on the semi-pro plan may not pull the trigger because they think they are pros. That’s a small thing though.

This is really cool. I’ve been a big fan of the Nodemailer project for how accessible it makes IMAP and SMTP. This is a significant step towards even more accessibility. I can imagine some pretty cool, lightweight email clients being built with this.

Thank you for making this a progressive web app. I’ve been preaching the benefits of PWAs for a while now and the first thing I do on any new site I access from my phone is try to add it to the Home Screen. Well done!

Hacker News would actually be the opposite if I was going to go single-sided with it. I don’t normally participate in the conversations but I love reading them.

This conversation though just happened to touch on something I’ve been experimenting with so I was compelled to comment.

That said, give me the read only client for HN (I know this exist already) :)

Despite what many comments here might suggest, Twitter is a microblogging site. You do not have to consume other tweets in order to contribute your own tweets to Twitter. That’s why you can follow 0 people and still tweet.

That’s why I love this idea. Imagine writing a blog but everyone suggesting to you that you have to consume other people’s blogs in order to contribute your own. Twitter can be toxic. But it can be great. If you are not in a mental space to consume the doom scroll, this is a good way to post your thoughts while protecting your mental health.

I’ve been tweeting from the command line for a few weeks now but will probably switch to this.