coderunner

First of all congrats on the success of your game. I've been mulling over taking a break from my corporate engineering job and making a game. Would it be possible to send you an email in about two weeks or so with some retrospective questions of your game dev journey? I'm currently in a crunch mode for a work trip then going to be with limited internet access while on the trip so wanted a chance to get my thoughts/questions together before asking.

If you don't have time, totally understand and congrats on all your success.

Did Notion focus on selling before they had the any semblance of a product? I thought the founders holed up in a Japan for months to get an early version implemented before things started taking off.

Would you mind sharing what your app is? I'm curious what level of technical sophistication is needed for an app that makes $2k/day. Was it more engineering or marketing or equally both that helped you gain users and traction?

What does he normally write about? It seemed to be a pretty popular blog but I never dug into the content and now the content is offline.

My understanding is that it says if anyone anywhere has free will, then so do some elementary particles. It doesn't say anything about if anyone or if any elementary particles actually have free will right? Does it lend support either way to if free will exists?

How does this compare to the video course? e.g. what are the differences?

As an aside, if anyone has any unusual things that you have done that have helped with depression, please mention them. I've done the usual route of therapy and meds but that didn't help with my depression or suicidal thoughts. Thanks in advance.

What about in the context of trying to get to an MVP? Is the dev time speedup of using a dynamic programming language and stack significant over using a c++ backed? You wouldn't care much about performance when you're trying to figure out if you'll get traction.

Oh okay, thanks. I wasn't sure if they were selling annotations that their trained model can do quickly or selling manual labeling services that their customers can use to train their own models. Sounds like the latter which isn't as technically impressive.

Does Scale AI use trained human annotators to label point clouds for customers or do they have a trained model that they use to quickly and automatically label point clouds for customers?

All the extras like platform and tooling is nice, but don't mean anything if you can't support yourself as a dev. Better revenue sharing for devs is one thing that can make a big difference, provided the user base is there. Either it'll be there on Epic one day or Valve will match the revenue share of Epic or both. I'm all for having a competitive option in this space.

I don't think it's entirely Epic's fault about the releases being yanked from Steam or crowd sourced titles making changes. The developers had to sign the contract with Epic and Valve decided that they're too big to fail (which they might be by now) so they didn't try anything to counter.

The one thing that does suck from the gamer perspective is having to use multiple stores. As a dev and gamer I'm okay with this however as it helps the dev community at large in the long run if a viable store contender ever arrives.

Tim Sweeney has been extremely kind and generous with his time in all my interactions with him dating back about 10 years ago. I wish him all the success in the world.

Him and Epic are getting a lot of hate on Reddit because of the exclusivity deals, but as a developer, I appreciate Epic trying to get the dev/store revenue split more generous for developers. Valve does the standard 70/30, and Epic is doing 88/12 I believe.

Would you mind saying how old you are? I'm 37 and wondering if that's too late to try my first the bootstrapping a side business path. I imagine I'll make mistakes along the way as a first timer.

Are you guys/girls bootstrapping this? I can't much info out there. How long have you been working on it?

Can someone explain what flagging an article means and why this one was flagged?

Thanks for the detailed reply! That was interesting reading about the challenges you faced and the market reactions.

I didn't know this was a thing. Thanks

Thanks for answering! Does that mean the perception system that's trained on real world data does well on the synthetic data coming in during testing? Or are the perception systems' training data kept separate (synthetic data for training the perception system used when testing in the simulation and real world data for training the real world perception system)?

And yeah, I've come across quite a few companies working on simulation platforms in my reading (cognata, metamoto, applied intuition, etc.) which made me interested in what they're selling but actual details are quite sparse on their websites.

I just found this paper related to that actually

https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07849

From what I can find out seems like all the companies are using unreal or unity for rendering the graphics though.

That was my impression as well. Maybe the idea is get the models trained in a simulation to a satisfactory level and work on transfer of the model to real world data in parallel? There's an awful lot of money going into the first part if there's no good answer to the second part right now though.

Sorry about side-tracking your post a little bit, but do you mind sharing what you did to attract enterprise clients? Trying to get paid enterprise clients without connections from a past life or connected investors while you're starting out seems like a very difficult task for me. They seem to expect either a reputable investor (doesn't exist if boostrapping) or proven track record on the product from other customers (doesn't exist if you're starting out). Thanks for any help.

Do you mind saying how old you are? One of my fears is if you're an programmer, you either need to move into management or quit being a programmer because of age bias. I prefer coding over management though.

Thanks, I appreciate the info.

I'm coming from a systems and desktop background and looking into a web side project. My only experience with backend frameworks is a few months with Django for a small project at work.

Is Django still a thriving development community? And is it able to handle a large amount of concurrent users? Basically is it a good choice for a backend for a new project? The web tech world moves really fast, and I like that Django has been around for years but wondering if it's still a good option.

Is there a cheaper S3 alternative that you recommend or that Mozilla's likely using instead?

Thanks for replying. I totally agree with needing traction first.

I'm putting cart before the horse a little bit by asking the stuff in my post, but I am wondering if I'm chasing a dead end if the odds of getting revenue from a side hustle to be similar to a corporate software engineering salary is pretty much non-existent because of the time limits of trying to do both at the same time.

Here is the draft linked from the author's website:

http://incompleteideas.net/sutton/book/bookdraft2016sep.pdf