simon_weber

I don't have anything planned yet, but I also haven't looked into their replacement service.

Whoops; thanks for the heads up! It's fixed now.

I run a number of tiny services in this category, such as an autoresponder for Google Hangouts: https://gchat.simon.codes/. I originally built it for myself - I forward many gmail addresses to one and was missing chat messages - but these days most of my customers are small business owners or employees of larger companies.

I recently summarized all my projects and my numbers here, if it's of interest: https://www.simonmweber.com/2019/01/07/side-project-income-2...

I recently went through this, though with the (arbitrary) goal of running for free indefinitely. This is tougher, since you can't use API Gateway and need to throttle your dynamo operations.

SQS ended up being the key to making this work: everything is asynchronous, and the js SDK is used to enqueue messages directly from the frontend.

That setup is described in https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo..., if you're interested.

I sell productivity tools - Chrome Extensions and a SaaS - that solve my own problems in a niche. All of them run subscriptions with varying kinds of free/trial access, depending on the audience and the cost to me.

If you're curious on the details, I wrote a post recently about getting to $100/month with them: https://www.simonmweber.com/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2....

I don't currently, but I think it's possible. That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I'm building them since they're a reasonable way to handle auth with my unofficial Google integrations (without the special cookie/cors permissions I'd need to store users' Google credentials).

You're able to change the subscription cost on the fly (I think; I haven't actually done it). The bigger problem is there's no easy way to do price segmentation. This is fine for my consumer product, but I may end up rolling my own payments setup for an upcoming business product.

One adds autoplaylists (iTunes smart playlists) to Google Music: https://autoplaylists.simon.codes.

I'm working on my next, which provides business analytics for Google merchants: https://www.simonmweber.com/2017/03/18/google-payments-cente....

My SaaS adds autoreplies to Google Chat and Hangouts: https://gchat.simon.codes.

You can find the business details in https://www.simonmweber.com/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2....

I sell productivity tools - Chrome Extensions and a SaaS - that solve my own problems in a niche. I've avoided ads: they wouldn't be worth it with such small install numbers.

For business-focused products I usually do a free time-limited full-access trial + paid subscription. For consumer-focused products I usually do freemium (limited version for indefinite use + paid subscription to remove limits).

To be honest, I just don't worry about it. I haven't had any problems yet!

In the case I run into problems, I'd consider changing the license.

I started two projects last year and now make ~$100/month in profit. Costs are almost nothing.

https://autoplaylists.simon.codes: iTunes-style smart playlists for Google Music.

https://gchat.simon.codes: autoreplies for Google Chat/Hangouts. Particularly useful for people with multiple accounts that forward email.

https://simon.codes/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2016-0-to... has more details on why I chose these and how I got started.

I switched to a Pixel earlier this year and it's been fantastic.

I primarily run https://galliumos.org, but keep ChromeOS around for casual use. I'd highly recommend GalliumOS to people interested in putting linux on it: it makes things like the custom keyboard layout work out of the box.

I'm a big fan of my Chromebook Pixel. galliumos.org is my daily driver, which is the best linux experience I've ever had -- everything just works.

https://galliumos.org comes pretty close to this. I had all the hardware working on my Pixel in little more than the time it took to install.

I wonder what this means for the folks using unofficial clients? I know there are clients for Mopidy and Squeezebox built with https://github.com/simon-weber/gmusicapi.

Does anyone have more details on what the "embedded string" object encoding is and what workloads it helps with? The closest thing I can find is https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/543, which seems pretty old.

> How are you gonna do it now?

I'm not sure.

Ideally I'd have a site where I can put my email and encourage folks to write me. This has worked better than video chat for me, since:

1) folks rubber duck [1] themselves while writing, so they ask better questions.

2) it's asynchronous, so we don't have to find a matching slot in our schedules (and don't commit to an amount of time beforehand)

I've redirected all my Helpouts schedule requests to email recently and it's worked well.

> Also, why did you do it for free?

I just never considered charging. I don't think I could do so and feel good about it with the amount of free help I've received (irc, SO, hacker school, college...).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Too bad; I've enjoyed running my free CS/programming Helpout [1].

Besides the decline in user growth that Google mentions, here are the major problems I saw while using it:

* hosting a free Helpout meant dealing with constant no-shows [2]. I started charging $1/hour and then refunding it to folks who showed up.

* attendees of free Helpouts were rarely prepared

* the scheduling system was very limited (especially compared to Google Calendar)

That said, when everything worked, it was an amazing experience.

[1] https://helpouts.google.com/103350848301234480355/ls/a344f06...

[2] https://simon.codes/2013/11/07/google-helpouts-first-impress...

Interesting. The race is now on between Wheeler's Title II proposal and Congress Republicans' rumored Title X proposal [0].

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/19...

I've used an xmonad clone for osx [0] for about a year now. It's a lot buggier than xmonad - mostly due to osx's terrible apis - but it gets the job done.

[0] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

http://simplynoise.com is what I use.

tomahawk-player.org is an open-source solution for the same problem.

I'm the author of the unofficial client library OP referenced. It's great to see folks building such awesome things on it =)

Shameless plug: gmusicapi has plenty of contributor-friendly work for all skill levels. If you're interested, shoot me an email or feel free to dive right into some issues.

https://github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API

Author here. I'm happy to answer questions!

"The signature of 'this shouldn't be a class' is that it has two methods, one of which is __init__." [0]

Why not write a function? This addresses all of the objections. Then refactor by pulling out concerns into other functions.

Need to share logic around the functions? Use a decorator. Passing too many attributes? Create a class to contain them.

I think classes are best avoided until it's obvious that encapsulating state provides a benefit, which I don't see in this case.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0&t=3m

re: Linux users complaining of lack of clients, check out insynchq.com. I've been a happy user for the last few months.

Many of these tips address the idea that good naming improves readability. I couldn't agree more!

If you're looking for more on this topic, Brandon Rhodes gave an excellent talk on this at PyCon US last year [0].

[0] http://pyvideo.org/video/1676/the-naming-of-ducks-where-dyna....

> 9. Create dict from keys and values using zip

In 2.7+, I'd recommend a dictionary comprehension instead.

I experience sleep paralysis often after starting study of lucid dreaming. For me, though, it is rarely the terrifying experience the OP describes. In fact, since it's such an easy situation to identify, I tend to become lucid immediately. Don't let this scare you if you're looking to start lucid dreaming.

There are also tricks you can use to escape. For me, scrunching my face and wiggling my toes always worked consistently.

Yeah, I'm not sure myself.

Generally, though, I think the situation has interesting parallels to piracy. Companies have many options on how to respond to unofficial use:

- cracking down on unofficial users == chasing down pirates

- attempting to control unofficial use (probably at the cost of normal usability) == DRM

- embracing unofficial users == the "piracy as free marketing" view

- viewing unofficial users as a sign of a specific weakness in the product == the "piracy as a service problem" view

I suppose that would make the original reverse engineer similar to someone who cracks a game's DRM?

Right, of course.

It can get really hard to tell where the line is, though. For example, multiple for-pay third-party clients for Google Music now exist [0]. Personally, I think this is still a value-add for Google, but I could understand why some would think it's exploitative.

Another thought experiment: say the unofficial use of the platform originally required a fair amount of reverse engineering. Can the person who figured it out be held responsible for other's abusive behavior?

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gomusic/id457883228