sovietmudkipz

Sidebar topic: (analog or digital) Work Tracking Systems for solo/tiny team sizes.

Central Question: What pragmatic work tracking advice do people have for tiny (1-4; 1 founder, 1-3 contractors) team sizes, analog or digital?

Context: I noticed a source of friction for my larger solo projects (1+ months) was a lack of structure and carrying the entire project in my head. Effective for hackathons but life is starting to force me into more context switching (getting older I guess). I've already refactored my work system to involve an analog weekly planner + weekly retro/plan ritual, heavier emphasis on digital calendar, adopting a two phase work philosophy (planning/grooming, task execution) often facilitated by pomodoro (5 minutes plan, 25 execute), and leaning on having a digital work tracking system.

I've taken a large bet on GitHub's ecosystem. Issues + "type:" labels let me create ticket types (spike, feature, bug) + "area:" labels (e.g. runtimes, category of concern (security, REST, client, ...), ...) allows me to gather and tag appropriate units of work. GitHub projects supports kanban boards and "filter by" or "slice by" features that are helpful. Pull Requests + Actions let me vet software additions. Issue/PR comment streams allow additional context capturing. Milestones & Releases let me plan larger epics and bundle my software. It's a robust digital system whose mental model makes sense in the context of delivering software.

I have an ambitious software project idea (multiplayer game software) that I'll eventually want to bring in a contractor or more. I want to stipulate some degree of interfacing with my system, even if it's just to capture the high level "this feature is handled by contractor A" and allow delegated delivery.

The points of friction so far have come from wrestling decision control with ai agents, and resisting the temptation to plan in too much detail too far into the future.

Given that brain dump, what advice might you have for me to help make for successful?

Programmer work product (typically) benefits the capital class, directly via product engineering or indirectly via platform engineering.

If the aspiration of a 10x or more programmer is enabled through AI then the capital class win, in the typical case. Software eats the world.

I cannot describe how disappointing it is to be switching to this insane time limit window based pricing. I absolutely abhor that I'll be subjected to 5 hour chunks of time where I'll be limited at some point in that window of time, and be told I'll have to wait. And then there is a weekly limit.

That's not how my creative energy works. I have time that I want to solve problems, and I want to solve them. I don't want a cooldown timer applied to solving a problem. Not to mention the anxiety of realizing that while I sleep I could have burned tokens in that time.

I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.

Meter my token usage DON'T tell me when I can use them! ARGH.

Ahhhh yes thank you for this link! I'm working on a project and my agent referred me to the factbook. It said all this great savory information was made available on the factbook website. I thought great but when I went to check it was all very basic. Truly I thought my agent was hallucinating!

It wasn't! Note to self: also check archive.org in case there is an internet archive for any sites an agent might reference.

I checked out this repo -- it has the information useful to my project. Thanks for sharing this!

I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”

App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?

Perfect…! I’ll check out Alex Rome.

Sounds like you’re ahead of me then! The game I’m working on off & on is a 32v32 moba. I want the gameplay of Heroes of the Storm but with the match size of a battlefield server.

I wish I could dedicate myself full time to the effort (and in fact I’m working with my financial planner to figure out a plan) but this is a side project that is prioritized behind a few things. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable collaborating right now since I would be unpredictable. I’ll keep you in mind for when that changes though!

Investigating…

Good point w/ journaling and maybe even preparing stuff to share. Right now it feels like trying to eat a whale whole. …That’s the beauty of doing something in a new (to me) domain though. Even if I don’t share, the practice of formulating how I would explain to someone is beneficial.

Hi! I recently (2 weeks) chose this software to invest time into in order to make music/sfx for video games. Do you personally use this software to create music yourself? Just curious!

Hobbyist game dev here. Getting into audio and music effects has been fun but I constantly feel overwhelmed. I chose Ardour as my DAW (digital audio workstation) and have been excitedly working on learning. I also bought the book “ Writing Interactive Music for Video Games: A Composer's Guide” which has been very helpful at understanding high level vocabulary.

It’s a lot of work. I slightly enjoy it but boooooy is getting into audio and music pretty challenging. It’ll be good if I ever need to know what I’m talking about when working with others… in the future where I can dedicate myself full time to game dev… One day one day…

I don’t really have a point here. If anyone has any resources, tips, or recommendations on this subject let me know.

Edit: Congrats on the new 9.0 release!

I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?

It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.

Why wait so long? Do it now…

This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”

You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.

To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.

Plugin for Krita I use: https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

App I recommend to download models and manage UIs: https://github.com/LykosAI/StabilityMatrix

(1) Download Krita (2) Download and install the Krita AI diffusion plugin (3) Run comfy UI using StabilityMatrix

Docs for using the Krita AI plugin: https://docs.interstice.cloud/basics/ It's a really fun plugin to use!

I call it silly because essentially I’m complaining that I don’t like setting up a service on an OS I don’t normally set up services for. My quibbles with that process can in part be addressed by crafting a terminal based workflow to configure the host and enable the service on my desktop, skipping the GUI completely. E.g. I’m sure I can do Task Scheduler shenanigans through powershell. More experience would help sand down the rough parts I experienced.

