stevoski
He claimed that Common Lisp was the best programming language for web apps, and that it gave him a massive advantage in creating his app.
What was his name again? Paul something? Oh yeah, Paul Graham.
I later found out that he had legally changed his name to Buck Rogers to intentionally be noticed.
But the quote from the article is in the context of a 1-person dev team, and how by keeping things really simple so that it is indeed _possible_ to build a feature in the morning and have it live in the afternoon.
Love this!
The philosophy behind how the author runs his app is very much like mine - go for simple, proven tech that you know really well.
(For the people dismissing the article because AI, you are missing out on a good read.)
Before they add any new UI element, they first look for something they can remove.
Self-promotional link: https://killthehippo.com/
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
That would be Fitt’s law, which - if you can believe it - dates back to 1954!
“Dolly Parton makes an impromptu appearance at Páidí Ó Sé’s pub in Dún Chaoin, Co. Kerry and takes to the stage to entertain the locals.
While on holiday in Kerry, singer Dolly Parton paid a visit to former Kerry footballer Páidí Ó Sé’s pub, where she performs her song ‘Coat of Many Colours’ accompanied by musicians Steve Cooney and Seamus Begley.
Dolly signs off at the end of her performance,
Thank you very much and welcome to Dinglewood
This episode of Cursaí was broadcast on 1 October 1990.”
Luckily he was allowed to make a call just after being detained, to his friend who worked for the British Council in Beirut. The friend was tirelessly in searching for him and seeking his release. It wasn’t easy.
(I met him just after his release, while he was building the courage to try again to leave the country.)
Why was he detained? Because his common Irish first name and common Irish surname matched someone on an Interpol list.
Of course, there are all sorts of edge cases and minor features to add to make it complete.
Likewise. 3 or 4 years ago, I ripped out two-thirds of all the JS in my B2B SaaS by using htmx with server-side templating. So much simpler.
The ethos of allowing a return to a simpler way of building a web app resonates with me.
A db table with only 10k rows? Even a full table scan should be extremely fast.
And with SQLite - which I assumed runs in-process, but even if not, surely is running on the same physical server? Faster still.
Of course, the magic phrase in my head is “create index”.
I hope Julia posts an update!
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
Thank you!
The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.
Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.
Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.
If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.
The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.
They keep adding new features at a steady pace, each slowly making the UI more confusing.
So we’ve stayed with Valkey.
And indexes. Many times in my career, adding the right SQL index has solved a serious performance problem.
I’ve now made our decision. We won’t be using them.
If they are going to position yourself as the non-slimy no-BS guys, they can’t pull this nonsense.
I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.
I feel like part of the blame for the situation is that JavaScript has always lacked a standard library which contains the "atomic architecture" style packages. (A standard library wouldn't solve everything, of course.)
Today this is utterly ordinary. At the time, it was remarkable.
From there the usual YouTube “experts” started stories on it. You know the type - they sound authoritative but they are basically regurgitating stuff from Wikipedia (or some Economist article) with some pretty screens and clickbaity thumbnails.
Ultimately, there’s nothing behind this story. As has been the case since Pakehas arrived, lots of Kiwis go abroad and spend lots of time abroad, some go back, and some don’t, and meanwhile NZ’s population continues to grow.
The trends grow and shrink based on relative health of the Aus and NZ economies.
And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.
When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.
She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.
We don't get old school, stripey blog posts anymore.
Both products were initially once-off purchases that you had to install and run on your own infrastructure, and with new, major versions packed with new features that you had to buy if you wanted, but could ignore if you didn’t.
The move to a SaaS model came years later for both products.