Matthew Reid is a Full Stack web developer, specialising in Java and the JVM, js and web frameworks. He has a passion for clean code, entrepreneurship, company culture and making the world a better place.
What is an indie hacker? The definition provided by Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, is: You’re an indie hacker if you’ve set out to make money independently. This definition is deliberately broad. In essence, indie hackers work for themselves (sometimes solo, other times with partners) not for a company. They do not have investors or a board of directors to answer to. They are free…
Programmatic SEO is all the rage but what is it and can it really bring that delicious SEO juice with minimal effort? What is programmatic SEO? If you haven’t heard of programmatic SEO or pSEO then you’ve probably been living under a rock. If you haven’t been living under a rock and you’ve ever googled how to connect gmail with google sheets (or something similar), then you’ll see Zapier appears…
I have absolutely nothing at risk with my latest product. I still hold down a full-time job, spend time with my family and I don’t work late into the night (which would risk burn out). If the business dies overnight I lose nothing (except some time invested). Being an indie hacker (not hunting VC money and hockey-stick growth) gives me that option. I also believe it means I’m making a better…
In this post I build a Twitter growth bot using Node and Google Cloud Functions. This was originally a live twitter thread. The children are finally asleep. I have an idea for a Twitter growth tool. Follow along here as I #buildinpublic 💡 Idea A bot that automatically tweets once a week as me and tags the 5 accounts with the most replies to my tweets in the last week. All you have to do to be…
How does the jet-setting business person feel as they settle down on the budget flight to a little Spanish island with their family? Their heady lifestyle may be the envy of many but has flying lost its charm for them? Wonder and awe is oft considered a sign of weakness or inexperience. A battle-hardened business person would never get so excited about buckling into those tiny seats, knees…
Make a list of all the services you use (plus logins). I used a spreadsheet Transfer ownership of all accounts to an email address you will had over to the new owner Change the address in domain registrar and all service accounts (once sale is complete) Use a (fairly) modern tech stack. My buyer was impressed that they could deploy using docker-compose and found the code easy to read and…
I recently started using tmux on my macbook which lets me setup workspaces for different projects. One of these projects requires postgres to be running. I use the fantastic postgres.app for mac which takes away all the faff of installing postgres yourself. They have a set of instructions for installing the command line tools which lets you run the postgres command. Unfortunately simply running…
You’re probably already aware of marketplace businesses that aggregate products from multiple sellers to provide consumers with a single place to get the best product/price (think booking.com, Amazon or Uber). There are some very successful marketplaces but it is notoriously hard to start one. For one, you have to run two businesses, one to attract sellers and one to attract buyers. Each side…
Does this scenario sound familiar? You recently implemented a feature. Everything works perfectly, you ironed out a couple of little bugs and had great test coverage and were very happy with the code architecture. Now another developer comes along with a monster PR that rewrites it all. You check out the PR with distaste. Of course it’s going to be garbage, you spent ages on making that code…
I’ve been using Value objects a lot recently. Especially as I’ve been working with DDD . Lombok provides a convenient annotation to avoid writing lots of boilerplate code for Value object classes. The annotation will make the class final , add a constructor that takes all the arguments and make each field private and final . Consider a model where we have two value objects, Animal and Human.…