Hey, I'm the author of m4b-tool[1] and tone[2]. The most important thing I learned about software development, is that the best software has a meaning to yours

Hey, I'm the author of m4b-tool[1] and tone[2]. The most important thing I learned about software development, is that the best software has a meaning to yourself and that you should use it yourself on a regular basis. m4b-tool is a tool to merge multiple audio files into the m4b audio book format. I hacked it together in a weekend in the language I knew best (PHP) and that probably was the worst for the job. All because there were no tools, that fitted my needs. After the first improvements I said to my self: Why not open source it, even if it is in a pretty crappy state? And the feedback was surprisingly good for a hackish script. And I learned A LOT from the community (e.g. how to implement something like multithreading in PHP or the simple fact that `cd -` goes back one directory in history). Another important thing I learned is, that early shipping is good, but automatic deployment and versioning is nearly as important. Thats why I decided to invest some time and simply release `tone` based on git tags with github actions... that was a very good decision so far. So to conclude: Build something, that you use (and want to improve) yourself Ship early Go for auto-deployment / CI as soon as possible Do some "marketing" for high quality feedback (e.g. on hackernews) Cover your ass with automatic tests as soon as possible [1]: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool [2]: https://github.com/sandreas/tone https://github.com/sandreas/tone