We're running a one-day AI hackathon in Madrid on Saturday Sept 12. Deliberately small: 20 curated spots, engineers and founders, individual format, something working by the end of the day. Then food and beers while people demo.
The plan is to repeat it every month or so, so I care more about getting the format right than about this one edition.
Two things I keep going back and forth on:
Individual vs teams. Individual means everyone ships something and nobody hides. Teams mean more ambitious projects but a worse experience for whoever gets the bad group. I've landed on individual for a one-day format, but I'm not sure.
We're getting ready to launch on Product Hunt for the first time. The marketing team is one person, just me ;p
Scrolling through launches from bigger brands is a bit intimidating. They have launch videos, whole marketing teams answering comments all day, and hunters with big followings. We have limited time, resources and a to-do list that doesn't get shorter.
As a solo developer I feel like I am constantly caught between building new stuff and fixing my past mistakes.
When you are trying to launch fast you write quick dirty code just to see if an idea works. But a few months later that same code turns into a headache. Changing a tiny button now breaks two completely unrelated things.
The issue is users always want new features but my codebase is crying for a complete rewrite. If I spend two weeks refactoring I ship zero updates to users. If I keep building new features the whole app will eventually break.
For those running solo projects long term how do you balance refactoring with building new features. Do you set aside specific days for tech debt or just fix things as you go?
I don't think I've seen a company hit 100%, and many are 0. I think for me right now it's maybe 60%? Some systems make it easier than others to get raw data out. Is there a tool that's helped you the most to get that # up? Or, does MCP into each tool take the take and warehouses are dead?
I keep seeing posts about some secret growth hack that supposedly saved a product, but when you look at what they actually did, it's usually pretty basic stuff.
Answering support messages talking to early users writing useful posts instead of pushing generic promos.
sometimes it feels like calling it a "hack" just makes people look for shortcuts instead of doing the boring work consistently.
has anyone actually found a real growth shortcut, or does it usually just come down to doing the basics really well?
I was testing a feature that records a small flag (a user ID, a level, and a timestamp) whenever the app shows a specific page to a user. On my preview deploy, the page showed exactly as designed. Then I opened the table: zero rows.
The cause was boring. The preview environment had no service-role key, so creating the database client failed. The code logs the error and moves on, on purpose, because the user should never be stuck waiting on a database write before seeing that page. But it also meant everything looked fine: the right page, a 200 response, no visible error. Preview sign-in works with the URL and anon key alone, so nothing else broke. The only trace was one log line, and a lock that depends on that row was quietly off too.
What I m changing: add the key to the preview environment, redeploy, and re-test by reading the table, not the screen.
The tradeoff I keep going back and forth on: swallowing the error is right for the user, and wrong for me.
Right now I m spending around $400 $600/month on Claude and APIs. My traffic is super spiky heavy during daytime US hours almost dead at night. I know GPU platforms exist but cold starts sound like a UX nightmare for interactive apps. On the flip side paying for dedicated A100/H100 instances 24/7 just to handle afternoon spikes feels like burning cash while the GPU sits idle all night. For developers who made the leap at what monthly API spend did dedicated GPU hosting actually break even for you?
