13 ms·

Do things, tell people (2012)

702 points by aarondf 5y ago

quickthrower2 5y ago
Title and body read like a PG essay. Even looks like one in terms of fonts.
ramoz 5y ago
Is this studied in “business anthropology”? Can anyone recommend related research.
jjice 5y ago
Got me inspired to bring my tiny tech blog portion of my site back. It's been a while, but you made me realize that it would be good to reflect on my work again. Really enjoyed this post.
swyx 5y ago
This is similar advice to the concept of Luck Surface Area: https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area do things and tell people. Good advice.
sharmin123 5y ago
pkdpic 5y ago
I'm usually very wary of this kind of post, narrative building and all that, but I like this. And I feel like the honesty at the end of the authors success / path leaves room for the reader to put it all in context. > If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. > Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. > Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. > Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it. I might add a Henry Rollins quote at the end of "(then) say yes to everything but make it work for you." Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.
- rexf 5y ago
  Making (software) stuff seems easy. I do post about it on social media, but honestly it gets 0 traction since I have almost no audience. > If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. This seems like "rest of the owl" where it leaves out a ton of critical steps. Become good at marketing is a lucrative career if you are good at it. So excuse me for being jaded when "learn marketing" seems as helpful to me as "sell profitable services". Sure, but how? The post recommends Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Code Academy. Only Wikipedia has info on marketing, but reading it is not the same as learning how to do marketing.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    The filter is the skill of self-directed learning. It is a meta skill that can be built, which then increase opportunities dramatically. When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  > Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore. I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck. When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
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rexstjohn 5y ago
This is actually very good advice from personal experience. The best career results (promotions) I have seen came from people who built a prototype of some sort then evangelized it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete product, often just a good prototype. First example: This guy took the Intel Edison and built a pretty cool project and brought it to our maker faire events. He ended up in conversation with the CEO of some company and ended up landing a $500K exec job. Just from building a skateboard hack and trying to tell people about it. Second: I knew a guy who built this neat prototype of a compute service and then did a keynote talk at a Meetup. It didn’t really work as a product but the website was convincing. It was enough to “get bought” by a major tech co and land him a CTO job. Another time I saw a guy leave a FAANG and build a compelling IoT type project in three months. Again, he ended up with a CTO level job after a few months. My take away is if you want an executive job, build something somewhat cool, even as a prototype, and go try to sell it for real. Even if you don’t raise any money or make it work as a business it is often way better than submitting resumes. There is something much more powerful about creating something that generates a lot of engagement and conversation, even if it is only half baked but looks decent and your storytelling is compelling. This isn’t interviewing it’s auditioning.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  How big are the companies these people landed exec positions at?
  - paulluuk 5y ago
    Apparantly they were big enough to offer a 500k executive position to someone who created a hobby project on a discontinued 50 dollar processor.
- SenHeng 5y ago
  I used to work at one of those body shop contracting places. A few years ago, I heard that the boss managed to sell the company, presenting themselves as developing an in-house blockchain product. I asked around some ex-colleagues and as far as anyone knew, all they had were some fancy PowerPoint decks and a very rough implementation in PHP. After getting bought, everyone still continued doing the same old body work jobs, except now for the parent company’s other subsidiaries. The website still mentions blockchain. Fake it till you make it.
egypturnash 5y ago
Okay. Here’s some things that I’ve done. A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. Then I went on to draw a comic book about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend. https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It managed to get cover quotes from Phil Foglio, Charlie Stross, and Peter Watts. You can buy a copy of the printed collection if it tickles your fancy. Now I’m working on a space opera comic. https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ It’s still in progress, you can’t buy a copy. But you could support me on Patreon if you have a lot of money from your software job.
- nestorD 5y ago
  > A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. I don't know if it is the blocker but makeplayingcards.com has a `high gloss` finish and does print on demand.
  - junon 5y ago
    Doing a full gloss is pretty easy. Doing spot gloss, where only spots of the print has another material (typically a gloss material) requires special printers or has to be done by hand, as I understand it (I'm not an expert). Finding places that does it can be tricky. I remember going down this road a few times in the past, too.
    - nestorD 5y ago
      What they call high gloss (the name is misleading) appears to be spot gloss: https://cd1.makeplayingcards.com/images/site/card-box-stock/mpc_scodix_480_01.jpg https://cd1.makeplayingcards.com/images/site/card-box-stock/...
ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I feel like I read this as a Paul Graham essay or something. There was an analogy about the area of a rectangle where one axis was doing things and the other was talking about things. Can anyone find it and link these parallel discoveries together?
- FearNotDaniel 5y ago
  It sounds like the Conjoined Triangles of Success.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    That's one of the tesselated hexagons of self-help ideas!
- nishnik 5y ago
  Are you referring to the luck surface area? https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
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jerrygarcia 5y ago
The number one growth hack: Exiting your comfort zone, then sharing that experience with others.
- anothersullivan 5y ago
  Fine. I'm starting Severus, which actually deals with "contacts, business cards, email addresses", but with some interesting privacy mechanisms. I haven't quite launched yet, but I've seen this topic come up frequently on HN, and I never talk about it. I need to get out of my comfort zone and talk about it.
  - jerrygarcia 5y ago
    Ship it!
    - riantogo 5y ago
      Okay, here you go. I have an amazing day job. But I always wanted to build some software utility that others found value in. So I shipped a forum platform. Because I can’t bring myself to share this with my friends and professionals network, it has no users: https://discoflip.com/ https://discoflip.com/
seligman99 5y ago
I'll join in: I'm building a tool called MicroKeys. It's a macro program, for Windows right now. It uses MicroPython as the script engine to let you register hot keys that do things. It's very much a work in progress right now. I'm writing it to fill a very specific niche I have, but if it's useful to others, I'd love to hear feedback on what it could do to be better to help it come to fruition. https://github.com/seligman/microkeys https://github.com/seligman/microkeys
jamal-kumar 5y ago
This just seems like some more optimistic inverse form of siver's rule not to tell anyone and zip it https://sive.rs/zipit https://sive.rs/zipit "Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved. NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” (pdf article here) — and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?” Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others."
- tnorthcutt 5y ago
  The linked post says “do things, tell people.” You are criticizing “tell people, do things.”
arvinsim 5y ago
I wonder how one generates interesting ideas to work on. Maybe I should look up product ideation as I am not really great when it comes creative idea generation.
- gumby 5y ago
  Don't worry about that, perhaps ever, but at least not now. Just do something you want, perhaps fix a bug or whatever. And write about it. Get in the habit -- it will make you feel better. Then you will discover that there are other people who are also interested in X. Also you'll discover that what you consider obvious info isn't obvious to others -- and they are smart people too. I used to be shocked by some posts that made the front page: "that's just trivial stuff everybody knows". That was pure snobbery on my part: I only knew that stuff because I'd been exposed to it decades ago (and there's of course tons I don't know, and never will). And the posts that made it to the front page were good explanations -- and many started with "I didn't know this at all so I looked into it and this is what I learned" You'll be amazed what support and interest you get from simply showing up. And don't bother to try to have a readership in the instagram-influencer zone. Better to have a group of people who are interested because they are interested in things you also are.
- stagger87 5y ago
  It's eye opening once you realize that most interesting ideas are simply iterations or slight improvements on existing ones. Simply releasing a similar product with one additional feature, or at a cheaper price point can excite the right people. In my experience most ideation comes from building a product. Spend enough time in a product space or market and you will naturally come across "interesting" ideas. I put interesting in quotes, because when you are in that space, the idea of iterating on a product may seem obvious or mundane, but if you can execute, and convince the customer, it's anything but.
- arpa 5y ago
  Do things for yourself. Find things missing and improve upon them. Don't think about the "product", but think what you want. Unless you're not talking about the self-improvement path outlined in the post, but rather a startup. In that case things get a little more difficult.
kiwicopple 5y ago
