stevoski (u/stevoski)

stevoski commented on An Update on Heroku heroku.com/blog/an-update... · Posted by u/lstoll

brightball · 3 days ago

All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.

I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.

stevoski · 3 days ago

Oh those Slicehost articles were excellent. I felt like I could actually do my own sys admin by following them.

stevoski commented on Painless Software Schedules (2000) joelonsoftware.com/2000/0... · Posted by u/MonkeyClub

j45 · 10 days ago

Reading into Joel, he was building SaaS. Fogbugz to name one.

He seems to have other posts on the lifecycle of software and product budding. Maybe it wasn’t mainstream then but some folks were doing meaningful parts of it.

stevoski · 10 days ago

Fogbugz, if the first version even existed in 2000, was not a SaaS. Nor was Jira, by the way.

Both products were initially once-off purchases that you had to install and run on your own infrastructure, and with new, major versions packed with new features that you had to buy if you wanted, but could ignore if you didn’t.

The move to a SaaS model came years later for both products.

stevoski commented on Painless Software Schedules (2000) joelonsoftware.com/2000/0... · Posted by u/MonkeyClub

stevoski · 10 days ago

For many of us, the way we manage software projects has changed has changed so much since the days when Joel wrote this.

It was a different age, with different products. I’m sure there are still products built the old ways, but Joel was writing before SaaS and CI/CD and endless roadmaps.

stevoski commented on Doing the thing is doing the thing softwaredesign.ing/blog/d... · Posted by u/prakhar897

jackfranklyn · 13 days ago

The "doing it badly" principle changed everything for me. I spent weeks planning the perfect architecture for some automation tools I was building. Then I just... stopped planning and built the ugly version that solved my own pain point.

What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could. You learn what users actually care about (often not what you expected), which edge cases matter in practice, and what "good enough" looks like in context.

The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.

stevoski · 13 days ago

> What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.

Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.

He argues much what you’ve described.

Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.

stevoski commented on How to make a damn website (2024) lmnt.me/blog/how-to-make-... · Posted by u/birdculture

stevoski · a month ago

“Damn”, this is good.

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.

stevoski commented on Scott Adams has died youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_Jr... · Posted by u/ekianjo

stevoski · a month ago

A fine time to acknowledge Scott Adams’ remarkably simple and clear financial advice: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

I think it is pretty good.

You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.

stevoski commented on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team github.com/tailwindlabs/t... · Posted by u/kevlened

freedomben · a month ago

> I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.

stevoski · a month ago

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price.

This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

stevoski commented on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team github.com/tailwindlabs/t... · Posted by u/kevlened

stevoski · a month ago

As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

stevoski commented on The Whole App is a Blob drobinin.com/posts/the-wh... · Posted by u/valzevul

stevoski · 2 months ago

What a great writer!

Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.

There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.

I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.

stevoski commented on Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024) medium.com/atari-club/int... · Posted by u/areoform

stevoski · 2 months ago

If you enjoy these types of stories from video game industry veterans, I recommend the My Perfect Console podcast.

https://www.myperfectconsole.com/