What is the best thing about being a solo developer? What practices have served you well?
For those that have been working as solo developers in their Indie businesses for a while, are there any practices that you've adopted that serve you well. For example "I don't bother with testing before launching" or "I always document my design decisions and trade-offs". I imagine there are some things that only make sense for dev teams working on large code bases in companies but other things carry over?
-Bhumi
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Hi Bhumi,
As I work on new things, I usually discover that there's a lot more to learn about something, so I go out and do research, and I found it very useful to write a blog post on what I learned. During the writing of the post I need to dive a lot deeper into the topic and I end up knowing it better. Then the blog itself attracts more people as well, potentially helping someone else out, and I use it as a reference in future work.
Hi @alexandru11 - I found your blog. Now I am going have to read the series! as I am building a blog is one of my current projects ! https://scatteredcode.net/building-a-fast-and-secure-blog-part-4/
Hi @alexandru11 - thanks for sharing. That makes a lot of sense. In fact I just started doing this. Although for me it's a constant balancing of time I spend writing blog posts and documenting my research vs. coding and making the thing work. I enjoy researching and understand stuff deeply and also writing so I get sucked into it and then I feel I should be moving faster and just make it work (first!). Where do you write?
Seems like a really smart move to make those blog posts. I've only done it once, but have had plenty of cases where I had to implement something new or unique and wish I had the documentation to reference later!
Yes it's totally worth having documentation to reference later, especially for tedious configuration type things that I don't have do often. Mine is scattered in Evernotes though.
That's great, look forward to reading yours. Mine started as a snippet collection, hence the name
The other major thing I do is set up an automated build process that runs tests, collects coverage and scans for vulnerabilities in my code and dependencies as well as finds code smells / bad practices.
I use sonarqube cloud for static code analysis, azure pipelines for the build and part of that runs owasp dependency check. All are free if your project is open source.
I should have a blog post on how I set up the whole thing on a private repo at my company, but you can see the free one in my GitHub: https://github.com/ops-ai/beyondauth (my latest project)