This is good advice for techies, who are usually good at the “do things” and but not the “tell people”. The same principle applies to a startup/side-project. At supabase we call this “ship and shout”, which is about as simple as it sounds (Ant wrote about our full “process” here: https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch ) The other one that took us some getting-used-to was being repetitive on platforms with a short “half-life”, like Twitter. It made me uncomfortable at the start since the general advice is that “reposting is annoying”. But any given tweet probably reaches only 1% of the audience i thought it would, so not many see the repost. Sometimes we will talk/tweet about something we shipped months ago and we still have developers commenting that they just learned about it from the tweet.
- tommiegannert 5y ago
  Do you vary (re)posting time of day, or is any repost pattern useful on Twitter?
- newaccount74 5y ago
  > techies, who are usually good at the “do things” ... But since they don't tell people, they often end up building useless shit. I've experienced this a few times when I spent weeks or even months working on a feature, then showing it to customers, and realising that they don't get it, or that it doesn't fix their problems, etc. I try not to get too attached to my ideas, so if something doesn't work, I throw it away and try a different approach. So I think doing things and telling people after the fact when you are done is not going to lead to success. You need to tell people early, so you can adjust what you're doing to make sure it's actually something interesting.
- ozim 5y ago
  I just want to add there are a lot of "business people" who are good with coming up with ideas but then those ideas are useless. So it is not only techies. One of company owners for example did not understood market our company is in and mandated that we built in Stripe integration. Well it was useless burning of money and he did not read "do things that don't scale", where our market worked you have high touch sales and send invoices and no one ever signed for payments, I removed the code last year and we are growing with customer base.
prawn 5y ago
I think about this a lot. I have a good sense of how much time I spend working on things (say, editing photos and videos) but can often lose sight of how often evidence of that work is seen by others. I might film a location, spend ages editing content from that location and upload it somewhere, but until I share that location, it doesn't count for much. It won't lead to sales, win new clients or build my profile. I often find myself going through the process and sharing the link with a friend or one client, and sitting back satisfied as though I'm finished. Have to then remind myself that I reached all of one person when I need to reach hundreds. I need a dashboard tracking visitation to projects on the web, how often I talk about them on Twitter, or post examples on Instagram, etc.
shakezula 5y ago
This is very similar to my advice to people just starting out in whatever industry they picked to work: say yes more. The unbelievable amount of opportunities I see people say no to put of insecurity in their abilities, out of social pressure, out of image concerns, etc… is absolutely baffling to me. Say yes more. Be smart, keep your wits about you, but say yes more.
jasfi 5y ago
MVP. Keep it minimum but viable to start with.
dceddia 5y ago
In a very meta twist of fate, I just heard about this article today on a podcast, and then realized Aaron (from the podcast) is the OP! If anyone wants to get some advice on how to use Twitter like a human being I recommend a listen. It was a great convo: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e In the spirit of the post, a thing I did last year is build a minimal video editor (https://getrecut.com https://getrecut.com) focused almost exclusively on cutting out silence. And then lately I’ve been building a cross-platform version of it with Rust and Electron. ‘Round here a lot of people dislike Electron, and I kinda count myself among that crowd, so it’s been a fun challenge to build an app like this that defies the idea that Electron apps have to be slow. Turns out you can get a lot of performance out of it if you write most of the heavy lifting in native code, pay attention to the algorithms, make things cache-friendly, keep an eye on the profiling and optimize as you go. So far the Electron app is on par with or faster than the native Mac app, which is exciting to see! Hopefully I’ll have something out in the next month or two.
- aarondf 5y ago
  Haha, hey Dave! In an even weirder twist of fate, I use your app (recut) to edit my other podcast!
jasfi 5y ago
I'm building two things: 1. A project to help people start businesses. The idea is to give founders the structure they typically lack. https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries. 2. An automated crypto trader based on technical analysis. https://tradecast.one https://tradecast.one Both are built on Flutter/Nim/Postgres. I actually also want to build an NLP project too, which I started on, but it's such a huge endeavor that I can't figure out an MVP which won't take 10 years! Plus I can't do too much at once.
- elcritch 5y ago
  Interesting are you using Flutter and Nim, or just Nim on backend?
  - jasfi 5y ago
    Nim on the back-end. The UI is defined in Nim (back-end) and sent to Flutter for rendering. I'm trying to figure out what to do with this part, because it could be useful for others. I'm thinking part Open Source and part commercial, maybe what Qt does. It could work with any back-end, e.g. Python, in theory. If you want to be notified of when I do release something, please email me (see my HN profile).
    - jasfi 5y ago
      I just put up a basic landing page for those that want to sign-up for the wait-list: https://nexusdev.tools https://nexusdev.tools.
wturner 5y ago
This is down to earth advice that matches my own experience. Here is a workflow app intend for work-from-home "gig economy" workers and contractors intended to be as easy to use as a search engine. Still experimenting. https://workflow-magic-svelte.vercel.app/ https://workflow-magic-svelte.vercel.app/
hardwaresofton 5y ago
It’s been a a long road but I’m finally at a point where I can definitively sat that this advice is some of the best you can give anyone in or out of tech. Writing about software I’m building, errors I run into, and situations I get into (and often stumble through) has been huge for my own development and my career (https://vadosware.io https://vadosware.io). Doing this has led me to habitually bite off more than I can chew which seems to be the only way to really grow: - A managed services provider for smaller clouds/infrastructure providers called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com), which came out of all my blogging about Hetzner and kubernetes. - LoginWithHN.com from how often I write about cool stuff on HN that was built for HN - A salary sharing site for Accountants (https://nomorepizzaparties.com https://nomorepizzaparties.com), which came about due to trying and investigating Baserow and NocoDB. Outside of tech there’s awesome collectives like MoonMusiq (https://moonmusiq.com/ https://moonmusiq.com/), a collaboration of musicians that I was made aware of via HN actually -- its obviously an outlet for people to do these two things, in that order. Make cool shit, share it.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  Thanks for the shout out!
- metters 5y ago
  Is it possible to search your blog for specific terms or is there an overview with all articles listed?
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    So there isn’t good search but articles are tagged. Looks like you’ve just given me my next rolling TODO item. Somehow I don’t think it’s even occurred to me. For now please use google search with site:vadosware.io : https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HERE https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUE... [EDIT] for those like me on the DDG default train: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HERE https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HER...
livinglist 5y ago
I can’t agree more… I graduated from an average university with average GPA, so I decided to do some personal projects to make my portfolio stand out. I always wanted to be a mobile app developer so I picked up Flutter and made some apps using it, most recently I have made a Hacker News client - Hacki: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki
creativeCak3 5y ago
Thought this was a wonderful article. Thanks for sharing. I figured to get in the spirit of sharing I'd share a little passion project I've been working on for sometime now: https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker It's an app that allows you to accurately track your commitments via hardware hooks(audio, mouse and keyboard). The UI can definitely use some work, but figured some people might find it as useful as I do.
- leobg 5y ago
  Wow. This looks super smart. I tried building a break enforcing app once: Locks the screen. Asks you what goal you want to accomplish and how much time you need. Then unlocks the screen for the requested duration. I stopped using it because of the very issues you mentioned. Pure time based solutions just aren’t practical.
- jokab 5y ago
  I use pomodoro for this. Writing software doesnt always require you typing at the keyboard. Most of the time I sketch the solution/design using pencil and paper
  - creativeCak3 5y ago
    Good point! This is why I will be adding "manual commitments" in the future ;).
chrismorgan 5y ago
(2012) Previous discussion from when it was published, a couple of weeks shy of a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640
rozenmd 5y ago
Can confirm writing about what you saw, how you responded, and giving advice to others works even in highly competitive fields. I write about React (same as thousands of other developers) at https://maxrozen.com https://maxrozen.com, get 10k readers a month now I started an uptime monitoring service despite 200 others already existing (https://OnlineOrNot.com https://OnlineOrNot.com), getting around 75 users a month. Now about to do the same with feature flags at https://deploywithflags.com https://deploywithflags.com - writing is everything.
quelsolaar 5y ago
So right. Don't look for opportunities, try to to become an opportunity. Taylor swift didn't get the opportunity to make a record, the record company got an opportunity to make a record with her. Be Taylor.
- warabe 5y ago
  She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her parents have been rich and very supportive throughout her career.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Don't diminish other people's hard work and talent. It's not a good look, especially not in people with the sort of career outlook the average HN-reader has.
    - massinstall 5y ago
