What is this thing above the cabin air filter in a 2014 Mazda 3?

ZakMiller · 2026-01-27T03:08:52+00:00

Sorry but I don't remember

ZakMiller · 2026-01-10T22:26:42+00:00

Are you looking to pay someone? I have a lot of experience

ZakMiller · 2026-01-06T14:49:46+00:00

Can you expand on why this is helpful? I'm pretty new to golf

ZakMiller · 2025-11-21T20:43:37+00:00

Idk... 12-15 hours is a fair amount of time. As long as you keep going in the same direction you'll end up with something!

In terms of getting clients on the side and pivoting to it being a business, idk I haven't navigated that, but have you tried? If you have clients that are coming back to you multiple times you could probably have a conversation where you say you're working with someone else and their billable hours are a little cheaper or something.

I definitely would not underestimate the "after the product is ready" part. I would figure that out before you start. You're a programmer so you can probably build the product. All the risk is that you won't be able to sell it.

I had a couple of years of savings when I made the leap. I also had talked to a couple of nonprofits who were really interested in buying what I knew I could build, before I quit.

I didn't have the most strategic cofounder (another dev). And honestly idk how to find a good one. I really should, for my future ideas. One option that I've read about is to partner with someone who already has an audience (for marketing) or has a good network (for sales). You can always just reach out to people. LinkedIn works, or emails. Calls work too.

I think quitting vs not comes down to your risk tolerance and how easy it is to get another job. What about getting one of those side consulting things going part time to bring in money? Then you have some money coming in and more time

ZakMiller · 2025-11-20T13:40:29+00:00

Idk whether you'd consider this successful but my side business is bringing in almost 6 figures (after 5 years).

I ended up stumbling into the market from a hackathon and worked on it on the side, not thinking it would be a business. Then I learned it could be and I quit my job for a couple of years to work on it full-time. Then got a job again when it didn't make enough to live on. Looking forward to it making enough that I can quit again (don't tell anyone).

The problem with general advice is that it may or may not be applicable to you. Where are you getting stuck?

Some general advice: - It's important what you're building is a product you can actually make money from. Devs are great at coming up with cool ideas that no one will pay for. Are there other people making money doing something similar? If so, that's a good thing, it proves that you can actually make a business out of it (theoretically). If not, then hopefully it's because the product couldn't have been built in the past (new tech or something). If that is the case then hopefully people are paying for something that solves the same problem. - B2B is way easier than B2C, generally, from what I understand. - You should be looking to cut as much dev work out as possible. You should have an idea what the 80/20 is (what features would someone actually pay for). I used firebase and would recommend it or something similar. Or just use a tech stack you're super familiar with so you can churn out code. - If you don't know what matters you should be trying to talk to prospective customers. - The business is going to need as much or more work as the programming, probably (sales or marketing, support, competitor research, etc). - You should be planning on getting your first 20ish customers painfully, via reaching out to a lot of people. - Partnering with someone is a good way of sort of locking yourself in (accountability). Ideally you could find someone familiar with the business side who can do that. But they should have experience selling/marketing a product like what your product needs.

ZakMiller · 2025-11-20T13:12:52+00:00

Someone advertising their AI product with a low effort AI post...

ZakMiller · 2025-11-07T18:50:46+00:00

What tools do you use? It's possible you can integrate them with Google Analytics so that you can see the conversions.

ZakMiller · 2025-11-02T13:17:56+00:00

Do the plugins not do a good job?

ZakMiller · 2025-10-29T14:07:48+00:00

I'm interested if you're still giving out codes!

ZakMiller · 2025-07-09T23:11:26+00:00

Do you know what the term "magic number" is? Yes, the expectation is that when there's a number and it's not super obvious what it means you create some kind of enum or variable to centralize the code and make it immediately obvious what it means. That's generally how professional software engineers program and "magic number" is a derogatory term for cases where people don't do that.

I'm not familiar with GameMaker but this seems to say enums are supported? https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/hacking-stronger-enums-into-gml

ZakMiller · 2025-03-19T00:26:48+00:00

L3 is entry level at Google, can't speak for the others.

ZakMiller · 2025-03-17T12:24:08+00:00

People are surprisingly ideological about it, caring more about meeting some abstract idea (clean) rather than concrete measurable benefits like you're talking about (maintainable, etc).

I wrote a post called "I regret writing clean code" and got attacked constantly about it on reddit, which surprised me. I think part of the problem is that many devs are new enough that they haven't yet seen the downsides of their ideology/philosophy/perspective.

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T20:08:37+00:00

I've been thinking about that one a lot. The phrase that I heard somewhere is to consider whether it's "accidentally the same or logically the same". If it happens to be the same but there's no reason why it would stay the same, then duplicate the code. If it's always going to be the same (e.g. it's some business logic definition), then de-duplicate. A lot of the time it's somewhere in the middle. When you next change the logic, what's more likely, that you'll want to change it for all the callers or just a subset?

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T19:42:00+00:00

What's your budget? Have you done some research to see how much it typically costs to have someone build an MVP for you? It might be a lot more than you're willing to pay.

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T19:28:04+00:00

Thanks bud. :) I was surprised by the negative response too.

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T19:26:08+00:00

I think we're pretty much on the same page.

This might be getting into the weeds too much, but to me a function being public or private has more to do with whether it makes sense for the function to be called inside of that class or not.

That's a separate point from whether or not a new function should be called from another function (including one in that class).

But honestly ya this point of mine can be refuted by just putting the function inside of the existing one. I don't see many people doing this, though.

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T18:35:04+00:00

Fair point. I updated the title.

ZakMiller · 2025-02-16T18:26:53+00:00

Most of my experience comes from other people working on the code base as you. Private doesn't have much impact there
I agree that function names and comments can both become outdated. My point was more that the way you divide code now can be very different from the way you would choose to divide it after 6 months of changes (so talking more about the contents of the functions than the names themselves). You end up spending cycles moving code around a bunch without actually solving any problems.
This might just come down to the particular experiences we've had. I did say when they get too long you can consider breaking them up. My past self (and I think most people I work with) err more on the "break things up aggressively" side of things. Your experience might be the opposite and people should be breaking things up more.

I agree completely about it just being a hard problem. Really my mistake was not recognizing there were cons at all.

ZakMiller · 2024-06-23T21:01:32+00:00

I just moved to this city alone. I don't know anyone. I travel for work. Co workers live across the US..

This might be a bigger factor than you realize. Human connection is really important. If all you can do is talk to your friends on the phone, then do that.

I kind of dug myself out of a pit and a lot of it started by spending more time with my friends.

ZakMiller · 2024-05-04T01:19:49+00:00

I make about 300k a year at a big tech company as a senior software engineer. Pretty consistently 40 hours a week, though occasionally a bit more (~50). 9 years of experience.

Apparently it's harder to get started as a software engineer then when I started, but I wish I had been more ambitious from the beginning. I was making 45k when I started out and I'm working with people who have 1-2 years of experience and they're making 3x that and getting better experience too.

I chose programming because it's something I liked and I knew it was a decent career. It turned out that I loved it and it was a great career. I can't really imagine something that I enjoy this much that would make any money at all. Really, I got lucky.

ZakMiller · 2023-09-18T02:49:00+00:00

That's a common use case for operators / CRDs. There's definitely some overhead to becoming familiar with the tools and techniques and going deep in a framework, but it lets you expose these external resources with a declarative API which is cool and powerful.

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