poushkar

I am on my N-th attempt of making a side-project, after many years of failed or not-finished ones. Every time I get a motivation to do something, I convince myself that this time is different for some reason. I would love to hear stories where it WAS actually different for you, and you succeeded (by your own definition of success)?

There used to be a relatively popular post here on HN a few years ago with links to multiple similar blog posts where authors collected list of the best value (in their opinion) things and activities. For example, I remember an author argued that hiring a tutor on any new activity is money well spent. Or buying certain items like Aeropress, etc

Thank you

What tech stack would you choose for building SaaS side projects as a single developer if these were your priorities:

- build it once, deploy and forget for months or years;

- adding new features is easy (once it's needed once a year or even less frequently). "Easy" here means little time spent reminding yourself how the app works and where to add new features;

- deploying is simple and can be done with little to no setup;

- language/platform/dependencies updates are infrequent, easy to do, unlikely to break the app;

- open source and developed by a community, no dependency on an enterprise.

What it says in the title: for a person who has no time to read HN every day, how do you make sure you are not getting rusty and missing out on important improvements in the field?

Hello,

Recently I've been thinking about writing a book or recording a video course on building an MVP with Ruby on Rails framework. It would be specifically targeted at non-technical founders with no prior programming experience.

Ruby on Rails happens to be among the most popular programming frameworks for building web apps in startups because of its extensive ecosystem and the tooling out of the box.

Typical beginner books on programming — and programming with Ruby and Ruby on Rails specifically — are oriented at a general audience. But building an MVP or a PoC is a completely different story: you've got to be extremely pragmatic in your choice of tools, libraries and their use. You must know the easiest, scalable way of running your SaaS on the Internet. You don't have to know or understand a lot of things which are only useful to a general programmer: like performance or writing "beautiful" code. All you need is to know just enough and in just the right combination to be able to deliver the first versions of the product. If it shows a promise - you can find a technical co-founder, or hire a freelancer to develop it further properly.

A little bit about me: I have 12+ years of working as a software engineer in startups of various sizes, most of which were built using Ruby on Rails.

I was part of small teams getting an MVP ready, mid-sized teams within successful startups with multiple rounds of investments behind, as well as a company of 1000+ engineers running some of the biggest Ruby on Rails apps out there.

Recently, I've also guided a (non-technical) friend in building an MVP, and it was quite illuminating for both of us. That's how I got the idea to scale it out in form of a course, or a book.

That said, I am not sure if there would be a demand for such a course. Maybe I am overestimating the need for it, and non-technical founders prefer spending their time somewhere else, instead.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you.

Hi HN, I would like to implement a service or a info product that can bring a couple of $ a month to donate to a charity, but I am out of ideas. Do you have anything in mind that you don't have time to work on yourself? Thank you.