      What about all the talented and hard working people we are not speaking about, merely because they did not have rich and supportive parents? Why is it so popular to act as if this does not make a difference? Economic status is the elephant in the room when it comes to discrimination. It does not feel good to acknowledge this, in particular if one personally is higher up the ladder. Nonetheless it’s the truth.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Which success is not in part due to outside circumstances? If it's not your parents' wealth, it's your upbringing, or your genes, or the people you happen to know, or where you happen to live, or the time at which you come up with an idea. Doesn't mean that the success is undeserved.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Plenty of people have rich and supportive parents. Very few of them become quite so successful. You can buy a lot of things but that levels of success isn’t one of them.
hunglee2 5y ago
Success = product x distribution Took me way too long to realise this, at least first two failed companies were as a result of over indexing on product. We do not have perfect market intelligence and inexperienced entrepreneurs most common mistake is relying on how good their work / product / service is. It's a business killer as not enough customers will ever find it. It actually makes more sense to build distribution first, so that your product (however good or bad it is) gets an opportunity for as much exposure as possible. Somebody will buy, if enough people see it
- ignoramous 5y ago
  > Success = product x distribution Distribution explains Meta's and Google's powress (in the consumer market), that's literally unmatched right now. Distribution ("Install Chrome" prompts on the Google homepage) is how Chrome rose to dominance, and distribution is why Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS. The other 3Ps (product, price, positioning) [0] of the marketing mix matter too (more so for consumer-grade products than enterprise where sales is takes precedence), but of course distribution (place) is king. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix
  - hunglee2 5y ago
    Indeed, distro is king. Reid Hoffman talked about this a decade ago. We kind of need to reread his blog post about it
- kuu 5y ago
  I think you're giving a big key that many of us as just developers/engineers miss some times, and it's the distribution part. For us, as we haven't trained in that area, it's hard to find a solution. How would you say that's the best strategy to build this distribution?
  - hunglee2 5y ago
    not just developers. I know loads of people who have such great product - coaching services, graphic design, you name it. But they retreat into doing what they love (the product) and don't realise that you got to sell it - and that needs distribution. I only learned this through repeated failure, fortunate enough to have the economic resilience to bounce back
edent 5y ago
Alexa… what is "survivorship bias"? Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people. I've been to industry events where I've seen people give "career limiting" presentations on something awful they've built. And I've seen great people stuck in a corner with the worst kind of industry fraudster. Sure, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs to meet your prince. But you also have to remmeber that you might end up kissing a poisonous one in the meantime.
- imgabe 5y ago
  That's not how survivorship bias works. Some things really do increase the chances of survival. You might as well dismiss life jackets as survivorship bias, because hey, what about all the people who were wearing life jackets and drowned anyway? It's only survivorship bias if you're talking about an unrelated factor that doesn't have any influence on the outcome.
  - edent 5y ago
    There's a difference between necessary and sufficient. Your argument is that it is necessary. My argument is that it is not sufficient. These are two different arguments.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      Dismissing things that are necessary because they aren't sufficient is a recipe for failure.
      - carapace 5y ago
        (Not OP) To me it seems they expanded on it rather than dismissing it: > Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people.
  - r3un1 5y ago
    If I get GP's argument, a more appropriate analogy would be that some life jackets are filled with lead and you can't necessarily tell them apart. That is to say, presenting yourself to the external world carries an inherent risk as well as the potential for reward.
kstenerud 5y ago
Doing things is the easy part. Getting anyone to notice is the hard part. I've been pushing https://concise-encoding.org/ https://concise-encoding.org/ for awhile now, and it's a LOT harder to attract people than it has been with my other projects. Probably the nature of it is part of the issue. After all, who gets excited over a data format? The big security scandals recently have helped somewhat since people are starting to take security more seriously, and this format is all about security. But still, it's fighting against inertia, and the going is slow...
- jmillikin 5y ago
  The first question I have when I see a new generic data encoding -- a question not answered anywhere on your site's front page -- is what advantages it has over the current incumbent (Protocol Buffers). I can write text-formatted Protobuf in any text editor, convert it to efficiently encoded binary, and parse it in dozens of languages with both first- and third-party libraries. Protobuf also has a JSON encoding for use in browsers, an ecosystem of tools such as linters and formatters, and the continued support of a large commercial entity. For use cases where Protobuf is too slow, there is Cap'n Proto and Flatbuffers. Why would I switch to your format, which seems to have extremely limited language support (Go only?), is significantly more complex (look at all those built-in data types!) and is supported by a single person?
- randomsilence 5y ago
  Just my impressions: 1) It wasn't obvious what you are offering until I scrolled down to the examples. You stress that you offer something secure before you show what it is. 2) Why is JSON not good enough? I can also encode trees in JSON. What's the advantage of your format?
- abainbridge 5y ago
  I skimmed your site and didn't really get it. Maybe that's what everyone else does. In case it helps, here are the thoughts that occurred to me, in the order they occurred. 0. To me "data format" makes me think of things like PNG, or the DWARF debug symbols format, or the MPEG transport stream, not general purpose text formats like JSON and XML (I'm not a web person). 1. A secure data format. OK, weird. I thought it was always the programs/libraries that dealt with the data formats that were guilty of the security bugs, not the format itself. 2. All the bullet points under simple and efficient are already true for all the data formats I know/use/care about. So already I've dismissed your project as interesting - ie the "simple" and "efficient" are already solved and I don't believe "secure" is a real problem. But I'm aware I might be jumping to conclusions, so I keep reading. 3. I skipped straight to "Security - Protecting your data". I thought the sentence explaining why security matters was superfluous - your audience already knows why security matters. 4. "The existing ad-hoc data formats are too loosely defined to be secure, and can't be fixed because they're not versioned". OK, this looks like the meat. I click the link. 5. "There are many vectors that attackers could take advantage of when they control the data your system is receiving, the most common of which are induced data loss, field omission, key collisions, and exploitation of algorithmic complexity". If the data is from an attacker, data loss and field omission sound like good things - I don't want their data or fields because they are an attacker. 6. '"change user" command with a group of admin\U+D800'. I'm still confused. It still sounds like the "admin\U+D800" string is processed by my program. Your data format doesn't know whether that is a valid string or not. Telling your data format is no easier than telling my program. Oh! Maybe it is. Because you only need to specify it in the data format, not in every program/library that implements the format. Is this the point of the system?
legerdemain 5y ago
Oh, man, Game Closure! I keep seeing their tiny little office space in the back of a Korean hot-pot restaurant just up the street. It's some sort of... game engine middleware company?
swyx 5y ago
this is related to the idea of the luck surface area: https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area
mavci 5y ago
I did a HN notification service to not miss this kinda good stories. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153116
dave_sullivan 5y ago
Good advice. People like to say "survivorship bias" but those people usually aren't doing things and telling people about them.
sn41 5y ago
I don't think this is complete. I think the product also has to fill a need, or an imagined need. An ancient quote from Thoreau, along a similar vein: “Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy." - "Walden", Thoreau
- ziftface 5y ago
  Wicker baskets aren't something worth talking about so this isn't really a counterpoint
  - nicbou 5y ago
    This is a metaphor
openfuture 5y ago
Here's the thing about doing things and telling people.. if the people ghost you then it can seriously take you off balance and if what you did is even slightly hard to explain then they will ghost you. It takes a lot of patience to do both the things and the telling to people but I think the latter actually takes more patience than the former even though it seems to be the other way around. Here's what I did recently: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeVYAP75GAvY8Q8iSfMoWMGgTPjvRh2xcM7Zb6qEop2VZ?preview=1 https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeVYAP75GAvY8Q8iSfMoWMGgT...
redfloatplane 5y ago
Wow, I thought I would resurrect my HN account for this. I wrote this article a little over a decade ago, when I was still in college, and I knew almost nothing about the world. (I still don't, but I didn't then, either) It's fun to see that it still resonates with people despite the naivety and the slight sense of "I am headed for success" that makes it hard for me to re-read. My initial reflection on the article was that I had fallen off the "do things, tell people" wagon a little bit, having let go of my twitter account and with it much of the easiest path to doing things and telling people. I still work in tech but I haven't created anything I'm particularly excited about in a good while, so I felt that I was failing my own ideal. Then, of course, I remembered that I hiked all of Ireland's long-distance trails (https://toughsoles.ie https://toughsoles.ie) and have a reasonably successful, if niche, youtube channel (https://youtube.com/toughsoles https://youtube.com/toughsoles). Funny that my mindset, especially regarding this article, is so tech-focused that I automatically discount something I've been doing for five years. All that said, I'm starting to look for new opportunities in the larger-than-startup space. Shoot me an email at carl@flax.ie and let's chat.
