I feel like part of the blame for the situation is that JavaScript has always lacked a standard library which contains the "atomic architecture" style packages. (A standard library wouldn't solve everything, of course.)

Today this is utterly ordinary. At the time, it was remarkable.

From there the usual YouTube “experts” started stories on it. You know the type - they sound authoritative but they are basically regurgitating stuff from Wikipedia (or some Economist article) with some pretty screens and clickbaity thumbnails.

Ultimately, there’s nothing behind this story. As has been the case since Pakehas arrived, lots of Kiwis go abroad and spend lots of time abroad, some go back, and some don’t, and meanwhile NZ’s population continues to grow.

The trends grow and shrink based on relative health of the Aus and NZ economies.

And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.

When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.

She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.

Both products were initially once-off purchases that you had to install and run on your own infrastructure, and with new, major versions packed with new features that you had to buy if you wanted, but could ignore if you didn’t.

The move to a SaaS model came years later for both products.

It was a different age, with different products. I’m sure there are still products built the old ways, but Joel was writing before SaaS and CI/CD and endless roadmaps.

Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.

He argues much what you’ve described.

Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.

I think it is pretty good.

You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.

This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.

There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.

I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.

https://www.myperfectconsole.com/

(I run a small SaaS product - a micro-SaaS as some call it.)

We’ll stop work on a new feature to fix a newly reported bug, even if it is a minor problem affecting just one person.

Once you have been following a “fix bugs first” approach for a while, the newly discovered bugs tend to be few, and straight forward to reproduce and fix.

This is not necessarily the best approach from a business perspective.

But from the perspective of being proud of what we do, of making high quality software, and treating our customers well, it is a great approach.

Oh, and customers love it when the bug they reported is fixed within hours or days.

Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.

Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.

If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is.

And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.

If you are selling software, don't be the person charging $10/month. It's hard to make that business work.

Be the person charging $50/month. It's still hard - any business is - but it's much easier to make a software business financially viable if you charge decent money.

I haven’t, but for reasons, I’m interested to hear about your experience with it.