Now the product decisions behind the OS giving me the icks… The terminal can’t (completely) help with that ^_^

I’m so close to the switch myself for silly reasons. I don’t like windows due to their creepy business practices and negative design patterns in their OS so I’m very bias against it. Forcing copilot is just the latest in their creepy practices…

For more details on why I came close to switching: I use my win desktop as a host for ai services such as Comfy UI for stable diffusion generation since it is a beefy platform; for example, I generate reference stuff for Krita (digital painting software) illustrations on my drawing tablet. I remember the process to configure windows as being strange, GUI bound (NOT windows strong suit), and just annoying due to my aforementioned bias. Valve has done great work with running games on linux which is the only reason I keep that OS and I’d rather set up services on linux.

This comment serves as a reminder to myself that I should just go ahead grab my windows license keys for archival purposes and flash a better OS on that system.

I always thought the companies I worked for would implement chaos testing shortly after this talk/blog released. However; only last year did we do anything even approaching chaos testing. I think this goes to show that the adage “the future is already here just unevenly distributed” carries some truth in some contexts!

I think the companies I worked for were prioritizing working on no issue deployments (built from a series of documented and undocumented manual processes!) rather than making services resilient through chaos testing. As a younger dev this priority struck me as heresy (come on guys, follow the herd!); as a more mature dev I understand time & effort are scarce resources and the daily toil tax needs to be paid to make forward progress… it’s tough living in a non-ideal world!

Updates: meditating on the description of your Rust supervisor helped clarify my own approach.

- Go based supervisor daemon runs as a systemd service on the host. I configure it to know about my particular game server and expected utilization target. - The supervisor is responsible for reconciling my desired expectations (a count, or % of cpu/mem/etc so far) with spinning up game servers managed by systemd (since systemd doesn’t natively support this sort of dynamism + go code is super lean). - If I want more than one type of game server I imagine I could extend this technique to spinning up more than one supervisor but I’m keeping that in my back pocket for now. - I haven’t thought up a reason to, but my Go supervisor might want to read the logs of my game servers through journald.

For my purposes I’m not making a generic solution for unknown workloads like your Rust supervisor, which probably helps reduce complexity.

My workstation uses systemd so I can see my supervisor working easily. Real heckin’ neat.

What’s the difference between scraping and malicious scraping? Does google engage in scraping or malicious scraping? Do the AI companies engage in scraping or malicious scraping?

I really appreciate your perspective! Pretty clear you’re someone who digs deep, doesn’t accept constraints given (eg ‘everyone’ desired an AWS based solution but that didn’t narrow your exploration), and tries to be pragmatic. At least that’s my impression.

What you’ve stated so far is interesting. I’ve reading through some of your blog content too. I sent a LinkedIn connection request (look for Andrew).

Probing question: knowing what you know do you have any opinions (strong or otherwise) on what a solo dev might want to pursue? Just curious how you respond.

Hmmm makes sense. Sounds like I may have a misunderstood mental model of resource consumption. I ought to reread https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorants-128-tick-ser... (specifically the section on “Real World Performance” where the engineer describes tuning) now that I have a better appreciation that they’re not trying to make resource utilization % higher, but instead making available more resources through tuning efforts.

> If you can avoid Orleans and kubernetes and all that, the better. It just adds complexity to this setup.

I’m starting to appreciate simplicity away from containers that’s why I’m even exploring systemd. I bet big on containers and developed plenty of skills, especially with k8s. I never stopped to appreciate that I’m partly in the business of making processes run on OSes, and it kinda doesn’t matter if the pid is a container or running ‘directly’ on the hardware. I’ll probably layer it back in but for now I’m kinda avoiding it as an exercise.

E.g. if I’m testing a debug ready build locally and want to attach my debugger, I can do that in k8s but there’s a ceremony of opening relevant ports and properly pointing to the file system of the container. Not a show stopper since I mostly debug while writing testing/production code in dev… But occasionally the built artifact demands inspection.

Funny. I probably will dive into Nix some day but I've been content letting it sit waiting for me to check it out.

If I understand correctly you're saying you manage hardware yourself (colocate in a data center? Dedicated hosting?) and that gives you an edge in pricing. That's pretty cool, and I think I can see how it could be less expensive to purchase hardware & maintain it rather than renting that compute from a third party. There is obviously the tradeoff of then being responsible for capacity planning for the workloads supported among other downsides and maintaining hardware lifecycle but I wouldn't be surprised to hear this downside is overstated compared to benefits reaped.

Mmmm, I remember reading this in Systems Performance Brendan Gregg. I should revisit what was written…

I target 80% utilization because I’ve seen that figure multiple times. I suppose I should rephrase: I’d like to understand the constraints and systems involved that make 80% considered full utilization. There’s obviously something that limits a OS; is it tunable?

Questions I imagine a thorough multiplayer solutions engineer would be curious of, the kind of person whose trying to squeeze as much juice out of the hardware specs as possible.

Yea. I realize I ought to dig into things more to understand how to push past into 90%-95% utilization territory. Thanks for the resource to read through.

Wow systemd can do more than I thought to imagine it could

O.O this may be the feature that gets me into podman over docker.

Yes! It’s a great project. I’m super happy they have a coherent local development story. I kinda abandoned using it though when I said “keeeep it simple” and stopped using containers/k8s. I think I needed to journey through understanding why multiplayer game services like Agones/gamelift/photon were set up like they were. I read through Multiplayer Game Programming: Architecting Networked Games by Joshua Glazer and Sanjay Madhav really helped (not to mention allowed me to better understand GDC talks over multiplayer topics much better).

This all probably speaks to my odd prioritization: I want to understand and use. I’ve had to step back and realize part of the fun I have in pursuing these projects is the research.