- Gentil 5y ago
  This comment of years can be categorized under "Do things, tell people" rule. haha. You wrote and you're telling people about your life after it. It was a good read. Hope you get good leads from here!
  - redfloatplane 5y ago
    The trick is to sneak it in under a bunch of self-effacement! ;)
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Ha ha, no I caught that. Seriously though, I like your advice, I am someone who thinks the same way. I have artistic daughters that I have tried to instill this in since they were young. Publish or perish is another way I put it. Or it will manifest itself as, "Got a good idea for a novel or video game? Cool, write it. Because you better believe that nearly everyone you meet every day also has a great idea for a novel or video game (or movie, etc.). The difference between Ray Bradbury and everyone else is that Bradbury sat in front of a typewriter every day." (It's possible too of course that Ray had some pretty good ideas though that not all of us had.) That also points to the sad reality that I have found (now in my 50's BTW, no college undergrad). So many people are not motivated to "do", I think that first came home to me when I was writing shareware games and sending floppy disks of the source code to people that would write me (send me a check). My thought was that, having been handed compilable sources, each one of these people would have read the code, gutted it, refactored it, added their own art/sounds and started putting out their own games. That it was just the "how to" they were missing. Not so as you might (now) imagine. Taking that step to create really is a difficult one for a lot of people. Further, going beyond "demo" and adding scoring, game completion, configurable controls, high scores, about box.... Very few put in that extra (and frankly tedious) effort.
rixed 5y ago
Is there a website where people who are good at doing things met people who are good at telling things? My guess is there is a short supply of the later, which makes the existence of such a site unlikely, but I'd rather ask anyway.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I think I've been bad at the telling people side of thing. In part because I've frequently built extremely esoteric projects, the sort of thing that's made even some technically minded people squint and go "huh, what?", real Terry Davis-tier stuff. Although these were mostly to scratch my own itches. Even now when I'm building stuff that's more widely appreciable and aimed at the enrichment of lives, it still feels unnatural to promote my work.
antooni 5y ago
Meeting new people is underrated.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 I think it’s a nice post. Makes sense. There’s probably a lot more to it, though. How we tell people is fairly important. I like the author’s self-effacement. Some people are so good at "telling people," that they don’t need to actually do anything (but they still work just as hard). I do both, but I’m not so good at self-promotion. I suspect that people feel that my "tell people" is empty boasting. I'm not a fan of the "humblebrag." If I say something, it's a fact; usually accompanied by links to resources that prove it. I won't make claims that I'm not ready to prove, but I will also mention what I can do. I’m often told that I’m lying, or inflating, by someone that never even followed the link that I provided in my statement (that proved what I stated). Getting that from prospective employers, was infuriating, and a big factor in my deciding to stop looking for work. I don't like being called a liar. I have three Twitter accounts (a personal one, and two corporate ones, for each of my companies), but I seldom use them. Social media is hard work, and I prefer to budget my hard work for the "do things." Pretty much all my social media interaction happens right here. I don’t especially care, anymore. It’s bemusing to have someone hit me with an insult[0], where they could have avoided embarrassing themselves, simply by clicking a link. It’s amazing that we are so focused on attacking others, that we jump at every opportunity to do so. Not sure what it buys us. There was a post, yesterday, about the "tone" of HN. I haven’t been here long enough to know whether or not it has declined, but this joint is Sesame Street, compared to a lot of other venues. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517422
k__ 5y ago
The best thing I did for my career was to start blogging. I started in 2017 and today I make all my money with technical writing and open-source development. I haven't searched for clients in ages, everyone I currently work for approached me.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  Same for me. Find a niche, make blog posts introducing technical topics, make blog posts explaining your work. As long as you can afford to wait for a couple good contracts a year you’ll do fine. Textbooks are apparently even better but take a lot more work.
  - k__ 5y ago
    Yes. I wrote a book, but it's so much easier to write articles. You get money after 4 pages of text, it's still marketing, and you usually make the same or more money with articles, depending on your rate.
- soylentgraham 5y ago
  Similarly here, word of mouth and people finding github repositories or posts on issues/forums where i typically post a solution to an obscure question. (Maybe helps having a consistent username) But its really dented any marketing/sales skills, and now I wish I spent more time honing those (as I want to make some of my own things)
  - k__ 5y ago
    Yes, it only helps if "your own thing" is related to the readers you already have
bartq 5y ago
That's one of the best things I've read recently. This is also the kind of articles the HN should be used for. What the author wrote just works and it transcends technology world. Works in almost all contexts.
thom 5y ago
I work in an industry (sports analytics) where most people now doing it professionally started out tweeting terrible charts based on scraped data. It's certainly still a very rich pipeline of talent even now. That said, be aware of the biases this introduces into your hiring pipeline - many people don't have time to do all the things, nor the platform to be heard by the people.
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lcnmrn 5y ago
Build Subreply. Tell people. Marked as spam. Build Unfeeder. Tell people. Marked as spam. And so on... :)
amanb20 5y ago
You have done well. Not every achievement should be about professional life. I can see the college version of myself in the post. Use to think the same. As I grew older, I realised leading a richer life is much better than just aspiring for professional success.
rpastuszak 5y ago
I tend to obsess with detail[*] and used to be quite self-conscious about my work. I am yet to find a small project I regretted sharing with people. You spend weeks working on something that never leaves a GitHub repo. Then, 3 years later, you see someone else, implementing a similar idea and sharing it. "this could've been me, if I wasn't such a coward", "my project was better because of x and y", or: "I'll never get anything done in my life" are the usual types of rumination that kick in. I know will resonate with some of you. So, now to keep myself in check I try to: 1. build toys, things that are too small to overthink them (https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/ https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/) 2. have a place where I keep intentionally shitty, unfinished drawings(important meeting notes): https://potato.horse https://potato.horse The point of 1) is to build things that just give me joy, they don't have to solve a particular problem. The point of 2) is to get more comfortable with things that are messy, broken. It feel more honest when I put unfinished doodles there. I don't care if people think they're ugly. (spoiler: people like my shitty drawings more than anything I try to make look perfect) With 1 and 2 it's just easier for me to get things out there, talk to people, learn that besides some parts of HN or Twitter, people are more likely to be excited about whatever the thing you're doing is, instead of judging you. I wish I had this mindset 20 years ago. ---- [*] which is somewhat ironic as I used to train people in prototyping and love hackathons
Brajeshwar 5y ago
Here is a good, fun, and quick-to-read book -- Show Your Work! https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/ https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/
eightturn 5y ago
and sometimes the things you think aren't interesting, are interesting to other folks. I stumbled into the vidalia onion industry, and randomly wrote an essay on it, and wound up discovering other folks liked the story. HN is a blessing in this way - it helps expose these fringe stories that'd never see the light of day in normal print/web publications.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Yes! I've got a website with pages on a variety of subjects, and the most visited pages are on the most obscure topics, that I wouldn't have imagined anyone would ever be interested in. I guess those pages appear in a google search. If I was starting over, I'd just write on super-obscure topics. The more obscure the topic, the less "competition", the more often someone reads it.
moneywoes 5y ago
Any suggestions for talking about things amidst a global pandemic?
fandorin 5y ago
That’s a spot-on short article. Last year I came to similar conclusions. You need to build something. Small, big, funny, serious, relevant, stupid, doesn’t matter. Something that will make you learn new stuff (by building it). So I’ve started my substack for fintech folks like me: https://fintechmeetscrypto.substack.com https://fintechmeetscrypto.substack.com
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ThinkBeat 5y ago
Do something. Dont worry if you are crap at it. Find something you like doing. Even if it is just silly Dont worry if you are crap at it. Once you do, keep doing it for as long as it is fun. If you wish to learn more and see if you can improve, do so Dont let it act as a stressor. Do it for you, to relax. You dont have to show it to anyone. Dont spend all your time on the career / money treadmill. If you learn how to do this it will enrich your life, help you to laugh at yourself and make you a healthier person
magicroot75 5y ago
This advice is good for the subset of people who are realists. For the optimist, it's akin to saying 'do what you love and you won't work a day in your life.' The optimist will be happy to "make things" no one needs which have no practical value.

