Indie developers think almost exclusively about if the product is good and sacrifice project/code quality at every turn in order to ship it.

Non-indie devs think almost exclusively about if the code is good, and sacrifice timelines, budgets, and actually shipping something at all at every turn.

I'm talking about myself in both cases 😂

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Sep 23

I was just perusing some code from my brother's project. He is a very effective self-taught developer, but it is interesting to see what falls by the wayside in that environment.... And what jumps out to me is... Dependency management.

His projects have a lot of non-updated dependencies, which I feel is one of those things which you'd do based on the culture of a team and not something you'd just "learn" independently.

I know he does update his dependencies from time to time, but not on a regular basis. I know some teams probably have bad cultures around this as well, but I know personally my values around updating dependencies are influenced by the habits of the software teams I've been on.

Communication. On PR, on reviews, on refactoring, on asking help. The manager of my team says that the difference between a senior and a junior/mid dev, is hardly technical, but on when and how they communicate.

All those things make for a subtle art that is only learn in teams and need to be adapted to each team member, which takes time. It's something that is harder to learn if you jump from project to project (although, there are ways).

I am just speaking from personal POV. >_> .

1.) Documentation: Indie developers don't document. If you do , you are either a maverick or a liar.
2.) Depending on Team: As an indie developer I had habit of soloing on everything. After a certain time it was bit infuriating being told to not do work ¯_(ツ)_/¯ .
3.) Libraries & Licensing : Indie developers tend to use everything available at their disposal regardless of the license involved.. In a company environment libraries have to be pre approved for usage. Plus developers are asked to not use GPL licenses or strict copyleft.
4.) Career Path/ Hierarchy : Indie developers don't think about career paths. While they get to Senior Developers roles faster. Indie developers are out of depth or experience for the Architect or other techno management roles.
5.)Vision: This is debatable. Indie developers don't get big projects or projects which connect to multiple systems. People in teams tend to get to work on bigger projects. But Indie developers can think of an project end-to-end. People in teams usually have work on a small part in a large vision without having access to see how everything wires up. So basically someone who has worked on teams exclusively cannot work on end to end projects.

I've been both. You cannot assume all Indie devs are the same, but teamwork require specific sets of skills you can't learn on your own, even with open-source projects.