Indiedotes Podcast

Robby Russell - Accidentally creating a popular open source project

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Show Notes:

Robby Russell created Oh My Zsh to support his co-workers, never intending it to become a popular open source project.

"This side project was a good way to experiment with some ideas.”

Robby shares how a rescinded verbal offer transformed his career, setting him on a new path ultimately to starting Planet Argon. He speaks about the origin story of Oh My Zsh experimenting with marketing and branding on a open source projects, and the legacy he wants to leave -- it might surprise you.

Show Links:

• Robby Russell
• Planet Argon
• Oh My Zsh
• The Mighty Missoula
• Robby on Medium
• @robbyrussell
• Robby on Rails
• Oh My Zsh origins

Lara Hogan - Writing Demystifying Public Speaking

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Show Notes:

Lara Hogan is the author of three books, including her latest, Demystifying Public Speaking.

" I thought, maybe it will go horribly wrong, and maybe I'll learn something about myself."

Lara shares how she found her publishers, finding her writing routine, how she got feedback, how she found the angle of her book and how long it took her to write.

Show Links:

• Lara Hogan website
• Demystifying Public Speaking
• Designing for Performance
• Building a Device Lab
• The Manager's Path
• #speakerconfessions

 

 

Ryan Luikens - Reclaiming creativity

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Show Notes:

Ryan Luikens shares why he stopped drawing, how he got started again and reclaimed his creativity.

" I had to find a way to transform from a professional non-creative into someone who made things."

Ryan shares the story of how he wrote his first picture book in two weeks, changing his perception of himself and his theory of developing a minimum viable habit.

Show Links:

• Drawn stories on Medium
• Ryan's site
• Doodles on Instagram
• Getting a habit back on track
• Morning pages

Eric Holscher - Read the Docs

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Show Notes:

Eric Holscher attended a 48 hour hackathon hoping to have a fun weekend building something. That project, Read the Docs, now has seven millions developers on the platform each month and is his full time job.

"I'm wearing a pager, people are depending on me, it's something that's important to the community, so I need to invest more into it."

Eric and I discussed how he settled on a business model, created ethical standards for advertising and why they avoided a subscription model. We also talked about how to build a sustainable open source project and the essential question he wrestled with after hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

Show Links

• Eric Holscher website
• Read the Docs
• Write the Docs
• What Technology Wants
• A walk in the woods

Lynne Tye - key : values

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Show Notes:

Lynne Tye created key : values to help match software developers with companies which hold similar values. She might make you rethink how you find your next job or your next employees.

“Looking for a job was so painful.”

The creator shares why she created key : values and:

• How she was able to go full time
• The role of mini launches
• What to do after launch
• How to keep driving traffic
• How she dealt with perfectionism
• Why she wished she launched sooner.

Show Links:

• key : values
• From indie lurker to indie hacker
• Indie Hackers
• How to launch on Product Hunt
• The lesson Lynne learned about Product Hunt launches

What to read: My three biggest career mistakes

Vaidehi Joshi - Creating Basecs

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Show Notes:

A job interview inspired software developer Vaidehi Joshi to create Basecs, a weekly series, as a way to teach herself Conway’s Game of Life and other computer science problems. Along the way she's helped thousands of others do the same.

“I thought it was just me who didn’t understand it.” 

Vaidehi shared how she found a balance when doing a weekly project, how she accidentally created a computer science curriculum and her process for learning and writing about a brand new topic in less than a week. 

Show Links:

• Vaidehi's website
• Basecs
• Basecs podcast
• Vaidehi on Medium
• One thousand words
• Technical Tuesdays
• Conway's game of life

 

Jake Sutton - Tonight's Negroni

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Show Notes:

Jake Sutton is a software developer and the creator of Tonight’s Negroni and the Dipsomania Podcast. Jakes uses side projects as a means of exploring different types of media.

“I didn’t do it to create an audience, I did it for creative expression."

Our wide ranging conversation covered the challenges of different mediums, how to build in feedback loops and shifting from a consumer to a creator. 

Show Links

• Jake's site
• Tonight's Negroni
• Dipsomania podcast
• Jake's Twitter
• Jake's Instagram
• Bar Helix

Justin Weiss - Navigating a software development career

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Show Notes:

Justin Weiss is a software developer and the author of Practicing Rails.

“Opportunities showed up or it was this job needs doing. So I’ll go and do it."

Justin told us about 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 find happiness in his career and how open source helped him get a new role. 

Show Links:

• Justin Weiss
• Practicing Rails
• Aha
• Avvo
• Managing Humans
• Rands in Repose
• High Output Management
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Andrew Nesbitt - addressing discoverability and sustainability in OSS with Libraries.io

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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 Nesbitt
• Libraries.io
• 24 Pull Requests
• Manifest podcast
• Nadia Eghbal: Roads and Bridges
• Sustain Open Source Conference
• Giving open source projects life after a developer's death
• What a sustainable OSS project looks like

Michael Eaton - Kalamazoo X, a tech conference that’s about everything except code

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Show Notes:

Michael Eaton heads up Kalamazoo X, a tech conference that’s about everything except code. We talked about what it's like to run a conference described as a braver, more profane set of Ted Talks.

Michael talks about the challenges fo marketing a conference that’s about the human side of technology, leaving the content in your speaker’s hands rather than curating it and how one talk changed the course of the conference. Finally, he shares he knew it was time for a change and what's next.

Show Links:

• About Michael Eaton
• Kalamazoo X
• Stop Drinking Spoiled Milk