702 points by aarondf 5y ago

quickthrower2 5y ago

Title and body read like a PG essay. Even looks like one in terms of fonts.

ramoz 5y ago

Is this studied in “business anthropology”? Can anyone recommend related research.

jjice 5y ago

Got me inspired to bring my tiny tech blog portion of my site back. It's been a while, but you made me realize that it would be good to reflect on my work again. Really enjoyed this post.

swyx 5y ago

This is similar advice to the concept of Luck Surface Area: https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area do things and tell people. Good advice.

sharmin123 5y ago

pkdpic 5y ago

I'm usually very wary of this kind of post, narrative building and all that, but I like this. And I feel like the honesty at the end of the authors success / path leaves room for the reader to put it all in context. > If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. > Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. > Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. > Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it. I might add a Henry Rollins quote at the end of "(then) say yes to everything but make it work for you." Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.

rexf 5y ago
Making (software) stuff seems easy. I do post about it on social media, but honestly it gets 0 traction since I have almost no audience. > If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. This seems like "rest of the owl" where it leaves out a ton of critical steps. Become good at marketing is a lucrative career if you are good at it. So excuse me for being jaded when "learn marketing" seems as helpful to me as "sell profitable services". Sure, but how? The post recommends Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Code Academy. Only Wikipedia has info on marketing, but reading it is not the same as learning how to do marketing.
- nefitty 5y ago
  The filter is the skill of self-directed learning. It is a meta skill that can be built, which then increase opportunities dramatically. When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore. I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck. When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

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rexstjohn 5y ago

This is actually very good advice from personal experience. The best career results (promotions) I have seen came from people who built a prototype of some sort then evangelized it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete product, often just a good prototype. First example: This guy took the Intel Edison and built a pretty cool project and brought it to our maker faire events. He ended up in conversation with the CEO of some company and ended up landing a $500K exec job. Just from building a skateboard hack and trying to tell people about it. Second: I knew a guy who built this neat prototype of a compute service and then did a keynote talk at a Meetup. It didn’t really work as a product but the website was convincing. It was enough to “get bought” by a major tech co and land him a CTO job. Another time I saw a guy leave a FAANG and build a compelling IoT type project in three months. Again, he ended up with a CTO level job after a few months. My take away is if you want an executive job, build something somewhat cool, even as a prototype, and go try to sell it for real. Even if you don’t raise any money or make it work as a business it is often way better than submitting resumes. There is something much more powerful about creating something that generates a lot of engagement and conversation, even if it is only half baked but looks decent and your storytelling is compelling. This isn’t interviewing it’s auditioning.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
How big are the companies these people landed exec positions at?
- paulluuk 5y ago
  Apparantly they were big enough to offer a 500k executive position to someone who created a hobby project on a discontinued 50 dollar processor.
SenHeng 5y ago
I used to work at one of those body shop contracting places. A few years ago, I heard that the boss managed to sell the company, presenting themselves as developing an in-house blockchain product. I asked around some ex-colleagues and as far as anyone knew, all they had were some fancy PowerPoint decks and a very rough implementation in PHP. After getting bought, everyone still continued doing the same old body work jobs, except now for the parent company’s other subsidiaries. The website still mentions blockchain. Fake it till you make it.

egypturnash 5y ago

Okay. Here’s some things that I’ve done. A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. Then I went on to draw a comic book about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend. https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ https://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ It managed to get cover quotes from Phil Foglio, Charlie Stross, and Peter Watts. You can buy a copy of the printed collection if it tickles your fancy. Now I’m working on a space opera comic. https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ https://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ It’s still in progress, you can’t buy a copy. But you could support me on Patreon if you have a lot of money from your software job.

nestorD 5y ago
> A couple decades ago I made a Tarot deck. https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ https://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ Sadly you can’t get a copy right now, I really need to get a reprint happening. It’s got spot gloss on the cards so that’s kind of complicated to do. I don't know if it is the blocker but makeplayingcards.com has a `high gloss` finish and does print on demand.
- junon 5y ago
  Doing a full gloss is pretty easy. Doing spot gloss, where only spots of the print has another material (typically a gloss material) requires special printers or has to be done by hand, as I understand it (I'm not an expert). Finding places that does it can be tricky. I remember going down this road a few times in the past, too.
  - nestorD 5y ago
    What they call high gloss (the name is misleading) appears to be spot gloss: https://cd1.makeplayingcards.com/images/site/card-box-stock/mpc_scodix_480_01.jpg https://cd1.makeplayingcards.com/images/site/card-box-stock/...

ReactiveJelly 5y ago

I feel like I read this as a Paul Graham essay or something. There was an analogy about the area of a rectangle where one axis was doing things and the other was talking about things. Can anyone find it and link these parallel discoveries together?

FearNotDaniel 5y ago
It sounds like the Conjoined Triangles of Success.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  That's one of the tesselated hexagons of self-help ideas!
nishnik 5y ago
Are you referring to the luck surface area? https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

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jerrygarcia 5y ago

The number one growth hack: Exiting your comfort zone, then sharing that experience with others.

anothersullivan 5y ago
Fine. I'm starting Severus, which actually deals with "contacts, business cards, email addresses", but with some interesting privacy mechanisms. I haven't quite launched yet, but I've seen this topic come up frequently on HN, and I never talk about it. I need to get out of my comfort zone and talk about it.
- jerrygarcia 5y ago
  Ship it!
  - riantogo 5y ago
    Okay, here you go. I have an amazing day job. But I always wanted to build some software utility that others found value in. So I shipped a forum platform. Because I can’t bring myself to share this with my friends and professionals network, it has no users: https://discoflip.com/ https://discoflip.com/

seligman99 5y ago

I'll join in: I'm building a tool called MicroKeys. It's a macro program, for Windows right now. It uses MicroPython as the script engine to let you register hot keys that do things. It's very much a work in progress right now. I'm writing it to fill a very specific niche I have, but if it's useful to others, I'd love to hear feedback on what it could do to be better to help it come to fruition. https://github.com/seligman/microkeys https://github.com/seligman/microkeys

jamal-kumar 5y ago

This just seems like some more optimistic inverse form of siver's rule not to tell anyone and zip it https://sive.rs/zipit https://sive.rs/zipit "Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”, even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved. NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion” (pdf article here) — and recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?” Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others."

tnorthcutt 5y ago
The linked post says “do things, tell people.” You are criticizing “tell people, do things.”

arvinsim 5y ago

I wonder how one generates interesting ideas to work on. Maybe I should look up product ideation as I am not really great when it comes creative idea generation.

gumby 5y ago
Don't worry about that, perhaps ever, but at least not now. Just do something you want, perhaps fix a bug or whatever. And write about it. Get in the habit -- it will make you feel better. Then you will discover that there are other people who are also interested in X. Also you'll discover that what you consider obvious info isn't obvious to others -- and they are smart people too. I used to be shocked by some posts that made the front page: "that's just trivial stuff everybody knows". That was pure snobbery on my part: I only knew that stuff because I'd been exposed to it decades ago (and there's of course tons I don't know, and never will). And the posts that made it to the front page were good explanations -- and many started with "I didn't know this at all so I looked into it and this is what I learned" You'll be amazed what support and interest you get from simply showing up. And don't bother to try to have a readership in the instagram-influencer zone. Better to have a group of people who are interested because they are interested in things you also are.
stagger87 5y ago
It's eye opening once you realize that most interesting ideas are simply iterations or slight improvements on existing ones. Simply releasing a similar product with one additional feature, or at a cheaper price point can excite the right people. In my experience most ideation comes from building a product. Spend enough time in a product space or market and you will naturally come across "interesting" ideas. I put interesting in quotes, because when you are in that space, the idea of iterating on a product may seem obvious or mundane, but if you can execute, and convince the customer, it's anything but.
arpa 5y ago
Do things for yourself. Find things missing and improve upon them. Don't think about the "product", but think what you want. Unless you're not talking about the self-improvement path outlined in the post, but rather a startup. In that case things get a little more difficult.

kiwicopple 5y ago

This is good advice for techies, who are usually good at the “do things” and but not the “tell people”. The same principle applies to a startup/side-project. At supabase we call this “ship and shout”, which is about as simple as it sounds (Ant wrote about our full “process” here: https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch https://supabase.com/blog/2021/11/26/supabase-how-we-launch ) The other one that took us some getting-used-to was being repetitive on platforms with a short “half-life”, like Twitter. It made me uncomfortable at the start since the general advice is that “reposting is annoying”. But any given tweet probably reaches only 1% of the audience i thought it would, so not many see the repost. Sometimes we will talk/tweet about something we shipped months ago and we still have developers commenting that they just learned about it from the tweet.

