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Solo
Building (& Running)
Successful Web Apps
By Your Lonesome
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! Why Solo?
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1. Broad Competence
Over Narrow Excellence
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2. Optimizing
for Autonomy
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3. The Pleasure of
Accumulated Sophistication
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" Finding Projects
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Early-Stage Projects
Small, Indie Products
Internal or Ancillary Apps
Throttled Projects
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# Three Keys
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1. Be Good
2. Be Fast
3. Don’t Die
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$ On Being Good
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No one telling you you’re doing it wrong
No one to question your architectural
decisions or technology choices
No one holding back your growth
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No one to point out your weak areas, push back
on your decisions, and help you improve
No one to talk through problems with,
or review your code
No one to show off to or celebrate with
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Making Yourself Better
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Find a Community of Practice
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Scan for Gaps
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Shift Between
Creator and Editor Modes
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Wear All the Hats
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DAMMIT JIM, I’M A DOCTOR, NOT A…
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Making Your System Better
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Clarify What You’re
Optimizing For
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We can live with the occasional maintenance window,
but we must keep infrastructure costs below $X.
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We can tolerate missing a delivery deadline,
but we can’t afford to ship a poor user experience.
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Intent, Content,
Form, Function
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Learn from Failure
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A customer didn’t receive an important daily summary email.
1. Why?
The nightly job that sends the summary emails failed halfway through.
2. Why?
That job iterates over the customers to send each email, and there was a
timeout on one email delivery, causing the job to crash.
3. Why?
I hadn’t anticipated or tested failure states.
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A customer didn’t receive an important daily summary email.
1. Why?
Add alerting on job failure or the absence of successful delivery.
2. Why?
Switch to a fan-out approach with a separate background job for each
customer email delivery, which will retry on failure.
3. Why?
Set aside some personal research and learning time.
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Ratchet Up
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% On Being Fast
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No time spent on building consensus
No time wasted fighting
over tools or approaches
No time needed to coordinate the work
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No parallelizing work
No momentum from others
No one to get you unstuck
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Making Yourself Faster
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Tackle Biggest Unknowns First
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Steal as Much as Possible
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Reduce Work in Progress
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Shift Gears Based on Terrain
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Minimize risk through:
Extra research
Incremental changes
Plans and checklists
Predetermined rollback strategies
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Making Your System Faster
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Choose Simple,
Boring Technology
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Use Technical Debt Carefully
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Yes: Speculative projects, high tolerance for failure, or
“default dead”
Maybe: One-offs for near-term speed (with
acknowledgement)
No: Constant pressure for speed
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Build Feedback Loops
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Level One: Automated tests
Level Two: Production observability
Level Three: Customer support
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Prefer Less Code
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☠ On Not Dying
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Satisfaction of knowing
you built this yourself
Complete ownership and responsibility
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Can’t easily leave
Project is in danger of failing without you
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Making Yourself
More Sustainable
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Be Your Own Best Manager
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Communicate Your Value
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Move to Successively Higher
Levels of Consideration
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Work on Multiple Projects
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Making Your System
More Sustainable
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Stay in the Big Boat
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Foster Trust
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Surprise or anger because expectations weren’t met
Decisions or actions being hidden from others
Hesitancy to change code, infrastructure, or process
because of previous bad experiences
Excessive verification or micromanagement
Long-running debates without resolution
Lack of collaboration
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Spend more time together
Apologize or make repair attempts, when appropriate
Increase transparency or the level of detail
Change the communication medium
Propose solutions that better align interests
Clarify expectations and commit to follow-through
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Build “As If…”
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Keep all credentials in a password manager
Keep your README up-to-date
Write automated tests
Use a project management tool
Document architectural decisions
Create runbooks and process docs
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Have a Succession Plan
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Time to Get Real
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Thanks!
@jeremysmithco