
Show HN: ProgrammingPosters.com - stevejalim
http://www.programmingposters.com
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stevejalim
Hi - I made PP with a friend/colleague as a tiny side project. Because it
seemed small, I thought would be more likely to ship. (Client work takes up
most of my working time).

It came about for a few reasons:

1) My current main client's walls were a bit bare, which started me thinking.
2) I then wondered about nice motivational stuff for developer workspaces,
specifically -- ideally more cerebral/stuff about good practice, rather than
the adrenaline-pumping 'CRUSH IT!' kinda tone or funky designer-oriented
posters. Oh, and no crappy jokes. 3) I like the Zen of Python, even years
after discovering it. 4) It thought it would be interesting to ship a product
that wasn't just bytes.

So, it's a static site (Pelican) + a Shopify backend + a designs from a
designer friend + some cash up front to create an affordable print run + a big
stack of posters on my spare office desk.

Easy, right?

Er, not quite. It's only been a few weeks and I’ve been rapidly learning that
even simple physical products (rather than a SaaS, say) bring a world of
complexity... Even though I had experience of the print world (long ago), I’d
never had to deal with the mixed quality of print-house results (therefore
reprints, therefore delays). Then there's absorbing the cost of defects and
damage, plus that need to pre-buy and hold actual stock to reduce the print
costs and the angst over shipping physical objects safely (including crossing
your fingers when you get a Slack message saying "Hey! The posters just
arrived! Opening them now!")

So, yeah, it’s been taking a surprising amount of headspace, but it is still
fun – and with lots of small bits of learning (or, perhaps more honestly,
small bits of realising that so much of the stuff I've read about physical
products is true, even with "simple" posters).

But, yeah, at least it shipped :o)

PS: I know about the FOUC - it's an annoyance of the theme I adapted for the
site, which uses skel.js to do responsive layouts (for some reason that I
regret not spotting before I pulled the lever and made it live a few weeks
ago)

~~~
stevejalim
Aaaand my Buy Now buttons are down while HN is all over my side project.

Thanks Mirai...

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wodow
Some of these are great!

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eecks
I can only see three?

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cdhanna
Yeah, what gives? I demand millions of zingy programming posters!

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stevejalim
Yeah, I know - we started with three because

a) it's a side project - our daytimes are spent busily making www.yunojuno.com
for a client

b) small print runs of posters (eg 1-5) are unsustainably expensive per item -
leaving no or even negative profit when printing just one - so we had to pick
a few designs to test the water and get those printed up, up front

c) I wanted to be sure that every poster we make is 100% 'legit' in terms of
usage of the quote. Even the dealings with the PSF (which is v friendly and
generally awesome) took a fair amount of back-and-forth to ensure everyone was
happy

So, yeah, MVP out the door - see what the water is like, then add more
designs. That's the plan