tommiegannert 5y ago
Do you vary (re)posting time of day, or is any repost pattern useful on Twitter?
newaccount74 5y ago
> techies, who are usually good at the “do things” ... But since they don't tell people, they often end up building useless shit. I've experienced this a few times when I spent weeks or even months working on a feature, then showing it to customers, and realising that they don't get it, or that it doesn't fix their problems, etc. I try not to get too attached to my ideas, so if something doesn't work, I throw it away and try a different approach. So I think doing things and telling people after the fact when you are done is not going to lead to success. You need to tell people early, so you can adjust what you're doing to make sure it's actually something interesting.
ozim 5y ago
I just want to add there are a lot of "business people" who are good with coming up with ideas but then those ideas are useless. So it is not only techies. One of company owners for example did not understood market our company is in and mandated that we built in Stripe integration. Well it was useless burning of money and he did not read "do things that don't scale", where our market worked you have high touch sales and send invoices and no one ever signed for payments, I removed the code last year and we are growing with customer base.

prawn 5y ago

I think about this a lot. I have a good sense of how much time I spend working on things (say, editing photos and videos) but can often lose sight of how often evidence of that work is seen by others. I might film a location, spend ages editing content from that location and upload it somewhere, but until I share that location, it doesn't count for much. It won't lead to sales, win new clients or build my profile. I often find myself going through the process and sharing the link with a friend or one client, and sitting back satisfied as though I'm finished. Have to then remind myself that I reached all of one person when I need to reach hundreds. I need a dashboard tracking visitation to projects on the web, how often I talk about them on Twitter, or post examples on Instagram, etc.

shakezula 5y ago

This is very similar to my advice to people just starting out in whatever industry they picked to work: say yes more. The unbelievable amount of opportunities I see people say no to put of insecurity in their abilities, out of social pressure, out of image concerns, etc… is absolutely baffling to me. Say yes more. Be smart, keep your wits about you, but say yes more.

jasfi 5y ago

MVP. Keep it minimum but viable to start with.

dceddia 5y ago

In a very meta twist of fate, I just heard about this article today on a podcast, and then realized Aaron (from the podcast) is the OP! If anyone wants to get some advice on how to use Twitter like a human being I recommend a listen. It was a great convo: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e In the spirit of the post, a thing I did last year is build a minimal video editor (https://getrecut.com https://getrecut.com) focused almost exclusively on cutting out silence. And then lately I’ve been building a cross-platform version of it with Rust and Electron. ‘Round here a lot of people dislike Electron, and I kinda count myself among that crowd, so it’s been a fun challenge to build an app like this that defies the idea that Electron apps have to be slow. Turns out you can get a lot of performance out of it if you write most of the heavy lifting in native code, pay attention to the algorithms, make things cache-friendly, keep an eye on the profiling and optimize as you go. So far the Electron app is on par with or faster than the native Mac app, which is exciting to see! Hopefully I’ll have something out in the next month or two.

aarondf 5y ago
Haha, hey Dave! In an even weirder twist of fate, I use your app (recut) to edit my other podcast!

jasfi 5y ago

I'm building two things: 1. A project to help people start businesses. The idea is to give founders the structure they typically lack. https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries. 2. An automated crypto trader based on technical analysis. https://tradecast.one https://tradecast.one Both are built on Flutter/Nim/Postgres. I actually also want to build an NLP project too, which I started on, but it's such a huge endeavor that I can't figure out an MVP which won't take 10 years! Plus I can't do too much at once.

elcritch 5y ago
Interesting are you using Flutter and Nim, or just Nim on backend?
- jasfi 5y ago
  Nim on the back-end. The UI is defined in Nim (back-end) and sent to Flutter for rendering. I'm trying to figure out what to do with this part, because it could be useful for others. I'm thinking part Open Source and part commercial, maybe what Qt does. It could work with any back-end, e.g. Python, in theory. If you want to be notified of when I do release something, please email me (see my HN profile).
  - jasfi 5y ago
    I just put up a basic landing page for those that want to sign-up for the wait-list: https://nexusdev.tools https://nexusdev.tools.

wturner 5y ago

This is down to earth advice that matches my own experience. Here is a workflow app intend for work-from-home "gig economy" workers and contractors intended to be as easy to use as a search engine. Still experimenting. https://workflow-magic-svelte.vercel.app/ https://workflow-magic-svelte.vercel.app/

hardwaresofton 5y ago

It’s been a a long road but I’m finally at a point where I can definitively sat that this advice is some of the best you can give anyone in or out of tech. Writing about software I’m building, errors I run into, and situations I get into (and often stumble through) has been huge for my own development and my career (https://vadosware.io https://vadosware.io). Doing this has led me to habitually bite off more than I can chew which seems to be the only way to really grow: - A managed services provider for smaller clouds/infrastructure providers called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com), which came out of all my blogging about Hetzner and kubernetes. - LoginWithHN.com from how often I write about cool stuff on HN that was built for HN - A salary sharing site for Accountants (https://nomorepizzaparties.com https://nomorepizzaparties.com), which came about due to trying and investigating Baserow and NocoDB. Outside of tech there’s awesome collectives like MoonMusiq (https://moonmusiq.com/ https://moonmusiq.com/), a collaboration of musicians that I was made aware of via HN actually -- its obviously an outlet for people to do these two things, in that order. Make cool shit, share it.

Minor49er 5y ago
Thanks for the shout out!
metters 5y ago
Is it possible to search your blog for specific terms or is there an overview with all articles listed?
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  So there isn’t good search but articles are tagged. Looks like you’ve just given me my next rolling TODO item. Somehow I don’t think it’s even occurred to me. For now please use google search with site:vadosware.io : https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HERE https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUE... [EDIT] for those like me on the DDG default train: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HERE https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Avadosware.io+YOUR+QUERY+HER...

livinglist 5y ago

I can’t agree more… I graduated from an average university with average GPA, so I decided to do some personal projects to make my portfolio stand out. I always wanted to be a mobile app developer so I picked up Flutter and made some apps using it, most recently I have made a Hacker News client - Hacki: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

creativeCak3 5y ago

Thought this was a wonderful article. Thanks for sharing. I figured to get in the spirit of sharing I'd share a little passion project I've been working on for sometime now: https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker It's an app that allows you to accurately track your commitments via hardware hooks(audio, mouse and keyboard). The UI can definitely use some work, but figured some people might find it as useful as I do.

leobg 5y ago
Wow. This looks super smart. I tried building a break enforcing app once: Locks the screen. Asks you what goal you want to accomplish and how much time you need. Then unlocks the screen for the requested duration. I stopped using it because of the very issues you mentioned. Pure time based solutions just aren’t practical.
jokab 5y ago
I use pomodoro for this. Writing software doesnt always require you typing at the keyboard. Most of the time I sketch the solution/design using pencil and paper
- creativeCak3 5y ago
  Good point! This is why I will be adding "manual commitments" in the future ;).

chrismorgan 5y ago

(2012) Previous discussion from when it was published, a couple of weeks shy of a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640

rozenmd 5y ago

Can confirm writing about what you saw, how you responded, and giving advice to others works even in highly competitive fields. I write about React (same as thousands of other developers) at https://maxrozen.com https://maxrozen.com, get 10k readers a month now I started an uptime monitoring service despite 200 others already existing (https://OnlineOrNot.com https://OnlineOrNot.com), getting around 75 users a month. Now about to do the same with feature flags at https://deploywithflags.com https://deploywithflags.com - writing is everything.

quelsolaar 5y ago

So right. Don't look for opportunities, try to to become an opportunity. Taylor swift didn't get the opportunity to make a record, the record company got an opportunity to make a record with her. Be Taylor.

warabe 5y ago
She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her parents have been rich and very supportive throughout her career.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Don't diminish other people's hard work and talent. It's not a good look, especially not in people with the sort of career outlook the average HN-reader has.
  - massinstall 5y ago
    What about all the talented and hard working people we are not speaking about, merely because they did not have rich and supportive parents? Why is it so popular to act as if this does not make a difference? Economic status is the elephant in the room when it comes to discrimination. It does not feel good to acknowledge this, in particular if one personally is higher up the ladder. Nonetheless it’s the truth.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Which success is not in part due to outside circumstances? If it's not your parents' wealth, it's your upbringing, or your genes, or the people you happen to know, or where you happen to live, or the time at which you come up with an idea. Doesn't mean that the success is undeserved.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Plenty of people have rich and supportive parents. Very few of them become quite so successful. You can buy a lot of things but that levels of success isn’t one of them.

