Avdi Grimm

I run http://letscodejavascript.com, which is a screencast for professional JavaScript developers. It's not exactly a SaaS, but as a subscription business, it runs on the same fundamentals: rate of acquisition, churn, customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, etc. We have X00 subscribers and gross low six figures. The show is bootstrapped and profitable, but not yet enough of a success to allow me to hire additional employees. I launched five months ago, at the beginning of February.

> When did people start paying for your SaaS?

I launched on Kickstarter, so in a sense, people started paying right away. There were two pivotal moments in the Kickstarter: First, I got a nice bump from posting it here on HN[1]. Second, I sent announcements out to a bunch of JavaScript blogs and newsletters. The only one that posted about it was JavaScript Weekly, but that led to a lot of people backing the project, and that led to an additional surge of publicity and backers. Part of the reason JS Weekly posted the project was because it was already successful, thanks in part to the HN surge, so there was this definite sense of success leading to success.

When I launched to the public, the series had already been airing to KS backers for about seven months. I had been collecting email addresses the whole time from people who wanted to subscribe but missed the Kickstarter, and I had somewhere north of 1,000 addresses by the time I went public. So I sent out three "you can subscribe now"…

Hello,

as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need.

As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you need more out of your editor. For example right now I am looking at learning org-mode to be able to do time tracking with it.

If you seriously consider using Emacs all the time I would recommend remapping the Ctrl key to Caps Lock for easier typing.

Since you were asking for some tutorials, these are the two tutorials that I found most useful in defining my Emacs setup:

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs - specific things that are very useful in your configuration

http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/ - someone in the ruby community, remaking his emacs config from scratch and explaining it as he goes

I am no where near a proficient Emacs user, but maybe I can provide some insight as a fellow learner if you get stuck. I believe my e-mail should be in my profile if you have any problem starting up with Emacs.

Have a nice day,
Vlad

My question too. Given that I can get a list of open source projects that I can work on for free with GitHub Explore[1] I am wondering what this provides me that is worth any money, not specifically $30. To take it one step further, why should I pay you for a list of free projects, when I can get paid to work on projects with other sites like Rent A Coder[2]? The list of features implies that I will effectively only get screencasts that I don't get from github repositories and depending on your language there are lots of places to get those too (ex [3]).

Don't get me wrong, I am all for monetizing, but I greedily want something if I am going to pay for it.

[1] https://github.com/explore

[2] http://www.rent-acoder.com/

[3] http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming-screencast-series/

EDIT: formatting

Avdi Grimm responded [0] to this (relatively old) article with what I think is a salient point: traditional design patterns are good, but Java makes expressing these design patterns very obtuse and heavy-handed. Nick Kallen conflates using intelligent design patterns with calling out every use of said design patterns in bold-face.

Writing Java feels like "now I'm going to make a Factory Factory! See, it says FactoryFactory right there in the class name!"

It's entirely natural to use intelligent design patterns in other languages than Java - so natural, in fact, that you don't have to invoke said patterns by name to use them!

[0] : http://avdi.org/devblog/2010/02/09/everything-you-love-about-java-is-everything-i-love-about-good-design/

Hi HN. If you get some value out of these slides, great! But please, do me a favor: don't try too hard to construct a narrative from a stack of slides which:

a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and

b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable.

A lot of this material has been covered in more detail on my blog (http://avdi.org/devblog) For instance, I wrote a whole article about Maybe, NullObject, and the limits of the ability to make objects falsy here: http://avdi.org/devblog/2011/05/30/null-objects-and-falsiness/

> You can remap keys on any keyboard layout

"Yeah but" now you're mucking around with software. It's not simply plug-and-play.

From its first paragraph, this 2012 article acknowledges that it was sparked by a HN discussion¹ about another article² and that the HN discussion already covered the remapping solutions you are again proposing 12 years later.

This article offers the Japanese keyboard idea as an alternative to remapping.

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1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976669

2. https://avdi.codes/underscores-are-stupid/