ramkarthikk's comments

Thank you for submitting this. I built this over the weekend. I have been blogging since the mid-2000's when blogging was at it's peak. There was a whole community around it - familiar faces commenting, friends promoting each other's post - sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Technorati where you could find interesting new blogs.

And then it slowly faded away as social media platforms rose in popularity. There are still many people who blog but not enough places to find them since the social platforms pretty much deprioritize external links.

I built Blogosphere to aggregate posts from over 1,000 blogs (adding more every hour and you can add them via the "Submit Blog") along with categories to help people find new and interesting blogs.

There was a period where this confusion was there with Teams (Classic) and Teams (New).

There was the whole .NET Core/.NET (while having .NET Standard for libraries) confusion. Even now many people think .NET requires Windows. Maybe they should have named it .NET Open?

This is such a wholesome post. It also shows how much agency we can have in our local community. It reminded me of the Derek Sivers story[0] about the dancing man and the first follower when I read the part about the first person (Luke) joining them.

[0] - https://sive.rs/ff

When I reread these, I always pick up some details that I missed in the earlier reads:

- On the shortness of life - Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Growth - Show your work and Steal like an artist - Domain modeling made functional

I've created: 1. a very minimal bookmark app, 2. a completely local (localStorage) markdown notes app, and 3. now working on a local Kanban app (like a local Trello).

1 and 2 are publicly available. Apart from tweeting once about the second app, I didn't post links anywhere so it almost satisfies the "just for yourself" criteria.

This is relevant: Everything is a remix by Kirby Ferguson[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

Over the years, trying to learn different languages/frameworks, failing most of the times and succeeding occasionally, I have found two things that help me:

1. Find an interesting project that suits the language/framework and keep the scope very minimal so I can complete it in 2 days (weekend). I can always learn more doing a second or third project. But I find that I can maintain my motivation when I see results and complete a project.

2. Restrict the number of new technologies for the project to maximum two (best if it is one). When there are many new things, I find that it can be exhausting and I give up after just a couple of hours. So for ex: When I initially learned React, I didn't know GraphQL, so even if I see a case where GraphQL might be the best fit, I will use REST API. This way I'm not stuck on all fronts.

To answer the first question, there is no single project I build to learn every language because that becomes boring for me. I try to build different projects every time.

For ex: When learning React, I built a HN reader, Foreign exchange meme reaction, and an app where I can see the time of all my teammates spread across the globe (all completed and live). When learning ReactNative, I built a small Twitter clone (haven't published it).

This completely resonates with me. Around 12 years back, when I was in my final year of college, I started a blog where I interviewed people who were doing interesting things (mostly online, like influential bloggers, startup founders, etc). Surprisingly [1], most people responded positively to the interview request.

After a few months of consistently publishing interviews, I started to get a lot of nice things come my way. The most memorable one is when one of the interviews led to a short term paid project and eventually a job offer (I didn't take it but wish I had).

I have had similar experiences in the past 12 years whenever I published something or built a side project and posted a Show HN.

[1] I say surprisingly because I didn't have a following at that point or a popular blog

Ah thanks. It should be fixed now.

Thank you for the feedback. Glad you like this. Yes, I was spending way too much time because of the endless feed and scroll. I was seeing more things I didn't subscribe to (follow) than what I subscribed to. So I created this app.

The timestamp idea is great. I will look into implementing it next. It's always nice to have a start and an end. Maybe I will add a setting where the user can specify how frequently they want to fetch new items.

I created https://plaintweet.com/ primarily for myself. I posted it on HN sometime back and many people visited it. It is completely free and doesn't use any analytics so I don't know how many people use it (if any).

It runs on a $5 VM along with some other small projects, so it doesn't cost me much and hence the outcome doesn't matter.

If this writing is what the author brings to the table, I think they are more than capable of writing a useful blog. And with more writing, it will only get better.

> It feels as if I should have great things to say about... stuff... and yet I don't. Every opinion I have is a copy of a copy of a copy of the first 5 top-level comments on a reddit-slash-hacker-news comment section.

Almost everything that's said or written is a copy of a copy of a copy. But as a reader, your 5th level copy might be the first time I'm encountering that particular idea. If only one person says something, the chances of me finding it are negligible. If a thousand people say the same thing, it significantly increases the chances of me finding it.

Thank you. I used to use WhatsApp at first, then I started using Notion. But anything I tried always required me to do more than a few clicks.

Whenever I'm browsing something that I want to send to my mobile, I send it via WhatsApp web or some hard way.

I wanted a way to quickly send links to my mobile. Since we can scan QR code to open URLs, I create a page that takes a URL input and generates a QR code. And then I created a JavaScript snippet that I could add to bookmarks, so I can click that when I'm on a web page and let the bookmarklet create a QR code.

This is a super simple app and can be built with a couple of lines of code.

But I thought this might be useful for people who do not have the time to build it for themselves.

Congrats on launching the app! You have mentioned the earnings from a tip-jar system. I also noticed that Typefully links to Mailbrew. It will be interesting to see the traffic numbers to Mailbrew and how many of them ended up signing up/paying for Mailbrew.

I agree with this mostly but to play devil's advocate: If you are good enough to build a product that people are willing to pay for, would it be really that hard to get a new job if you lose your current job?

“The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life” - This is a book on stoicism. It’s a quick read but has so much value. I re-read this book once a year.

“Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United” - I’m a huge Manchester United fan. Sir Alex Ferguson managed the (biggest) club for 27 years, winning so many trophies, managing big personalities, rebuilding the team multiple times over the course of his career. He has so much valuable advice in this book.

A quick feedback: There are so many newletters these days that lot of people need a strong reason to give their email ID. Substack has a good feature where people can read previous issues before subscribing. Since there is no landing page or preview content, I would suggest to write a few issues before putting it out for the world to see.

That being said, good luck with this project. I will come back and subscribe once I get a feel for the content I can expect.

"I am writing this to let you all know that everyone's experience during this pandemic is not the same. I do not have all this extra time that folks keep talking about."

Thank you for writing this. At times, not intentionally, we surround ourselves and follow people on social media who have very similar lives to us that we don't hear different views.

It is a good reminder to listen and empathize (always, but more so now) because not everyone has lot of time now that they are working from home. Not everyone can be as productive as before at work, let alone say, read books or build a side project.

I'm planning to add this as a setting in the next increment.