Tom Preston-Werner

As someone who created a language that's gotten some momentum in the past year [http://julialang.org/] and also drew the short straw and ended up making the web site, I can say that core contributors to programming languages (especially scientific ones) seem not to be particularly interested in making pretty web pages. So I kept it as minimal as possible, starting from Tom Preston-Warner's blog [http://tom.preston-werner.com].

Could we hire a designer? Sure. But that's so far down our list of priorities, it's not even funny. And who's going to pay for it? Also, even the time spent dealing with a designer (finding one, negotiating cost, signing contracts, providing feedback, etc.) is time I could be spending on making crucial design decisions, closing issues, improving core language functionality, and writing documentation. That's probably why more mature languages tend to have fancier websites. The Go guys are still super busy making Go awesome!

Even if we hired a designer who made a lovely site, then someone has to maintain it. Programming languages are living, evolving things, and their web sites change. You know what's worse than a bare bones web site? A fancy designer-made web site with a bunch of changes subsequently added by an amateur who doesn't know what the hell they're doing (me).

So for now, I think we'll keep it minimalist.

Checking your actual landing page ( https://propertywebbuilder.com ) and my opinion is... that it isn't a very good landing page. The sizing and spacing are awkward and blocky, your color scheme clashes with your images, the images are generic and tacky, everything is too big and wide, etc. Maybe because you worked on it you feel that it is a great modern style landing page, but that isn't how it reads to me (and seemingly to other people as well).

Maybe you look at a SIMPLER site like https://tom.preston-werner.com/ and mistakenly equate that with a "worse" landing page. Actually though this simple page has bullet proof styling, and slapping some stock images on it like you did on your page wouldn't make it better, it would make it way worse.

Rather than looking for an external factor like a "mythical uncanny valley" to explain your landing page's poor performance, look inwards at your individual styling and what could be improved.

You're right. In his blog post about the talk[1], he makes it clear that his emphasis is on bootstrapping to profitability.

"The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness."

[1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html

Pulling from an old blog post, I don't see any inconsistency.

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html

> The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness.

Readme Driven Development, a term I first saw used by Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub founder): https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-development.html

I find it to be a great method of development. The core use case (what the project is and why it exists), and the public interface are so important, and often overlooked when people start a project by writing the code first. I tend to write the README in my head naturally, before I start a project, so writing it down makes sense.

I also like to write the developer guide part of the README at the beginning (how to setup a development environment), so I ensure the project is easy to contribute to.

> As far as I know Redwood has no server-side rendering solution.

SSR is priority number one for v2. In the meantime, a number of users use Next.js as a client that talks GraphQL to the Redwood backend. It works very well!

> there is actual financial backing for Next.js

Today I announced I will be providing $1M of funding for future RedwoodJS framework development this year, so now we have funding too. =)

https://tom.preston-werner.com/2022/04/04/redwood-v1-and-funding.html

The truth is, we can both succeed at the same time, there are so many great app ideas waiting to be explored, and different tools will work better for different situations!