Go with your gut

If there's one adage I stand by from my years on this earth, it's the one of "Going with your gut". It's a cliche I know, but one I always reflect on when faced with a quandary. It's about being true and honest with yourself and ultimately has led to good things when I've stuck to it.

Bootstrappers are faced with many of these situations - not least of which being do you stick out your day job or step out and pursue the solo dream you always wanted? In this months issue we cover one such story where the founder of keygen.sh reveals the stresses he was under trying to balance two jobs after several years.

I've put together a couple of YouTube videos over the last month, the latest is linked below. Over 90% of my views on my channel now come from M1 videos. I'd like to cover a broad range of computing subjects, rather than just reviewing hardware - but evidently people love to watch others opening boxes. My gut says I should stick with everything I find interesting and hopefully others will enjoy it too.

Hope you enjoy this issues links - as always, if you have any comments on them or content suggestions for the future, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian

Stories

That Time I Told My Wife I Wanted to Quit My Job

Keygen is a great product I happened across whilst trying to figure out how to create a license for a desktop application I made a couple of years ago. Here, the founder Zeke tells the story of how he got to the point of telling his wife he wanted to do it full time.

Mistakes I've Made in AWS

Chris Fidao shares a useful list of the things he has learnt about deploying Laravel to AWS over the last 6 years.

Contributing $250/mo to the open-source Python framework FastAPI for free

Kenneth Cassel is an Indie Hacker whose product slip.so allows programmers to sell their knowledge in the form of courses. Here he talks about how he is able to donate to the FastAPI project, whilst the cost to his business is free.

How to Make $80,000 Per Month on the Apple App Store

It's easy to make tens of thousands of dollars from the App store. You just might need to sacrifice any morals you have to do so.

My Latest Video

Code

marceloprates/prettymaps

If you've ever had to draw a map for yourself, you'll realise what a pain it can be. Prettymaps is a small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Some of these look very pretty.

jorisschellekens/borb: CRUD for PDF files in Python

I've always struggled when trying to work with PDFs in Python. borb is a library for reading, creating and manipulating them, with a simple API.

Q1K3

Quake celebrated its 25th (!) anniversary last month. This is a lovely homage to it you can play directly in your browser, made in just 13KB of JS.

google/zx: A tool for writing better scripts

zx is a wrapper around Node.js to allow you to use JS as a replacement for writing scripts in bash. No more looking up random bash commands!

mjmlio/mjml: MJML

Responsive emails are an absolute pain in the backside and go against all we know as web devs. They're one of the only places I know of where nesting tables is still actively encouraged. MJML is framework that makes responsive-email easy, made by the folks at mailjet.

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