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Two worlds: idea people and developers
I recently attended a startup weekend and was surprised by the backgrounds of the other attendees. As a software engineer myself, I expected to see mostly engineers, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, I found myself surrounded by people with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, all of whom shared one thing in common: they had an idea. At the same time, couple months ago started running an Indie Hackers Meetup in Dublin, a software startup meetup that mostly attracts developers.
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Fun indie projects
I wrote in November that I’m taking a break from indie hacking, well, the break didn’t take long (2-3 months). A break made sense at that time, because my project watchlimits.com wasn’t getting traction and I just changed jobs. New job presented a lot of new learning opportunities and as any change was somewhat stressful, so I didn’t want to overload myself and risk a burnout. I am back in a not fully “serious” capacity.
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I left my Site Reliability job
I left my Site Reliability Engineering job after almost seven years. I didn’t leave Google though, just changed to another role within Software Engineering in the Cloud Infrastructure. I was somewhat unhappy with my cushy role as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager at Google. After quite a lot of deliberation, exploring opportunities and some setbacks (hello, industry layoffs and hiring freezes), I left my SRE job. My last day was October 14th 2022.
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Abandoning the indie hacking dream for now
Iām taking a break from indie-hacking Will I never write a line of indie code again? Obviously not. I love building, sharing and learning. But I am going to stop trying to make profitable indie-businesses for the next couple months or a year. Building things is fun, but marketing a business that has no traction is a grind and a roller coaster. Something that right now I am tired of.
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My micro-side project trended on HN and got thousands of visits within the first day
My micro-side project Netflix Calculator trended on Hacker News for a couple of hours and: received 8K+ page visits brought hundreds of visitors to watchlimits (my main project) caused many new downloads of watchlimits got me the first paid customer for watchlimits with a yearly plan got multiple backlinks and started ranking top 5 in Google within a week - bringing SEO traffic already OMG! My latest side project - Netflix Calculator - has been on the front page of hacker news for the last 4 hours!
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Technical learnings from the first quarter of work on watchlimits
You can still use side projects to grow as an engineer without sacrificing the business success of your product. There are no guarantees that the business will succeed, but I believe that regardless of the business outcome you should try to end up smarter than when you started. This post is a retrospective of my technical learnings from my first 3 months of working on watchlimits.com (chrome extension to limit excessive video watching).
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My release checklist for chrome extensions
Many products can be updated very quickly. You spot a bug, you push a fix in next 5 minutes, sadly for chrome extensions it’s not like that. When you update a chrome extension in the chrome web store you submit a package that then goes through a lengthy review. It can take multiple days and during that time you can’t update a newer version, for example if you find some bugs.
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How I find time for indie hacking while having a full time job
A friend recently asked me: āHow do you find time for all your projects while working full time?ā āI donāt, I just complain about not having enough time instead.ā But more seriously, I am working on two products, while having a demanding full time job and doing a lot of sports (7+ training sessions per week). Ok, Iām in my late twenties and I donāt have kids, but I do have a social life and a spouse that wants to do stuff together.
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How to make a product on gumroad and earn some money (#secretunasaladrecipe)
If you’ve been in the Indie Hackers circles for a while you probably heard about people like dvassallo@ who made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling simple digital products on gumroad. Make a thing, put it on gumroad, earn money, could it all be that simple? I have heard many good things about the platform and I wanted to try it out with something straighforward. I didnāt feel like I had some super valuable secret I could share that I could make into a killer course, but…
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Sometimes stupid product ideas are the best - motivation behind the secret tuna salad recipe
I created a digital product out of my family’s favorite tuna salad recipe and in this article I will tell you why I thought it was a good idea. Iām a software engineer by trade and I have spent thousands of hours building software products that donāt really earn me money (yet). Entrepreneurship is risky, thatās for sure, but often indie businesses fail because founders lack marketing skills and fear to put themselves out there until itās pretty late.
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