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When you hear the words “It’s not rocket science what we are trying to do here!”, you are hearing the words of a frustrated person. When I hear this sentence in a software project, I have found the person usually means this:

• “Why don’t the software developers just implement what the business asked them to do?”
• “Why do we need another meeting to talk about the requirements?”
• “Why is this taking so long?”

Talk to the software developers, they might tell you why:

Asking the question “Is this a good business idea?” is very different from asking “Is this business idea a good fit for me?”. When I first started out, I only thought about the former. If you actually want to start a business, answering the second question is at least as important!

So how do you find an answer to the question “Is this a good fit for me?”.

Ask yourself: Is it fun?

I found that fun is a great indicator to judge if a business idea is a good fit for me. Also, I like to think about any business idea in terms of two phases. Because once you have an idea, there are only two things left to do:

Baking your own bread is simple, but strangely satisfying. I don’t usually bake my own bread, I buy it from a bakery or grocery store, like most people that I know.

To prepare your own bread, you only need some very basic ingredients that you can find at any store: flower, salt, sugar, and yeast. And water. (Actually, yeast is only one option. The yeast’s purpose is to make the bread rise. This is called “leavening”, and there are different leavening agents used in different regions of the world.)

I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything original to say. All of it has been said before. People don’t want to hear about the things I have to say. I don’t have the time. I don’t feel like it. I am boring. I am not good enough.

Other people have said it better.

Other people have said it butter.

Other people have said it bitter.

I can do bitter.

I am a software developer in my forties. Here are four things I wish I had learned and practiced earlier in my life:

• Your logical mind will often deceive you when it comes to important things in life. Learn to trust your emotions. In order to do that, I needed to first learn to recognize my emotions, to actually feel them, notice them, instead of ignoring or censoring them.
• We humans all have the same basic needs for safety, connection, and growth. If you are unhappy, recognize this and figure out, which of your needs are not met.
• If your instinct is to always do everything yourself, learn to ask for help. If your instinct is, to always ask others for help, learn to do something yourself.
• Learn to live with your negative self-talk, your doubts. But more importantly, learn to take them less seriously. You might not be able to make them go away, but you can practice ignoring them once in a while.

Have you ever noticed that you are putting off doing certain things all the time, again and again? Like doing the taxes or getting started on that personal project. Of course, you have. When I put things off for too long, my mood suffers, and sometimes this leads to putting off even more tasks. Feels bad.

Here is a little trick I came up with that helps with getting unstuck: Create an emotional brain dump of all your current tasks.

From a MicroConf-Talk by Rob Walling, Co-Founder of Drip. The links should take you directly to the relevant parts in the video.

▶️ Rob’s Rule of Thumb (2015)

His assumptions: Free trials with credit card up-front.

• Visitor/Trial conversion rate: 0.7-2.0% (depends on price point)
• Trial/Paid conversion rate: 40%-60% (lower if no credit card up-front)
• First 60/90 day churn: 20-40%
• Post 60/90 day churn: 4-7%

▶️ Positioning your Startup: How to be different

• Invent a category. Great, if you have a giant marketing budget or a lot of time. Not an option for bootstrappers or if time is important.
• ▶️ Take a position in a category
• Compare features. (Avoid this.)

Are you building a Software-as-a-service (Saas)? Do you wonder if you are tracking the right things? If you came here via Google, then chances are, you are not. Neither did we with ParrotPolls. (Update 2023: If you lead a remote team, then take a look at my new startup, Crunchmetric. It helps you get closer to your team, helps you be aware of problems ahead of time.)

tl;dr: If you have less than ~30,000 unique monthly visitors, focus on getting more visitors. (Hint: product features will not solve this problem. Features do not get you web-site visitors.)

Until recently I used the web-interface of Route 53, the AWS DNS service, to manage the DNS records for my startup, ParrotPolls. Making manual changes to such a critical piece of infrastructure always made me nervous. I knew there was a better way, but I had never taken the time to set this up.

The incident which got me to set up terraform (a command-line tool for managing cloud infrastructure) was when I realized I was about to lose track of which DNS records serve which purpose. We had been trying a couple of different service providers, and in particular the email-providers usually require setting up TXT and CNAME records for DKIM and SPF. If I had used an infrastructure-as-code-approach, like terraform, I could have just looked at the history of the git-repo. That’s what I want!

Motivation

Any non-trivial project I’ve ever worked on sooner or later had a need for feature flags (also called feature toggles). They can be used for awesome stuff but they can also be used for terrible things. It’s really up to you and your team.

The goal

At the end of this tutorial you will know

• how to implement feature flags in django
• how to use a third-party feature-flag-provider to manage your feature-flags
• have an idea how this can be used to roll-out new features to a subset of your users (e.g. only staff-members)

Getting the project source-code

The example-project can be found on github. Here are the steps I used to create the initial commit. I assume you have pipenv installed (and, of course, Python 3):