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To be just a little contrarian to this post, I've become at peace with the idea that you should probably always spend a great deal of time, and maybe or probabl
by bfe 15y ago
To be just a little contrarian to this post, I've become at peace with the idea that you should probably always spend a great deal of time, and maybe or probably even more time than you feel totally comfortable with, learning about all aspects of something new that you're trying to understand and do something with, and maybe even mentally iterate through different ideas and through a wandering exploration of the idea space while you're building your understanding of it, before you try doing the something with it.
That said, I also love the post and I've bookmarked it to look at again on the committed date to see what they've come up with.
- martinkallstrom 15y agoYeah, blogging about launching and posting it on HN is not actually launching either. But still worthwhile! Talking about launching is silver, launching is gold.
- fedd 15y agowhat is launch then? telling on a big conference with big fanfares? i really want to know because i announced our project here and was ignored, so i know for sure that writing on HN is not launch telling on blogs and forums is a way to test how needed is your solution. my unnoticed launch maybe is gold, but massive discussion of it, testing of our technology, emerging of fans and haters - that would be, i dont know, platinum :)
- martinkallstrom 15y agoI was pondering this myself as I posted my short comment. Good question. BTW, can I offer any help on getting you some attention? It is not magic, just some routine work we could do together. I have a fair bit of experience from getting my own startup established the past five years.
- fedd 15y agoi don't know, what kind of work? did @antirez of Redis do those things? i guess the audience just liked his project and that's all. if my work is BS and we get some attention with some tricks (edit: in a good sence of the word!), we would just agonize longer before everyone including me understands that my work is unneeded. let it be as naturally as it is but thanks anyway (addition: be us a consumer web startup we would agree. our audience is hacker and web engineering crowd, so the help would be just upvote my posts :)
- count 15y agoAntirez was a known quantity. He was known for hping, way back before Redis was a glimmer in anyone's eye. Going from awesome to further awesome is easy. To mix metaphors there - the first million is hard.
- fedd 15y agogot you. i should go to where i am already known... :)
- martinkallstrom 15y agoThere is such a thing as deserved attention and it doesn't come by itself to the rest of us. PR is not smoke and mirror, it is plain work. Still, it's the part of 'launching' that few have worked out how to do just because they don't take the time to do it. If web development could be reduced to 'just sit down and write a program and put it on the web' then PR could be reduced to 'just find out what journalists and bloggers have readers that would be interested in your stuff and ask them to write about it'. It is as simple as that and as with programming, it only takes a couple of years to get a good grasp of. (addition in response to your addition: so make sure I get to know when you post something you'd like me to upvote. See, then you're doing PR work. If you think attention will come by itself, then you could sit in front of your TV and expect your software write itself as well)
- fedd 15y agoyou're right! yes, i guess i am doing it already. my complains was just about this particular site, where i haven't worked much enough yet
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoive found i learn the most from just experimenting and DOING. I can read learn python the hard way all day, but when it comes down to it, trying to do your own thing is the best teacher.
- _delirium 15y agoI've found that sometimes, but have also found the opposite, where 30 minutes of reading has cleared up many, many hours of confusion borne of experience. Most often it takes the form of: 1) run into variants of some minor difficulty on and off, develop a solution or workaround; 2) run into another edge case that breaks my solution, patch it, start wondering if this problem is more subtle than I'd first thought; 3) try to determine if what I'm doing is an instance of something more general that has a name; 4) finally find a chapter in Knuth that exactly explains why I've had the problems I've had, in addition to giving me a solution that covers a more general case I hadn't even run into yet. (On the other hand, having run into the problem in various forms 'irl' probably did make reading the description/solution in Knuth more intelligible and well motivated, compared to if I had just sat down and read every one of his books first.)
- amcintyre 15y ago"On the other hand, having run into the problem in various forms 'irl' probably did make reading the description/solution in Knuth more intelligible and well motivated, compared to if I had just sat down and read every one of his books first." That's definitely the case for me. I find that I don't have the internal motivation to sit down and read a lot about a given subject until I've been faced with some real- world problem that turns out to be really hard without more knowledge of that subject.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoI like to speed read/scan books like Knuth's just so I have some mental map of what's in them, even if I don't grok it right away. That way when I do hit a problem I'm working on, I'm more likely to remember I saw it already solved in a book somewhere. In fact, I just assume from the start that every single problem I face in programming, no matter how large or small, has already been found and solved by someone else, and written about in a book or posted about on the internet. It's not like I'm trying to create real AI or prove P=NP or anything, just building apps.