Stories of indie creators
Artist, web designer Lynn Fisher is a serial creator. Her projects include: A Single Div, AirportCod.es and Why.AZ among others. Lynn specializes in light-hearted projects. Lynn shares why she started A Single Div, why she loves using constraints for her creative projects and why she finds CSS an expressive medium to experiment with.
Shares her experience of working on Crying in Public, a community-based map based in New York City. The project was one of her more technically complicated ones. We talked about the aspect of the project she focused on the most, getting labeled as “offensive content” by Facebook’s API, how she knew she was on the right path when designing the project, the unifying element for all her side projects, how she determined when to launch Crying in Public, and her working style.
The creator of the popular series Ruby Tapas and MOOM shares how he determined what to delegate, the importance of taste when creating something, how he determines pricing of a product and how he markets is products.
Leah Culver talks about building Breaker, iOS app focused on podcast discovery. She shared the one test she uses to know when it’s time to bring in others, the approach they took to get users, how she picked Erik Berlin to work with, the two week product process they use to build features, how to determine what tasks to give to others vs trying to do it all yourself.
Sean Griffin talks about why he writes detailed commit messages, how the Diesel core team was formed, how he grew the community and how he decided what features to put into Diesel 1.0
How to run a successful kickstarter, why you might choose to self-publish your book and the downsides of using Amazon for self-publishing
Seth shares: his advice for launching on ProductHunt, why Botlist’s launch was so successful, how the site makes money and why Botlist transitioned from a directory to a community
The creator of Codecaster on creating a product to solve your own problem, why he built it in a language he’d never used before and the features he shipped in the beta version.
Software developer Andy Croll on the impermanence of software, how closing down a project helped him figure out his technological preferences and helped his career.
The creator of Oh My Zsh talks about his popular open source project, how a rescinded verbal job offer changed the course of his career and the legacy he wants to leave.
The process of writing a book including the writing routine, the role of feedback and how she figured out the angle of her book.
An illustrator with a day job, Ryan shares how he wrote his first picture book in two weeks, how he creates minimum viable habits and his creation process.
An upfront conversation about how he settled on a business model and developed ethical advertising standards.
The creator shares why she created {key : values}, how she was able to go full time, what to do after launch and how to keep driving traffic.
How a job interview inspired Vaidehi to understand Conway’s Game of Life and other computer science problems by creating a weekly series, basecs.
Side projects as a means of exploring different types of media
Learning to be a manager for the first time, how he knew when it was time to make a change, the question he asked himself to get back happiness in his career and how open source helped him get a new role.
Podcast RSS Show Notes:Andrew Nesbitt, creator of Libraries.io, Dependency CI and 24 Pull Requests, cares deeply about solving the problems of discoverability and sustainability in open source. He created Libraries.io to help developers find new open source libraries, modules, frameworks, and keep track of the ones they depend on.“You are not your code.”We talk about Libraries.io, which has indexed 30 million open source projects. Our discussion covers the trouble of single points of failures in projects, how they developed attributes to assess repositories, how they got funding and how to make decisions about the risk of a transitive dependency. Show Links:About Andrew NesbittLibraries.io24 Pull RequestsManifest podcastNadia Eghbal: Roads and BridgesSustain Open Source ConferenceGiving open source projects life after a developer's deathWhat a sustainable OSS project looks like
Behind the scenes look at how the conference was named, how one talk changed the course of the conference and what it really take to run a conference.
How Writing Docs Like Code helped Anne Gentle experiment with the full product management cycle.
Software developer and author Zed Shaw shares why he started charging for Learn Python the Hard Way and the challenges of making money in open source software.
Calligrapher and hand-letterer Carla Hackett shares her journey translating an in-person workshop into a paid online course.
Kim Goulbourne talks about how she lowered your out-of-pocket expenses through sales and sponsorships and how she plans to build more marketing into her schedule in the future and what she learned.
Creating Cucumber Pro, a boot-strapped product, how to ask the right questions and how to avoid building something your customers don't need.
How actionable feedback can transform your performance, what to do if you're stagnant when learning something new and how to know when to quit.
Creating products like make8bitart.com and glitch.com to lower the barrier to get new people into programming.
Composer and jazz pianist Sumi Tonooka on why constraint can be good and the creative process of creating For Malala
Developer and journalist Owen Williams talks about building Charged, his popular tech news newsletter.
Software developer Seb Rose talks about the twists and turns of his professional life and how he came to land at Cucumber Ltd.
How software developer got into fly fishing to her avoid burnout.
Richard Schneeman shares how he balanced between building features and marketing his site, Code Triage.
Why your mindset and trusting yourself matters in creative projects.
Sidekiq creator Mike Perham talks about how he build a sustainble business model on top of an open source project.
Saron Yitbarek talks about crafting an experience at her first conference, Codeland.
Design Life FM podcast host and graphic designer Femke van Schoonhoven talks about collaborating on side projects.
Machine learning expert and author Matt Kirk shares his experience of writing two technical books.
What happens when you have a career failure? What do you do next? For John Bafford that meant hiking the Appalachian Trail, and a new path in his career and life.
Independent Game Developer Chris Parsons talks about doing a Kickstarter Campaign for a video game.
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