and it's like "You're almost making half of what I make." But when you think about it as a business income stream, suddenly if I have to hire one developer even just part time, there goes almost all that money. That's not even enough to hire a developer part-time, somebody who would be really skilled enough to work on Actual. And so money from a business perspective, having to set aside $20,000 to invest in development for a couple months - if you're a business and you can't afford that, that's a huge problem. But 20k for a personal -- you know, if I'm about to buy something for 20k, I agonize over that for week. I hate buying cars, because they are so freakin' expensive. But 20k in business money is nothing, right? I mean, for most businesses, that shouldn't be anything, if you're doing it right. So 3k - a lot of people were like "Dude, you're giving up $3,000 a month." To me, it's just like, you don't understand the burden, because I was lonely, and the next thing I really needed to do is either find a co-founder, which I couldn't do, or hire somebody else to help development. Like, properly hire; don't outsource some cheap labor. Properly hire somebody to help development. And $3,000 a month is not anywhere close to being able to hire somebody out. So you're kind of stuck in this awkward middle phase, which I think happens with bootstrapping, right? You've got to really bear through that awkward phase where you make enough money, to get to the point where you can start hiring out.

I bet if I had sold, it would have been even... Like, there's a lot of people who reacted to open source where they are worried about not being able to set things up themselves, and it totally makes sense, because they're not technical users, but they're happy for that direction. I think if I had sold, it would have been a very similar response from a lot of people, where they're going to leave the app... But it would have been like an angry response, which - I mean, honestly, a lot of apps do that. Things change and things happen. But I think it would have -- I think there's a lot of trust in there that it's like I've been saying I'm in it for the long haul, and then you turn around and sell it... Which, you know, it would have been my right to do to be honest, but it still would have pissed off a lot of people, and I didn't really feel like dealing with that.

When a product manager trusts that the engineers on the team have the interest of the product at heart, they also trust the engineer’s judgment when adding technical tasks to the backlog and prioritizing them. This enables the balanced mix of feature and technical work that we’re aiming for.

I started Trailblazer GmbH 4 years ago with my relocation from Australia back to Europe. One of our consulting clients is the central police department of a German state that has kept me busy for more than three years now.

ActiveInteraction plays nicely with Rails. You can use interactions to handle your business logic instead of models or controllers.

By the same token, marketing or political incentives often push design idioms

It turns out that creating and using Free Software is not just good to individuals, but for businesses as well, for example by building upon publicly available components and by collaborating shared software. The term Open Source is a business-friendly rebranding of the Free Software concept. This line of thought was also widely successful, e.g. Firefox/Mozilla was an open sourcing of Netscape software.

First, they chose to find a new home for Tumblr instead of shutting it down. Second, they considered not just how much cash they would get on day one, but also — and especially — what would happen to the team afterward, and how the product and the team would be invested in going forward. Third, they thought about the sort of steward of the community the new owner would be. They didn’t have to do any of that, and I commend them for making all three points a priority.

the study of innovation shows that everything hinges on the hard work of taking a promising idea and making it work — technically, legally, financially, culturally, ecologically. Constraints are great enablers of innovation.

But there’s a downside to the hackathon hype, and our research on designing workplace projects for innovation and learning reveals why. Innovation is usually a lurching journey of discovery and problem solving. Innovation is an iterative, often slow-moving process that requires patience and discipline. Hackathons, with their feverish pace, lack of parameters and winner-take-all culture, discourage this process. We could find few examples of hackathons that have directly led to market success.

what if projects were designed to combine a hacking mindset with rigorous examination of the data and experience they glean? This would reward smart failures that reveal new insights and equip leaders with the information needed to rescale, pivot or axe their projects.