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I've only ever "shipped" two independent projects, and they are the the best things I have ever done for myself in terms of development, both from a personal ca

I've only ever "shipped" two independent projects, and they are the the best things I have ever done for myself in terms of development, both from a personal career growth perspective but even financially. I work at a nonprofit and I had done some ABSURDLY SIMPLE data analysis on a relatively annoying public data set to consume. I'd done it for our institution, but it was sort of straightforward to generalize it to any institution for which this would be applicable. The code was... awful. Rather than doing it "properly," since I already had all the code I had written to do the analysis for my institution, I literally just ran it on the entire data set (10GB or so) for every organization that existed and then just put some result file on S3. My "site" would just let folks search for their institution, and present the data with a couple graphs, some nice visuals, and have them print it out. I was ashamed of it in a technical sense. But I just bought a domain and tweeted at a journalist. Whelp, two weeks later, I had my picture in the city's biggest paper, my org got some positive press, did a service for other non-profits, had folks reaching out to me about jobs, etc. It took SO LITTLE effort, and every instinct I had was that it was bad and I shouldn't publish it. But the reality is I had already done 95% of the work... committing to just do the extra 5% was so hard to do, but in hindsight, so obviously amazing ROI, even if it hadn't gotten the attention it did. Secondly, I built a reading app for a teacher at my school to let him do an activity where kids would jumble up sentences and paragraphs in order to help them understand transition words. The only reason I agree to try to do this was that I was learning React at the time and wanted to play with the React drag and drop library. After a weekend, I had it essentially working, and it was a success in his classroom. And here, too, it was to be the end of it... but I pushed myself through it, added a simple login mechanic, user account, etc. I had a small technical question as I was wrapping up, and I posted it on reddit. Someone who worked at a nonprofit mentioned to me that the app could potentially qualify for a grant that the Verizon foundation was running for learning apps. I applied... and we got it. The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Really... just ship it!

alin23 4y ago
The first project sounds like you just thought of a really clever caching mechanism :) if the data rarely changes and the cache is still valid then why not, I think you did find the “proper” way to do it! As programmers we tend to want to generalize a lot, when in fact you can get to 80% of solving the real pain of a task with the first 20% of the work. The rest of the work can usually be done by a human much faster and with more trust than a three-thousand-if-elif-else solution would get.
ambicapter 4y ago
> The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Is that what the award was...intended for? You maybe don't want to brag about that on the internet.
- klysm 4y ago
  That’s what I was gonna say lol, pretty sure that’s not legal at all.
  - jdmichal 4y ago
    It's a grant from a private organization. It's at worst a breach of contract. And if he simply called it a salary paid to himself to continue development and marketing of the app, that probably successfully clears any hurdles.
- pphysch 4y ago
  Usually the recruitment org will use the grant money to hire someone to work on the grant project, at which point the money is successfully laundered for any legal use by the employee. Or you can simply attribute X% of an existing salary to the grant, and not even bother hiring someone new. It's relatively easy to spend grant money on anything, as long as it's not in unreasonable amounts.
- beambot 4y ago
  I assume the award was to pay for development. As long as it wasn't grossly in excess of prevailing dev wages, why shouldn't they be able to use their salary as they see fit...?
  - ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
    That's exactly right -- along with the money I had to introduce the app to a few schools, collect feedback, make improvements, etc., which is what the money was for and which I did. It just worked out nicely that I was in grad school at the time and it matched to what my outstanding balance was!
wpietri 4y ago
This is awesome! And I want to add that the same applies if you ship it and it doesn't succeed. Because then you either learn that you're barking up the wrong tree or what to try next. A decade ago I did a startup with a pal who is an excellent product manager. He had an idea that sounded great. So great that we actually raised some seed money. But when we built a basic prototype, it turned out people hated it. [1] That sounds like a bad outcome. But if it's not going to work, then the sooner you find that out, the less time you waste on it. So yes, ship early and pay close attention to how people receive it. [1] more here in a 5-minute Ignite talk he did on it: Here's a 5-minute ignite talk from him: https://vimeo.com/24749599 https://vimeo.com/24749599

alin23 4y ago

The first project sounds like you just thought of a really clever caching mechanism :) if the data rarely changes and the cache is still valid then why not, I think you did find the “proper” way to do it! As programmers we tend to want to generalize a lot, when in fact you can get to 80% of solving the real pain of a task with the first 20% of the work. The rest of the work can usually be done by a human much faster and with more trust than a three-thousand-if-elif-else solution would get.

ambicapter 4y ago

> The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Is that what the award was...intended for? You maybe don't want to brag about that on the internet.

klysm 4y ago
That’s what I was gonna say lol, pretty sure that’s not legal at all.
- jdmichal 4y ago
  It's a grant from a private organization. It's at worst a breach of contract. And if he simply called it a salary paid to himself to continue development and marketing of the app, that probably successfully clears any hurdles.
pphysch 4y ago
Usually the recruitment org will use the grant money to hire someone to work on the grant project, at which point the money is successfully laundered for any legal use by the employee. Or you can simply attribute X% of an existing salary to the grant, and not even bother hiring someone new. It's relatively easy to spend grant money on anything, as long as it's not in unreasonable amounts.
beambot 4y ago
I assume the award was to pay for development. As long as it wasn't grossly in excess of prevailing dev wages, why shouldn't they be able to use their salary as they see fit...?
- ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
  That's exactly right -- along with the money I had to introduce the app to a few schools, collect feedback, make improvements, etc., which is what the money was for and which I did. It just worked out nicely that I was in grad school at the time and it matched to what my outstanding balance was!

wpietri 4y ago

This is awesome! And I want to add that the same applies if you ship it and it doesn't succeed. Because then you either learn that you're barking up the wrong tree or what to try next. A decade ago I did a startup with a pal who is an excellent product manager. He had an idea that sounded great. So great that we actually raised some seed money. But when we built a basic prototype, it turned out people hated it. [1] That sounds like a bad outcome. But if it's not going to work, then the sooner you find that out, the less time you waste on it. So yes, ship early and pay close attention to how people receive it. [1] more here in a 5-minute Ignite talk he did on it: Here's a 5-minute ignite talk from him: https://vimeo.com/24749599 https://vimeo.com/24749599