hunglee2 5y ago

Success = product x distribution Took me way too long to realise this, at least first two failed companies were as a result of over indexing on product. We do not have perfect market intelligence and inexperienced entrepreneurs most common mistake is relying on how good their work / product / service is. It's a business killer as not enough customers will ever find it. It actually makes more sense to build distribution first, so that your product (however good or bad it is) gets an opportunity for as much exposure as possible. Somebody will buy, if enough people see it

ignoramous 5y ago
> Success = product x distribution Distribution explains Meta's and Google's powress (in the consumer market), that's literally unmatched right now. Distribution ("Install Chrome" prompts on the Google homepage) is how Chrome rose to dominance, and distribution is why Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS. The other 3Ps (product, price, positioning) [0] of the marketing mix matter too (more so for consumer-grade products than enterprise where sales is takes precedence), but of course distribution (place) is king. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix
- hunglee2 5y ago
  Indeed, distro is king. Reid Hoffman talked about this a decade ago. We kind of need to reread his blog post about it
kuu 5y ago
I think you're giving a big key that many of us as just developers/engineers miss some times, and it's the distribution part. For us, as we haven't trained in that area, it's hard to find a solution. How would you say that's the best strategy to build this distribution?
- hunglee2 5y ago
  not just developers. I know loads of people who have such great product - coaching services, graphic design, you name it. But they retreat into doing what they love (the product) and don't realise that you got to sell it - and that needs distribution. I only learned this through repeated failure, fortunate enough to have the economic resilience to bounce back

edent 5y ago

Alexa… what is "survivorship bias"? Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people. I've been to industry events where I've seen people give "career limiting" presentations on something awful they've built. And I've seen great people stuck in a corner with the worst kind of industry fraudster. Sure, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs to meet your prince. But you also have to remmeber that you might end up kissing a poisonous one in the meantime.

imgabe 5y ago
That's not how survivorship bias works. Some things really do increase the chances of survival. You might as well dismiss life jackets as survivorship bias, because hey, what about all the people who were wearing life jackets and drowned anyway? It's only survivorship bias if you're talking about an unrelated factor that doesn't have any influence on the outcome.
- edent 5y ago
  There's a difference between necessary and sufficient. Your argument is that it is necessary. My argument is that it is not sufficient. These are two different arguments.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Dismissing things that are necessary because they aren't sufficient is a recipe for failure.
    - carapace 5y ago
      (Not OP) To me it seems they expanded on it rather than dismissing it: > Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people.
- r3un1 5y ago
  If I get GP's argument, a more appropriate analogy would be that some life jackets are filled with lead and you can't necessarily tell them apart. That is to say, presenting yourself to the external world carries an inherent risk as well as the potential for reward.

kstenerud 5y ago

Doing things is the easy part. Getting anyone to notice is the hard part. I've been pushing https://concise-encoding.org/ https://concise-encoding.org/ for awhile now, and it's a LOT harder to attract people than it has been with my other projects. Probably the nature of it is part of the issue. After all, who gets excited over a data format? The big security scandals recently have helped somewhat since people are starting to take security more seriously, and this format is all about security. But still, it's fighting against inertia, and the going is slow...

jmillikin 5y ago
The first question I have when I see a new generic data encoding -- a question not answered anywhere on your site's front page -- is what advantages it has over the current incumbent (Protocol Buffers). I can write text-formatted Protobuf in any text editor, convert it to efficiently encoded binary, and parse it in dozens of languages with both first- and third-party libraries. Protobuf also has a JSON encoding for use in browsers, an ecosystem of tools such as linters and formatters, and the continued support of a large commercial entity. For use cases where Protobuf is too slow, there is Cap'n Proto and Flatbuffers. Why would I switch to your format, which seems to have extremely limited language support (Go only?), is significantly more complex (look at all those built-in data types!) and is supported by a single person?
randomsilence 5y ago
Just my impressions: 1) It wasn't obvious what you are offering until I scrolled down to the examples. You stress that you offer something secure before you show what it is. 2) Why is JSON not good enough? I can also encode trees in JSON. What's the advantage of your format?
abainbridge 5y ago
I skimmed your site and didn't really get it. Maybe that's what everyone else does. In case it helps, here are the thoughts that occurred to me, in the order they occurred. 0. To me "data format" makes me think of things like PNG, or the DWARF debug symbols format, or the MPEG transport stream, not general purpose text formats like JSON and XML (I'm not a web person). 1. A secure data format. OK, weird. I thought it was always the programs/libraries that dealt with the data formats that were guilty of the security bugs, not the format itself. 2. All the bullet points under simple and efficient are already true for all the data formats I know/use/care about. So already I've dismissed your project as interesting - ie the "simple" and "efficient" are already solved and I don't believe "secure" is a real problem. But I'm aware I might be jumping to conclusions, so I keep reading. 3. I skipped straight to "Security - Protecting your data". I thought the sentence explaining why security matters was superfluous - your audience already knows why security matters. 4. "The existing ad-hoc data formats are too loosely defined to be secure, and can't be fixed because they're not versioned". OK, this looks like the meat. I click the link. 5. "There are many vectors that attackers could take advantage of when they control the data your system is receiving, the most common of which are induced data loss, field omission, key collisions, and exploitation of algorithmic complexity". If the data is from an attacker, data loss and field omission sound like good things - I don't want their data or fields because they are an attacker. 6. '"change user" command with a group of admin\U+D800'. I'm still confused. It still sounds like the "admin\U+D800" string is processed by my program. Your data format doesn't know whether that is a valid string or not. Telling your data format is no easier than telling my program. Oh! Maybe it is. Because you only need to specify it in the data format, not in every program/library that implements the format. Is this the point of the system?

legerdemain 5y ago

Oh, man, Game Closure! I keep seeing their tiny little office space in the back of a Korean hot-pot restaurant just up the street. It's some sort of... game engine middleware company?

swyx 5y ago

this is related to the idea of the luck surface area: https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area https://www.swyx.io/create-luck#luck-surface-area

mavci 5y ago

I did a HN notification service to not miss this kinda good stories. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153116

dave_sullivan 5y ago

Good advice. People like to say "survivorship bias" but those people usually aren't doing things and telling people about them.

sn41 5y ago

I don't think this is complete. I think the product also has to fill a need, or an imagined need. An ancient quote from Thoreau, along a similar vein: “Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy." - "Walden", Thoreau

ziftface 5y ago
Wicker baskets aren't something worth talking about so this isn't really a counterpoint
- nicbou 5y ago
  This is a metaphor

openfuture 5y ago

Here's the thing about doing things and telling people.. if the people ghost you then it can seriously take you off balance and if what you did is even slightly hard to explain then they will ghost you. It takes a lot of patience to do both the things and the telling to people but I think the latter actually takes more patience than the former even though it seems to be the other way around. Here's what I did recently: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeVYAP75GAvY8Q8iSfMoWMGgTPjvRh2xcM7Zb6qEop2VZ?preview=1 https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeVYAP75GAvY8Q8iSfMoWMGgT...

redfloatplane 5y ago

Wow, I thought I would resurrect my HN account for this. I wrote this article a little over a decade ago, when I was still in college, and I knew almost nothing about the world. (I still don't, but I didn't then, either) It's fun to see that it still resonates with people despite the naivety and the slight sense of "I am headed for success" that makes it hard for me to re-read. My initial reflection on the article was that I had fallen off the "do things, tell people" wagon a little bit, having let go of my twitter account and with it much of the easiest path to doing things and telling people. I still work in tech but I haven't created anything I'm particularly excited about in a good while, so I felt that I was failing my own ideal. Then, of course, I remembered that I hiked all of Ireland's long-distance trails (https://toughsoles.ie https://toughsoles.ie) and have a reasonably successful, if niche, youtube channel (https://youtube.com/toughsoles https://youtube.com/toughsoles). Funny that my mindset, especially regarding this article, is so tech-focused that I automatically discount something I've been doing for five years. All that said, I'm starting to look for new opportunities in the larger-than-startup space. Shoot me an email at carl@flax.ie and let's chat.

