Bootstrapping a Type System (2010)
Published in 2017, this chronicle by @lemming details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 101 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 22 comments
I've read a few of this guys blog posts and they are generally fairly interesting. This one a little less so, but I had a good chuckle from the line about why he implemented generics in magpie. "Magpie has generics because I’m firmly of the opinion that a type system without generics is about as useful as a language with functions but no parameters." Let the go programmers pour hate upon this blog post
For those of you don't know, Bob Nystrom is the developer of Wren (wren.io), and previous to it he developed Magpie (the language he's discussing), and Finch (http://finch.stuffwithstuff.com/ ↗). He's pretty impressive as far as language development goes.
I followed this blog for a long time. The whole journey of creating the Magpie language is fantastic. Most of what I know as a senior dev comes from trying to really understand his posts.