Indie Hacker Diaries: July 15th-19th, 2024

“The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Interesting Links

• Moumint v2 - The site I designed and built with Joystick is finally live, go give it some clicks.
• FreshReplAI - The name is confusing, but this is a cool idea to keep an eye on. It helps you locate social media threads about topics relevant to your product and then automate conversations. I’m not big on the latter part, but doing the leg work on finding relevant discussions is very interesting. Not yet launched but worth getting on the list to see where it goes.
• Coolors - A nice color palette generator. Found this while working on the dark theme for Mod. Just hit the space bar and it will generate a fresh, random palette (you can bookmark the URL to save it for later).
• Telescope - Inexpensive SEO research tool, similar to more-expensive tools like ahrefs. Handy for strategizing content without spending $100/mo.

Pro Tips

Know when you’re on to something

As I’ve made progress on Joystick, Mod, and Push over the last 3.5 years, I’ve noticed a reluctance toward early adoption. Despite that, I’ve kept going because my day-to-day experience with it is far smoother than any of the tools I used to depend on in the past (as intended, “it just works” without any gotchas). If you’re building something new, really take the time to ask why what you’re building is not just different, but better. And if you’re certain about that, keep at it.

Do the thing you know is correct

One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard came by way of Jim Keller, the infamous CPU architect: “If you look at leaders of companies that have really good long-term success, every time they saw that they had to redo something, they did.”

I’ve internalized this to the point that, when working on something, if it doesn’t feel quite right or isn’t getting the intended result (even if it works), I’ll go back and try a different approach. This attitude can lead you to creating exceptional results. It can be frustrating to scrap a bunch of work and go back, but if you think it’s the right thing to do, don’t shy away from it.

Make time away from the computer

As I made progress on Mod and Joystick this week, I made a point to step back and slow down. I put up a bird feeder/stand in the backyard a few months ago and added a hummingbird feeder about a month ago. Unfortunately, the one I got (avoid anything with the name “Perky Pet”—some reviews claim they kill the freaking birds) had a leak and would only take a day or so to drip all the nectar I filled it with onto the ground.

So, this week, I decided to go track down a replacement smack in the middle of the day. I had plenty to do, but going to get, hang, and fill that feeder gave me enough time to process some problems. It’s also scored me a pair of hummingbirds who have come back every single day since (literally taking sips from it as I write this). It’s nice to look up from the screen and see them hovering to take sips or fly by the porch and scare the crap out of me.

What I Worked On

• Completed work on the dark theme for Mod Plus. This was mildly tedious because I had to make sure colors were balanced consistently across all components, but Mod’s structure made it fairly painless (themes are attached via a data attribute on the tag and then each theme gets its own CSS files—no overlap).
• Got database binaries working for MongoDB and PostgreSQL on MacOS, Windows, and Linux (postgres on Linux still needs some work, though). This means that you'll be able to download and use Joystick without having databases pre-installed on your machine. Joystick will just download the missing database and install/configure it for you. This is exciting as I’ll be able to roll out Joystick RC2 as soon as I do some more testing. Hopefully in the next week or two here.

Final thought

I think I accidentally donated it a few years back, but I used to have a t-shirt with the (unattributed) quote on the back that said “things of quality have no fear of time.” That’s how I think about my work and encourage others to do the same. In the rush to get things done, build fast, etc., a lot of quality is lost. It’s funny, because everybody laments how “things don’t work the way they used to.” Well, it’s worth considering that the reason why they don’t is because everybody is rushing. Toward what? I’d argue nothing.

In your own work, no matter how important or trivial you might find it, take the time to slow down and get the details right. Sure, you can slap together a piece of junk and ship it at warp speed, but is that actually going to serve the end customer well or just make you a quick buck and give you an ego boost (at best)?

If you want to live in a better world, start by building it yourself—don’t wait for others to do the work.