My primary advice is never to be a solo developer ;)

blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-coding-buddy

When it comes to UI, never design what you can steal!

blog.codinghorror.com/never-design-what-you-can-s…

Steal from everywhere! Look at the best examples of UI near what you're trying to do and "borrow liberally". What works? What doesn't? You're a user, too -- what tools do you like and dislike for their UI, and why?

I find this works best when you "borrow" from multiple different great UIs and combine the best lessons from each.

Also -- get a design book, they're fun!

blog.codinghorror.com/basic-design-principles-for…

blog.codinghorror.com/reading-with-edward-tufte

Well, the honest answer is that.. I don't 🤣

However, I did not fully understand this until I had children.

blog.codinghorror.com/on-parenthood

I guess my main recommendation is to create a workspace, as much as you can, that can be physically closed off from your typical home stuff. This is easy for me because we have a small building outside the house that I use as an office. The idea is that the physical walling off helps you and people around you understand when you are in "work space" versus "home space".

Some people on the Discourse team (we're all remote!) also rent rooms or desks at co-working spaces and go there to work.

No regrets! Ruby has performed well for us and we've almost never had issues due to Ruby or Rails itself in many years of hosting and building, so that's great!

I do have two things I wish were better though:

• Ruby should be further along than it is now in terms of low-level maturity with things like memory allocation and garbage collection and JIT compilation type features. It feels like Java and .NET are a decade ahead in the fundamentals.

• There's a general lack of emphasis in the Ruby community on overall "performance as a feature". We've tried to help with rubybench.org

I think Just In Time reminders are the best way to deal with this

blog.codinghorror.com/the-just-in-time-theory

The key thing to consider is when to intervene, e.g. when are there points of negative action? Some examples could be ...

• first time you press a key in your first reply (if you are replying because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet xkcd.com/386 )

• replying over and over to the same person

• replying very rapidly to the same topic

etc

I also feel that downvoting is a very dangerous thing to add to any community, so be careful with that. It's OK on Stack Overflow because those are systems of data, facts, and science -- things that can usually be verified. But in Discourse we're dealing with opinions, so downvoting isn't appropriate.

It is interesting how the conspicuous absence of upvotes can sometimes feel like a slap, though ;)

No, however, HyperInk did bundle together blog posts as a book in

amazon.com/dp/B008HUMTO0 amazon.com/dp/B00BU3KPQU

and they did a great job with it.

My schedule is so bizarre because I've worked from home for a decade now! I do have a home office which is a separate small building from our main house, which is nice.

I've never been great at pure work/life balance but kids sure do help you tweak that in the life direction ;) With Discourse I try to have a more traditional 9-5 M-F work week, though I am a bit of a night owl so that ends up being more like 11-7

Working remotely from home is a skill you have to actively cultivate though, it has its own set of pros and cons. Great article here

medium.com/@beccadownes/remote-teams-45038339ac68

My setup is basically

• three 4k monitors (easy to do today)
• CODE mechanical keyboard codekeyboards.com
• fast Desktop with lots of RAM and PCI M.2 SSD

It's so easy to build fast great computers these days it's almost boring!

Thanks for citing that one! Performance is indeed a feature, even today.

I think the way to deal with it is to keep performance top of mind for developers as they build so it isn't forgotten -- we do this in Discourse by having mini-profiler show page timings on every load. So if you get bad numbers, they are angry and red in the upper right corner of the page, and any developer can cite that with a link to drill into problem areas, either in the database or in the server-side code.

We actually use an evolution of our original .NET mini-profiler in Discourse:

miniprofiler.com

I highly recommend integrating performance tools into the daily work of your team. It delivers results!

I used to think netbooks were gonna be big :(

Turns out, it was phablets instead!

I don't think I could have done anything much differently for SO. I can only think of two things

1. was not starting meta.stackoverflow.com sooner, but that still came relatively soon.

2. splitting into two projects, careers and stack overflow proper, so early on with so few people working

#2 was painful, and I can technically blame Joel for that, but we felt it was key to get the income part of the project going as soon as possible so we could figure out how to make it a sustainable business.

I think the Q&A format was less relevant to programmers back in 2007.. though it was in fact was ASTOUNDINGLY common on the web! It blew my mind how many random Q&A sites there were on the web when I began researching it in 2008! People may laugh (and justifiably so) at Yahoo Answers but it had crazy levels of real world usage by real people. Q&A was a latent market, I think, and we tapped into that for the programming use case.

As far as work/life balance, I think integrating more women into the field will help. It's awfully easy to work 12 hours a day when you don't have any children in the picture, and this goes for fathers as well as mothers.

Online payroll and bookkeeping services! I can highly recommend bench.co and gusto.com

I am still recovering from that time Joel made me install Quickbooks..

Strive to work with people who you admire, that are smarter than you, so you can learn from them. Take pride in your work and be persistent and thorough in solving the problems you face each day.

I cannot, sadly.