Code and Bootstrapping

In this episode, Mark talks about the single largest reason Alchemist Camp has worked—frugality.

Leaving the San Francisco / Silicon Valley area to be a digital nomad and drastically cut rent, using open source and very inexpensive equipment and spending under $10/month total for a revenue-generating site... it was about as lean an operation as it gets.

In this episode, Mark talks about automation, where Unix luminaries saw its rise and where it's still undervalued, decades later.

See: The Practice of Programming

In this episode, Mark talks about common scalability concerns and why they're not generally a good thing for an early stage boot-strapper or even most funded startups to worry about.

Firebase Costs Increased by 7,000%!

Twitter crashes hard, Internet freaks out

Twitter can't kill the Fail Whale

Crash Shuts Down Ebay for Much of the Day

In this episode, Mark talks about feeling confused as a developer, why the feeling continues despite gaining technical skills and why a lack of confusion could be a bad sign.

From Nand to Tetris Also see the previous episode on Automation

In this episode Mark talks about how heatmaps and surveys were useful in the very early days of Alchemist Camp, how he used them and a common pitfall when taking surveys.

Companion screencast: Using heatmaps and surveys to drive content production The heatmap and survey tools I used: Hotjar The Markdown to HTML converter I used: Dillinger.io

I sat down for a chat with my friend, Julien and asked him about his story of moving from the finance industry into tech, why he did it and how he goes about jumping into a new tech stack.

Recorded for the Code and Bootstrapping podcast:

Find Julien at EatTheBlocks

Related: Engines vs Power-ups: learning skills with a shelf life

Full transcript: https://alchemist.camp/code-bootstrapping/julien-eat-the-blocks

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Mubashar Iqbal is a multi-time Product Hunt maker of the year. At the time of this recording, he's released 67 products and most have 100+ upvotes! I asked him about he ships so quickly.

Mubs on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mubashariqbal His latest project: https://podhunt.app

Recorded for the Code and Bootstrapping podcast

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Arvid and his partner Danielle just sold their company, Feedback Panda, after scaling it to a $55k MRR in just under two years. The product is aimed at online English teachers serving the Chinese market, but they were working from Germany.

We talked a bit about how he evaluated the market opportunity in online English teacher pains Danielle identified. I also asked Arvid how he thought about how much and where to invest engineering efforts, the pros and cons of open metrics for startups, book recommendations and more.

I was definitely in this conversation to learn as much as possible to apply to my own bootstrapping efforts!

Arvid on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arvidkahl …