Recommended books for learning Python?
The joys of home delivery from @asda. Ended up with two bags from someone else’s order which included three sirloin steaks.
It's the end of an era as Patrick Rhone calls it a day on his Minimal Mac blog.
This is the final post on Minimal Mac. This project contains what I believe in when it comes to a mindful and intentional approach to technology. After nearly 2,500 posts, I have nothing more to add to what has already been said. As I wrote in my book enough, saying no is actually saying yes to other things. It’s time to say “no” to this project so that I can say “yes” to others (or, in some cases, fully commit to agreements already made).
— The End by Minimal Mac
It's been an amazing journey following this blog over the years and always a pleasure to read.
Fixie Friday - Airtight Cycles Möbius 650c Kyudo
A work of art. The detailing in the frame is amazing, especially around the seat tube cluster.
via Cycle EXIF
These scenes from Star Wars are amazing in their detail.
Meanwhile at NBU
... they're teaching the things other business schools don't.
Giving up 2/3 of the way through Peter V. Brett’s The Daylight War. Feel like I’ve been reading it for weeks. Time to move on.
Focusing on Writing Code
I wrote this on Friday's post:
Building and marketing products isn’t for me. I prefer to be neck deep in code rather than marketing tools.
I've been thinking about it a lot over the weekend.
The pursuit to build something that people will want to use and buy is what many people want. To take an idea, build it, and turn it into a successful product. Everytime I see an app (usually based on a simple idea) rocket to the top of the App Store charts I wonder, "Why didn't I think of that?".
The thing is though, this usually isn't the first idea for that person. It might be their tenth or even twentieth attempt at making a successful product. Yes, it might be their first attempt, but I don't think there's ever been a single attempt at a product that's went on to sell millions. There's always been a few failed attempts before that one successful product happens.
Rather than continually change the idea of Journalong into something that works I simply let it trudge along based on it's same initial idea. If I was really serious about making Journalong into something better I might have changed how it recorded entries, or changed it's target market to a more focused group, or even open sourced it after the first three months of inactivity. It's taken me a couple of years to finally admit defeat.
A continually pivoting product isn't something I have a whole lot of time for. lame excuse you might say. I would disagree. The ongoing testing and validating of a product until it starts to gain the traction of paying clients isn't what I want to do. I want to write software, but I also want to be paid for writing that software. I'm exploring a few options such as open sourcing a few ideas to see what happens, but for the moment I'll be keeping the focus on writing code rather than building products.
Cracking bike, cracking colour, cracking name. What more reason do I need to post this here?
via Cycle EXIF
Journalong has been limping along for a few months now. With almost no interest from myself in rolling out anymore features and a lack of activity from those users that have accounts there, I made the decision a few weeks ago that I would kill the Journalong service off completely and transform it into something else. There were two main factors that influenced this:
- Lack of Interest & Activity - Journalong started off well with and managed to accumulate over 100 users in the first couple of months. The next few months weren't so great. A couple of users signed up to the service every month since then but in the last few months there has only been two sign ups. From those people that signed up, just a few accounts used Journalong on a monthly basis. Not exactly a busy service you could say.
- Being Free - In the beginning Journalong was free, then it was paid, then it became free again. If anything from this, I've learned that products and services like this should be paid right from the start. Yes, it can be a hassle coding the payment processing for a web site, but even just a basic monthly subscription should be there if you want the product to become a sustainable business. Once something has been free, it's almost impossible to convince all users of the product or service that they should pay for it.
So that's the reasons for killing Journalong as a service so what next for Journalong? Well I did want to remove myself from managing a dead service, but I think there's still value to having a Markdown journal for your Dropbox. So, over the last couple of days I took the source code for Journalong apart and repackaged it as an open source Sinatra application that you can run on your own computer.
The great thing about this is that I can keep Journalong going at my own pace. Being open source I can make any changes I need or others need in my own time and accept changes from others.
Building and marketing products isn't for me. I prefer to be neck deep in code rather than marketing tools.