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I killed my side projects - clean slate
I have recently shut down the indie products Iāve been accumulating over the years, RIP: redeal.app - real estate investment calculator - inspired by bigger pockets, initially scraping daft (irish real estate listing website) invertimo.com - investment tracking and bookkeeping (open source), useful for stocks, funds or any sort of crypto assets if multiple exchanges/etc are used, was integrated with degiro, interactive brokers and binanceā¦ + manual uploads watchlimits.com (that is partially alive as the last version is still available in the chrome store, but the āpremium featuresā wonāt be working) - a productivity extension helping with excessive video watching online I lost motivation to work on these projects, they were either in zombie stage (Redeal/Invertimo) or in somewhat alive stage (watchlimits), but little momentum or financial potential.
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Learning Deep Generative Modelling from Stanford
I am a big fan of self-directed learning, but I have never before spent almost 2 thousands of dollars on a single course. Was it worth it? Who could most benefit from that? I took the Deep Generative Modeling course from Standford online for 1750 dollars. It was a first such course for me and before committing to it, I had some questions and doubts as it was rather expensive. I hope sharing my experience will help out people in a similar situation.
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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had spent about 9 years there. I started my journey in software at 19 (first internship) and then continued working part and full time while continuing my degree in Applied Physics.
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I quit my startup because of comic sans
Okay, it wasnāt really caused by the Comic Sans. I had very fun 3 months of pretty fun collaboration and intense learning, but in the end I had this very clear feeling that I would be better of on my own. It wasnāt awful, but it wasnāt great. There were many small and big things that were making our fit non-ideal, and I had doubts growing in me, and one Sunday night, a pick deck in Comic Sans topped me over the edge to call it quits.
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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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