Its more about being a servant leader and not a bottleneck than literally being "not needed". Its a mindset of wanting your team to be able to operate without having to check with you (the EM) on every little thing. I've also heard it called having IC's be a "manager of one" where they can independently work on things, get work finished, etc. without needing constant nagging.
A good manager I had once had the approach of setting guidelines and "just getting out of the way" and I try to follow that, it works well for most people.
I like being a servant leader. In no way does that mean I can go on holiday and people won't miss me. They will miss my services. If people don't miss me, then they must HATE me as a manager.
I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.
At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.
I'd suggest commercial aircraft as an even better analogy than cars.
Most of the ongoing costs you mention for cars still apply--but there are also the occasional (possibly dramatic) changes to the interior 'cabin product' like new seats and entertainment systems, new fabrics/branding, new business class seats/pods, changes in seat layouts, etc in order to remain competitive in their market segment.
Cars rarely have such significant refreshes, but software products often have analogous design and UX overhauls that are also intended to try to keep the software competitive in its market segment. And again airlines don't need to engage the specific airframe manufacturer like Boeing or Airbus for these, but they do need some semblance of a tech team that have certain domain expertise in aircraft engineering constraints.
Airframes also have major overhauls called MROs (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) about every 6-10 years, which again does not require the original manufacturer but does require significant engineering expertise. To me this is akin to certain ongoing software maintenance activities like updating a codebase to use newer library versions, major database version updates, API or SDK version compatibility, etc.
Some "yanks" align their identity with their vehicle. There are songs about trucks but yes a van or mini-van are more flexible.
There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.
If its a 737 delivering pallets of dog food or humans in seats, the safety concerns are the same. They take off and land at the same airports and can collide with other airplanes. The stuff on the plane doesn't mean there are different safety checks.
Auto pilot can be used for nearly everything after take-off and before landing, so I think you'll need to define "AI" here. I see people using "AI" almost interchangeably these days for things that plain old computers have been doing for a while now. Auto-pilot is not AI, its just a set of instructions (aka programming) given to a computer.
Airports have designed approaches, large airports have multiple and there is a need for communication with other humans, reacting to dynamic environments including weather, other aircraft (both airborne and on taxiways) and having actual vision out the cockpit to see things.
The latest "tool" for me is just Apple Notes for me with a todo list of tasks on a page.
Its a struggle for me to get any momentum going on personal projects. I think its because I'm a person that is externally motivated - like I know I get paid, promotions potentially, etc. via my employment. When it comes to personal projects I can't get going. I only mention this because I would also change out what/how I use to manage the work thinking that would change and I'd get more done, its never worked. Things I've used along the way: trello, wiki, pen and paper, various apps like todoist, etc.
> That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement
Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.
There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.
There are some hacks to make video content easier:
1. Just do split screen videos where you talking head with slides on the other, and read off the slides.
2. Record in segments, with a full reset between each segment. Makes editing really fast.
3. Don't stress about small mistakes. People are into authenticity, it's ok.
Lighting/"studio" design is still an art, but you can get something set up in a day or two. The harder part is coming up with good video ideas, and doing a compelling title/thumbnail/hook. That's a rabbit hole.
If you have a social media following you can leverage that. Cold calls can work if you're selling big ticket items, but you also need to be good at sales and do a lot of legwork so I wouldn't go down that route. I wouldn't start advertising until you can demonstrate product market fit.
It’s fundamentally not viable in the sense of mass adoption. Security conscious and tech nerds (like HN audience) might do it but mass adoption, aka crossing the chasm from early adopters and onwards, isn’t feasible because all the aunts, uncles and grandma’s out there aren’t going to pay for it or switch.
If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to <insert some replacement> then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?
If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?
Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.
My early thoughts on pricing are that the free version allows you to keep a rolling 30 day window of content, it is built to encourage you to post every day, recording your life, with some soft journalling, phot prompts etc, so 30 days gives you a month free. on day 31, you can no longer access the 1st days content, day 32, 1st and 2nd days content is faded, subscription allows you access to your whole timeline, if you unsub, the 30 day window cuts back in. Subscription allows you access to everything - £2-4 a month is what im thinking. Might be dumb, might not be
The rolling timeline seems like a good approach to not have free users take a ton of storage but I would think even allowing free users to post video/images content at all is going to consume a lot of storage. It might be worth thinking through ideas on how to encourage users to get their network to sign up.
Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.
I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.
I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.
Can you elaborate more on your last sentence and running VMs? How does 32GB set aside for VMs and GPU accelerated let you run native Windows? Is there special/newer VM software that is used? Is it still virtualbox?
Outside of docker containers for servers and work I haven't delved into VMs on PCs in a while but this sounds compelling to run linux and windows at once from the same hardware instead of a dual boot.
KVM (standard Linux kernel feature) will get you virtualization. On top of that there's a hardware virtualization feature which is called IOMMU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_ma...) allowing you to "detach" physical hardware from your host PC and assign it to a VM. This allows you to run a operating system (in this case Windows) inside a virtual machine, but it can use the physical GPU for graphics acceleration because you attached the GPU to it.
When you attach the GPU to it, the VM will also behave like a "real" PC meaning it will discover your graphics card as one of its installed devices and will ask you to install AMD or Nvidia drivers (depending on what hardware you assigned to it) on the virtualized Windows system.
Although it's a bit easier and less tricky on a laptop with 2 GPUs (a integrated GPU embedded with the CPU and a discrete GPU for example) it is also very much possible on a system with a single integrated or discrete GPU.
The only thing you will need to consider on a single GPU configuration is that all GPU acceleration on the host will be gone as long as the GPU is deattached from the host, and it will solely depend on the frame buffer for graphics output (so in this particular case you should not run apps requiring 3D acceleration and the GPU accelerated VM on the host at the same time).
When you have two GPUs you can use one for applications on the host and the other for GPU acceleration in the virtual machine, which means you can run 3D accelerated apps on the host, and a GPU accelerated virtual machine at the same time.
Do note however that you can't run any Windows games with kernel level anti cheat this way, that cat and mouse game has been played and lost. A lot of other use cases will work fine, though.
A good manager I had once had the approach of setting guidelines and "just getting out of the way" and I try to follow that, it works well for most people.
reply