Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > But... I don't truly know what my users want. There is no telemetry of any kind in Luxury Yacht. I like being able to say that, but it means I have no idea how many people are using it, or how they're using it. I don't know what features are the most important to other people.
So add telemetry and a request tracker like https://www.productboard.com/. This is not a solo vs team thing.
by esafak - Founding a company, or just working on any project with a very small team (Less than 5 people) has all of the same issues the author wrote about here. At least they did for me. I resonated a lot with this. ---
Separately, I hope the author of this project is able recognize how this project might be able to grow sustainably. Its a hard thing to know that you won't be able to work on something forever, and either building a community who wants to maintain a core project or having some company pay to maintain it could be a good idea. Linus isn't going to be around forever, but I expect that linux will outlive him by a good margin.
by twosdai - A version of this I've been enjoying is mostly solo dev but with a biz-guy partner. I mostly just build software but have a partner who will go find out how people are using it, what they want, handle inbound, and be there to chat about ideas even if we're not getting into the technical weeds.by rgbrgb
- All the pros listed really resonate with me. I don't develop software as a career anymore, but do it as a hobby. I wouldn't take on a second developer partner for any of my projects. I guess it would feel like working on a beautiful, personal painting and recruiting a second artist to paint half of it. Maybe that works for others, but it's just not how I see myself creating a work. I'd accept small patches to fix bugs, but for the actual overall thrust of my projects, I'll probably always be lone-wolf.by ryandrake
- I feel like your con about not making the right design choices isn't a con. Solo development doesn't mean throwing out the principles that help you learn. Prototyping and beta releases exist to validate design choices without needing a team to debate them. If your software has users they become the sounding board. You mentioned only asking your friends about your ideas. The best part about prototypes and betas is that you get to build something, use it, and see if you like it before committing. If the idea doesn't get traction, throw it away!by neovintage
- For me the Best Pros is "That one random-internet-comment is a good usability improvement, ask LLM to do the small change and commit immediately."
Smaller ideas need not be approved, or held back by schedule pressure from bean counters. Just Do It. :). It's the small corrections which end up polishing the product as good as "professional usability studies".
by ramshanker - The sharpest con for me is blind spots: solo you're the author, the reviewer and the QA, and all three share the same wrong assumptions. Same goes for weaknesses: on a team someone covers what you're bad at, solo nobody does. LLMs patch this surprisingly well on the technical side - it's a reviewer that didn't write the code, but much less on marketing, positioning, all the stuff outside the editor.by vadchen
- The rule to remember about solo development: Alone I can go faster, together we can go further!
Everything else boils down to this.
by lelanthran