I didn't know that, thanks. I remember how much I love ublock origin when I start visiting websites in chrome on mobile. We get used with a clean browsing and feels like this is the norm until you have to do the same thing on mobile.
As the founder of an early stage startup, everything that is not related to product development seems that I am not actually working. I know that I should devote myself to hone my Customer and Company machines, but I hate the feeling of wasting time.
I am trying to transform Customer and Company as products, so I trick my mind to evolve them appropriately.
1. Traditional Distorbution packages. If someone want to go that way OpenSuse Build Service. https://build.opensuse.org/
"The openSUSE Build Service is the public instance of the Open Build Service (OBS) used for development of the openSUSE distribution and to offer packages from same source for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other distributions.." (Possibly MacOS and Windows)
2. Package Formats (I hope it is the future) we have appimage, flatpak (Redhat backed), snap (Ubuntu backed). Containerized solution with the hope of easier portability and better security by sandboxing type solutions.
Personally I think flatpak is the best of breed with appimage a close second. Flatpak and appimage are the most open friendly. Flatpak using individual repositories which I prefer. Snap uses a central location which i also don't like as much.
Since an AppImage is just a compressed filesystem, you can also extract its content very similar to a zip file. But you then will miss out on the easy binary delta updates using AppImageUpdate, and have an extra step of unpacking, and will need more storage space.
> What is the minimal state of completion this project needs to reach for me to consider it a success and having been worth my time?
I used to think like that, but this is a moving point. As long you finish a list of things that you deemed important, many others will replace the old ones and the list actually will never be empty. This feeling of fulfillment will never come.
So I'm doing differently this time in my startup (that was also my side project for a while). I created a funnel and measured everything. I cannot develop anything on top of my head (We, developers, are creative by nature, and it's easy to find a myriad of interesting new features). The new feature needs to come from data and user feedback only. No exceptions.
The funnel is completed and has being measured, then the project is completed. Everything beyond that is just optimization. This was a shift in my mind and I feel much better because I finished the project, instead of constantly open. And of course, this is not a mind tricky. The project is actually completed.
This reminds me of the quote by Henry Ford when he said if he had asked people what they wanted they would have told him "faster horses". Sometimes users don't know what they want till you give it to them.
This is the reason that I said DATA (that you measured) and user feedback. Furthermore, I am talking about the funnel, incremental changes. Ford probably got user feedback to make the car better. What you said comes before.
I'm curious what do you think about AMP. Do you think it is a good solution for this? (not implying that AMP solved this problem, but rather some company as intermediary to serve you the page correctly, instead of relying on the website's owner)
I don't disagree with you, but there are so many bad websites that something should be done. AMP is a really bad solution to a real problem. Walled garden pages as Facebook for companies and similars are equally bad in my opinion. Some time ago I had the idea that, maybe, the website layout could be controlled by the user, and only data are controlled by the website's owner. The web would become boring, I know, but the alternative is just as bad: broken websites.
> Some time ago I had the idea that, maybe, the website layout could be controlled by the user, and only data are controlled by the website's owner. The web would become boring, I know,
(disclaimer: my web developer days were a lifetime ago)
wasn't this basically the idea with CSS (and user CSS), "semantic" HTML and JS as progressive enhancement? those were pretty exciting ideas (IMHO), and with modern CSS there's no reason they shouldn't look good either... what ever happened with that?
What PG calls "bets" I would call interesting topics for Newton. Maybe he just liked the subjects. Calling bets is saying he was trying to actually accomplish something out of their studies and work. I don't think a curious mind would work like that. Even in physics, he studied a broad range of topics, not only Mechanics.
Furthermore, you don't need to make a breakthrough in everything to satisfy your desire for knowledge. Even more so for Newton, which was known by his seclusion and introversion.
From my experience copying a feature is about twice cheaper than trying different approaches. You may not figure out a good way to implement it until you build first version and let people try it. You may need re-iterate to find perfect implementation. The copy-cat will come later to see what you've done and will implement the good solution without iterations.
I have just discovered the previous write-ups about your business numbers [0] and it is awesome! So much valuable information. Thanks for taking the time to share!
