Dima Dee

15 years in engineering taught me how to build software. Now I'm figuring out the other half: finding users, keeping them around, learning how to talk about what I build. Writing down everything I learn along the way. Follow along if you're building something and figuring out the rest as you go.

@marclou This is the move, a ton of respect! The grind culture never talks about when you actually have to stop. Glad you're putting yourself first. I wish more founders felt like that.

I overworked myself. For the past 5 years, I barely took a day off. I shipped 30 startups, wrote 30,000 tweets, made 70 YouTube videos, and answered thousands of support requests. The weird part is, it never felt like work. It felt like play. Until recently. For the first time in years, I’ve struggled to get things done. I don’t want to open my laptop. The things that used to make me happy suddenly feel heavy. That scares me a bit, because the playful side of work is what got me here. And right now, it feels like I lost it. So I’m taking a break. I’ll still do about an hour of maintenance work a day, but the rest of my time will go to real life. I’m training for Hyrox in Korea on May 25, so I’ll put my energy there for now and train 20 hours a week. I went through a little burnout once before, in 2021. What helped me was going back to basics: training, reading, eating well, and sleeping 8 hours. It brought the hunger back then. I trust it will again!

@feifei_qiu Or it can be one-user market.

Unpopular opinion Paid user ≠ product-market fit. They signed up, but don’t use your product. What’s your next move?

@ella_schlags This is basically not true. Duopolies.

candians 🤝 monopolies

Nobody talks about the mental health side of building something no one uses yet. You ship a feature. Nothing happens. You fix a bug. Still nothing. The silence is the hardest part of building a product. Unless you solve your own problem. Then you have one user who cares.

@ThePrimeagen Longest streak so far

It's been 0 days since AGI was achieved

@KaiXCreator By not using JWT of course!

@ElitzaVasileva For me, losing momentum usually means I need real rest first, fully detached. Then I pick a reward for the next milestone and restart with something easy I actually want to do, but postponed.

How do you usually go back to your normal workflow when you have lost momentum?

@_tenZdhon_ I touched the lake

If ure in Toronto Touch some grass today

@dramaricic Is r/SideProject actually where your target audience hangs out?

One of my posts in r/SideProject got 40k views in 24h. Result: -17 new users -0 paid users Maybe my freemium is a mistake?

The best monitoring setup is the one you actually check. I've seen teams with $2k/month observability stacks they barely open until prod breaks. Complexity you ignore is worse than simplicity you actually use.

@amine_builds @theo They do it in Canada too, faced it once.

@theo Yep. I've noticed they only do this in america. When I'm in canada I have no problem seeing the other plans

Does Google actually hide all the cheaper plan options when setting up a new Google workspace? There are 3 cheaper options and I'm not allowed to see or select any of them.

@theo Faced the same thing! Registered from the landing page without picking a plan first and got locked into the expensive one. Had to remove my domain through support and re-register via their "promo" pricing page.

Cloudflare's EmDash: a WordPress replacement built in 2 months, zero plugin ecosystem, no migration tool yet. "More secure" is a great pitch to developers. It's not a pitch to the business owner running WooCommerce with 30 plugins who just needs their site to not break. New tech doesn't win when just the architecture is prettier. But this definitely has potential.

@Cloudflare Awesome! But it’s not exactly a great first impression when the default template fails to build...

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress. cfl.re/3NPVfev

@matryer Finally! Now we can self-host it 🙃

BREAKING: Entire Grafana codebase leaked. github.com/grafana/grafana

I still use Node to build frontend. There’s no real alternative yet. I also still have a few Node services. They were fun to build, but much less fun to support. It’s not about which stack is “better.” It’s about what you can still debug at 2am when production breaks.

Where Node wins: Prototyping speed when you already think in JS. Shared language with your frontend, fewer context switches. If your whole team is JS-native, Go creates more problems than it solves. Also better-auth is a superior package with no real alternative in Go.

Why I pick Go over Node for backends: Outstanding DX. One binary. No node_modules black hole. Simpler builds. Simpler deploys. Fewer moving parts to reason about. After another round of npm supply chain attacks and accidental source leaks, it matters even more. 🧵 ->