I'm really fascinated by this career path. As I approach 40 I'm really feeling the pain of the whole developer vs manager dichotomy. The fact is, I've always been comfortable on both sides as a generalist and a team lead, but as my career progresses I'm increasingly feeling the pressure to specialize either by going full-time or specializing in some area that can command a hire salary than the reams of bootcamp dev grads + 5 years experience are claiming. One path would be to found a company and raise money, but I don't really want to spend my brainpower on pitching investors, and the thought of having employees dependent on me feels stressful. I figure I have enough general experience with tech and business that I ought to be able to bootstrap a comfortable solo lifestyle business, but what?
I'm just on the other side of 40 and have similar developer vs manager pains as you. Had my own bootstrapped company for several years, sold it, and lately have been working as an engineering manager at a startup.
Its nice not having the normal worries of a founder but I already have the itch to do something again. Problem is, I never have luck when I go out looking for an idea. The idea usually finds you. You just need to make more opportunities for serendipity.
Also, don't think you have to found a company AND raise money.
> I ought to be able to bootstrap a comfortable solo lifestyle business, but what?
I can't help thinking that his blogging & communications was integral not only the success of the product, but the inception aswell. Something magic happens when you build a flow: more stuff appears from nowhere.
I'm trying to do the same. But after spending the last few months building my own product, I feel like I'm not ready yet. The mistake I made in my career so far was not knowing enough about one industry, it's very difficult to think of a profitable idea if there isn't an industry you know inside out. So I'm considering going back to full time employment, pick an area that I'm really interested and learn that market well.
Pick something that you enjoy ... What does pro athletes like more then money, fame, good looks, and medals ? They like training and competing over all else. So in order to get successful you need to really like what you do. Sometimes it will feel like "work", but that usually means it is work.
I am pursuing this path. I'm interested in fulfilled by Amazon-type products in addition to software projects. It's truly amazing how "easy" it is run one of these businesses solo in comparison to before the internet.
Almost $1M as a solo founder - impressive. I wish many years of success and continued revenue for Sidekiq, and hope the founder never succumbs to the dark "we're gonna scale from $1M to $1B" side.
The guy behind indiehackers.com, csallen, is doing an incredible job with the site. Interesting interviews tailor made for hackers, the forum is an interesting place and it's been fascinating to follow his journey which he shares in vivid detail.
I suppose we'll have to get used to stuff like this. With UTF8 it's really no different from regular words. Even the Go tour has an example of writing go in Chinese, I think.
How does Sidekiq compare to Celery (apart from being a different language)?
IMHO Sidekiq succeeded, because it works smoother, than other (Ruby-based) task scheduling systems, but can we say the same for Celery? It seems pretty stable and is used in production by many organizations and companies, so the question is, could one do the same for the Python ecosystem, or is Celery just in such a good shape, that it's hard to compete with (considering the same open-core model)?
I really love sidekick and use it in several projects. It's one of those gems that just feel really well put together and complete. And once you add it, it opens up all of these possibilities that you might not have considered previously.
Huge props to the developer, and I'm glad that he's been able to make a living off of this.
Kudos to Mike. I'm glad to see Sidekiq Pro/Enterprise are this successful.
My favorite things about Sidekiq (and how Mike runs it) are:
1) The documentation and wiki pages of Sidekiq. [0]
2) The weekly happy hour chats. [1]
The docs and getting started guides are some of best I've seen in OSS -- everything is well-documented and thought through. There's a lot of good things to emulate here.
In addition to his years of conferences talks, blogging, and helpfulness through over mediums... Mike has a weekly happy hour on Fridays to answer questions. I've done it a couple times and he's been extremely helpful.
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Its nice not having the normal worries of a founder but I already have the itch to do something again. Problem is, I never have luck when I go out looking for an idea. The idea usually finds you. You just need to make more opportunities for serendipity.
Also, don't think you have to found a company AND raise money.
Dead Comment
I can't help thinking that his blogging & communications was integral not only the success of the product, but the inception aswell. Something magic happens when you build a flow: more stuff appears from nowhere.
The guy behind indiehackers.com, csallen, is doing an incredible job with the site. Interesting interviews tailor made for hackers, the forum is an interesting place and it's been fascinating to follow his journey which he shares in vivid detail.
There is a bit of a feeling that the community version is somewhat 'nerfed', but it's really Mike's freedom to release the pro/enterprise version.
Though stuff like this: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/blob/master/lib/sidekiq/l... scares me~ :)
0: http://5by5.tv/rubyonrails/222
IMHO Sidekiq succeeded, because it works smoother, than other (Ruby-based) task scheduling systems, but can we say the same for Celery? It seems pretty stable and is used in production by many organizations and companies, so the question is, could one do the same for the Python ecosystem, or is Celery just in such a good shape, that it's hard to compete with (considering the same open-core model)?
Huge props to the developer, and I'm glad that he's been able to make a living off of this.
My favorite things about Sidekiq (and how Mike runs it) are:
1) The documentation and wiki pages of Sidekiq. [0]
2) The weekly happy hour chats. [1]
The docs and getting started guides are some of best I've seen in OSS -- everything is well-documented and thought through. There's a lot of good things to emulate here.
In addition to his years of conferences talks, blogging, and helpfulness through over mediums... Mike has a weekly happy hour on Fridays to answer questions. I've done it a couple times and he's been extremely helpful.
[0] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki
[1] http://sidekiq.org/support