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38 Comments

What is the best thing for you about being a solo developer?

For me, one of the best things of being a solo developer is to never have a conflict in your git repository 😎

  1. 13

    The fact that I can rotate from developer, marketing, content writer, seo, design or anything needed...

    I love it.

  2. 6

    git commit -m "lol" on master

    Deciding about technical decisions myself and the freedom it gives me. I can write a 600 line component without worrying, for now, it will be bad in long-term but short-term solutions might outweigh everything else.

  3. 6

    I can change my stack whenever I see fit :)

    1. 2

      you don't need to convience anyone 😀 this one is also nice

    2. 1

      I'd consider that a negative, it's too damn easy to chase all of those shiny new things as a solo developer. Doing so detracts from building your business and ends up eating up time that could be better spent doing non-business stuff (hobbies, reading, family, etc)

  4. 4

    I need to learn about everything haha

  5. 4

    Oh.... What takes one developer a month,
    will take three developers three months.

    1. 1

      That's fair if you're referring to 3 developers working on the same project (and more so if the project is behind, and you're a Mythical Man Month truther), but what about 3 developers working on 3 different things? If each developer is in a silo on completely unrelated aspects of the system, the output could very well be 3x and not 1/3

  6. 4

    I like not being pushed to solutions that I don't believe are best, I can move fast and have control over overall design.

  7. 3

    Writing "bad code" to ship something quick. Of course I always go back and fix it later...

  8. 3

    I can tell you one bad thing that just happened. Updated my website to fix some bugs, site crash. Backed up my site, still crashed. Now I'm on my own trying to figure WTF happened.

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        One of those, I have no idea what I'm doing or did, but it cleared the bug... Nothing is showing up in red. Now I'm wondering if it's not broken, should I just leave everything as is, or continue updating / making things better.

  9. 3

    Not waiting on blockers! It affects your flow when you've done your part and you're waiting on someone else to provide you with something you need, and you have to stop and do something else.

    I'd actually like to do more pair programming though, I think I'm missing out on other's different ideas/ways of doing things rather than being particular about doing it my way!

  10. 2

    Being your own boss is always the best. You don't have to depend on anyone else, you don't have to follow anyone's instructions etc.

    1. 2

      You also don't have anybody to answer to but yourself. Most people are quick to give themselves the benefit of the doubt and not hold themselves accountable.

  11. 2

    Being able to rapidly build and break things without needing to worry about warning other devs!

    I've actually managed to have a conflict in a git repo only I work on...

    1. 1

      If those things you're breaking are making it to production, then you're relying on your customers to be your QA department, which isn't ideal.

      1. 1

        I more meant things like breaking API changes. Not bugs. :)

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          Gotcha, and yeah, that's fair.

          Only point I have in terms of that, is that the longer you silo out and do stuff like that, the harder it will ever be to work with other people, so I'd still see it as mostly a negative :P

  12. 1

    Honestly for me, there is no best thing about being a solo developer.

    In my personal experience "being in the silo" too long makes it extremely difficult to bring new developers into the project. It's extremely easy to get married to certain ideals that make it fairly intolerable for yourself as well as the new person.

    The lack of other devs also leads to a vacuum in terms of code quality. Nobody else to review your code means you're running the risk of never improving. Sure you can certain move the needle forward on the business, but there's always that innate desire that I have to improve, which is easier to do in a group setting with differing opinions based on experience.

    I run things pretty rigidly for myself these days, and I suspect I'm the exception to the rule, but I don't let myself get away with shoddy commit messages, or merging code into production haphazardly (without at least a formal review by myself, or without proper testing).

    Guess I'm saying that I kind of hate being a solo developer, and that's not to say that I'm looking for help either. My relationship status with myself is "it's complicated" ;)

  13. 1

    Wasting an hour in convincing others we should do this 1-hour task.

  14. 1

    It's same as travelling solo. You can do whatever and whenever you want. :P :)

  15. 1

    Being able to create the initial rendering of your idea so it is easier to show than explain when it is still kind of abstract.

  16. 1

    All the code looks exactly how I would do it!

    Yes, just push to Git and you're off to the races :D

    Chosing the stack and changing whenever I want, without telling anyone!

    No WTF momemts :D

    1. 2

      I love having control (and responsibility) over my own destiny. On a whim I decided to start using Github's Actions to automatically deploy my landing page whenever I merge into my "deploy" branch. It builds the web assets, syncs them to my AWS S3 bucket, and invalidates the CDN. I didn't need to talk to or convince anyone else that it was a good idea worth spending half a day on figuring out and tweaking. Now I spend zero time on deploying my landing page when I make changes, and I'll be able to do the same thing for any other site I create. JUST DO IT!

      1. 2

        That makes me happy to hear.
        Thanks for the github actions tip, I'm checking it out now.

        1. 1

          This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    2. 1

      exactly, it is pure speed!

  17. 1

    I have the liberty to decide what tools to pay for or use for free 😜

    1. 1

      Maybe I've been blessed, but I haven't been told what tools I can and can't use in a good long while. Mind giving some examples here, want to make sure I'm understanding the sentiment properly.

  18. 1

    So true 😂👍🏼

  19. 12

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Also like this, but also curious to dig a big deeper. Are you referring to bailing 100% on a project, or simply cutting your losses early on a project that's went off the rails (or both)?

    2. 1

      I really love this 😂

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