This! I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a chance to spin up a greenfield project, prototype or proof of concept in my 30 year career. Those were always stolen moments, and the bottleneck was never really coding ability. Most professional software development is wading through janky codebases of others' (or your own) creation, trying to iron out weird little glitches of the kind that LLMs can now generate on an industrial scale (and are incapable of fixing).
Here's the next video documenting my progress creating a SwiftUI-style declarative video rendering engine. This video shows how I'm anchoring the features to the needs of my project to avoid getting carried away with silly features...
This is a fast tour through the implementation of a fadeIn(duration:) modifier in the SwiftUI-style video rendering framework I’ve been working on.
1. How modifiers are implemented
2. How image processing works
3. How the realtime audio works
Still feeling my way through, and I didn’t even touch on how much time it took to get everting into Swift packages before I could even start with the audio. But yeah this was a couple of days’ work last week and feels like huge progress.
I lasted about 18 months at Canonical (thankfully I didn’t have to deal with this interview process) and I can say that this description of an interaction with Shuttleworth rings true. The poster really did dodge a bullet by not getting hired. Enough time has passed that this now gives me amusement instead of making me feel outright angry. Shuttleworth is an autocratic micromanager who sprinkles arbitrary mandates into every aspect of the business, which accumulate to make it impossible to deliver anything effectively. The promise of the project was huge (this was over 10 years ago) and he hired many brilliant people but then largely ignored their expertise in favour of his own whims. You may notice that the things Ubuntu does well are mostly things that he didn’t find interesting enough to interfere with.
One of the hardest things about being a solo developer is quality control.
If you're the only developer in the team, and you don't have any testers, how do you make sure you don't break things?
I've been in a lot of startups that got this wrong. Now I'm on my own and I've had to find a way to cut through all the noise and create a sustainable process to keep my software stable while continuing to innovate with creativity and vigour.
I needed to find the perfect balance of automation and flexibility.
But I would also dispute this as "rentseeking". Am I taking something from the commons and putting a paywall around it, or am I working hard as a producer of value, and trying to find a way to be rewarded for my labour? To me it feels like the latter. I'm not sitting back on the spoils of capital, I'm working for a living.
Well, to a point. I wouldn't have been able to attempt this without a certain amount of privilege - for instance not being rent-burdened for the last few years due to my partner owning her own home - but I'm not exploiting workers or anything here.
I wish I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about how to make money from my work. But that's Capitalism for you. But if it makes any difference, I described how I wanted to run my company (if it ever starts making enough money to support a team) by paying everyone the same here: https://goodtohear.co.uk/changes/modal/social_enterprise (direct link to a modal which usually sits on the product page).
I think I've made this clearer on the website now but you know you can download the whole thing without even creating an account on the website. The only limitation is the number of cards you can create, but it's more than enough to figure out if it's a workflow you like.
Yes. This is how I do all my educational content and there is a Record feature for just this purpose. I prefer to record another take than to spend hours editing!