Gentil 5y ago
This comment of years can be categorized under "Do things, tell people" rule. haha. You wrote and you're telling people about your life after it. It was a good read. Hope you get good leads from here!
- redfloatplane 5y ago
  The trick is to sneak it in under a bunch of self-effacement! ;)
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Ha ha, no I caught that. Seriously though, I like your advice, I am someone who thinks the same way. I have artistic daughters that I have tried to instill this in since they were young. Publish or perish is another way I put it. Or it will manifest itself as, "Got a good idea for a novel or video game? Cool, write it. Because you better believe that nearly everyone you meet every day also has a great idea for a novel or video game (or movie, etc.). The difference between Ray Bradbury and everyone else is that Bradbury sat in front of a typewriter every day." (It's possible too of course that Ray had some pretty good ideas though that not all of us had.) That also points to the sad reality that I have found (now in my 50's BTW, no college undergrad). So many people are not motivated to "do", I think that first came home to me when I was writing shareware games and sending floppy disks of the source code to people that would write me (send me a check). My thought was that, having been handed compilable sources, each one of these people would have read the code, gutted it, refactored it, added their own art/sounds and started putting out their own games. That it was just the "how to" they were missing. Not so as you might (now) imagine. Taking that step to create really is a difficult one for a lot of people. Further, going beyond "demo" and adding scoring, game completion, configurable controls, high scores, about box.... Very few put in that extra (and frankly tedious) effort.

rixed 5y ago

Is there a website where people who are good at doing things met people who are good at telling things? My guess is there is a short supply of the later, which makes the existence of such a site unlikely, but I'd rather ask anyway.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I think I've been bad at the telling people side of thing. In part because I've frequently built extremely esoteric projects, the sort of thing that's made even some technically minded people squint and go "huh, what?", real Terry Davis-tier stuff. Although these were mostly to scratch my own itches. Even now when I'm building stuff that's more widely appreciable and aimed at the enrichment of lives, it still feels unnatural to promote my work.

antooni 5y ago

Meeting new people is underrated.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614640 I think it’s a nice post. Makes sense. There’s probably a lot more to it, though. How we tell people is fairly important. I like the author’s self-effacement. Some people are so good at "telling people," that they don’t need to actually do anything (but they still work just as hard). I do both, but I’m not so good at self-promotion. I suspect that people feel that my "tell people" is empty boasting. I'm not a fan of the "humblebrag." If I say something, it's a fact; usually accompanied by links to resources that prove it. I won't make claims that I'm not ready to prove, but I will also mention what I can do. I’m often told that I’m lying, or inflating, by someone that never even followed the link that I provided in my statement (that proved what I stated). Getting that from prospective employers, was infuriating, and a big factor in my deciding to stop looking for work. I don't like being called a liar. I have three Twitter accounts (a personal one, and two corporate ones, for each of my companies), but I seldom use them. Social media is hard work, and I prefer to budget my hard work for the "do things." Pretty much all my social media interaction happens right here. I don’t especially care, anymore. It’s bemusing to have someone hit me with an insult[0], where they could have avoided embarrassing themselves, simply by clicking a link. It’s amazing that we are so focused on attacking others, that we jump at every opportunity to do so. Not sure what it buys us. There was a post, yesterday, about the "tone" of HN. I haven’t been here long enough to know whether or not it has declined, but this joint is Sesame Street, compared to a lot of other venues. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517422

k__ 5y ago

The best thing I did for my career was to start blogging. I started in 2017 and today I make all my money with technical writing and open-source development. I haven't searched for clients in ages, everyone I currently work for approached me.

ahelwer 5y ago
Same for me. Find a niche, make blog posts introducing technical topics, make blog posts explaining your work. As long as you can afford to wait for a couple good contracts a year you’ll do fine. Textbooks are apparently even better but take a lot more work.
- k__ 5y ago
  Yes. I wrote a book, but it's so much easier to write articles. You get money after 4 pages of text, it's still marketing, and you usually make the same or more money with articles, depending on your rate.
soylentgraham 5y ago
Similarly here, word of mouth and people finding github repositories or posts on issues/forums where i typically post a solution to an obscure question. (Maybe helps having a consistent username) But its really dented any marketing/sales skills, and now I wish I spent more time honing those (as I want to make some of my own things)
- k__ 5y ago
  Yes, it only helps if "your own thing" is related to the readers you already have

bartq 5y ago

That's one of the best things I've read recently. This is also the kind of articles the HN should be used for. What the author wrote just works and it transcends technology world. Works in almost all contexts.

thom 5y ago

I work in an industry (sports analytics) where most people now doing it professionally started out tweeting terrible charts based on scraped data. It's certainly still a very rich pipeline of talent even now. That said, be aware of the biases this introduces into your hiring pipeline - many people don't have time to do all the things, nor the platform to be heard by the people.

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lcnmrn 5y ago

Build Subreply. Tell people. Marked as spam. Build Unfeeder. Tell people. Marked as spam. And so on... :)

amanb20 5y ago

You have done well. Not every achievement should be about professional life. I can see the college version of myself in the post. Use to think the same. As I grew older, I realised leading a richer life is much better than just aspiring for professional success.

rpastuszak 5y ago

I tend to obsess with detail[*] and used to be quite self-conscious about my work. I am yet to find a small project I regretted sharing with people. You spend weeks working on something that never leaves a GitHub repo. Then, 3 years later, you see someone else, implementing a similar idea and sharing it. "this could've been me, if I wasn't such a coward", "my project was better because of x and y", or: "I'll never get anything done in my life" are the usual types of rumination that kick in. I know will resonate with some of you. So, now to keep myself in check I try to: 1. build toys, things that are too small to overthink them (https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/ https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/) 2. have a place where I keep intentionally shitty, unfinished drawings(important meeting notes): https://potato.horse https://potato.horse The point of 1) is to build things that just give me joy, they don't have to solve a particular problem. The point of 2) is to get more comfortable with things that are messy, broken. It feel more honest when I put unfinished doodles there. I don't care if people think they're ugly. (spoiler: people like my shitty drawings more than anything I try to make look perfect) With 1 and 2 it's just easier for me to get things out there, talk to people, learn that besides some parts of HN or Twitter, people are more likely to be excited about whatever the thing you're doing is, instead of judging you. I wish I had this mindset 20 years ago. ---- [*] which is somewhat ironic as I used to train people in prototyping and love hackathons

Brajeshwar 5y ago

Here is a good, fun, and quick-to-read book -- Show Your Work! https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/ https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/

eightturn 5y ago

and sometimes the things you think aren't interesting, are interesting to other folks. I stumbled into the vidalia onion industry, and randomly wrote an essay on it, and wound up discovering other folks liked the story. HN is a blessing in this way - it helps expose these fringe stories that'd never see the light of day in normal print/web publications.

yesenadam 5y ago
Yes! I've got a website with pages on a variety of subjects, and the most visited pages are on the most obscure topics, that I wouldn't have imagined anyone would ever be interested in. I guess those pages appear in a google search. If I was starting over, I'd just write on super-obscure topics. The more obscure the topic, the less "competition", the more often someone reads it.

moneywoes 5y ago

Any suggestions for talking about things amidst a global pandemic?

fandorin 5y ago

That’s a spot-on short article. Last year I came to similar conclusions. You need to build something. Small, big, funny, serious, relevant, stupid, doesn’t matter. Something that will make you learn new stuff (by building it). So I’ve started my substack for fintech folks like me: https://fintechmeetscrypto.substack.com https://fintechmeetscrypto.substack.com

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ThinkBeat 5y ago

Do something. Dont worry if you are crap at it. Find something you like doing. Even if it is just silly Dont worry if you are crap at it. Once you do, keep doing it for as long as it is fun. If you wish to learn more and see if you can improve, do so Dont let it act as a stressor. Do it for you, to relax. You dont have to show it to anyone. Dont spend all your time on the career / money treadmill. If you learn how to do this it will enrich your life, help you to laugh at yourself and make you a healthier person

magicroot75 5y ago

This advice is good for the subset of people who are realists. For the optimist, it's akin to saying 'do what you love and you won't work a day in your life.' The optimist will be happy to "make things" no one needs which have no practical value.