Leaving your job to pursue an indie project as a solo developer
On this episode we chat with Samuel Simões, the developer behind Poker Now. Simões created the project so he an his friends could play poker during the pandemic lockdown. It became such a success, growing 100X, that he left his job building hospital management software and is now focused on trying to make a living as the sole author and architect of Poker Now.
We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space.
Simões shares the tech stack he used to craft the first version of Poker Now, and how he rebuilt the service after it crashed under the weight of a massive wave of new users. During the peak of lockdown, his site went from an average of 100 concurrent users to more than 10,000 at a time.
Lastly, we chat about the allure of leaving a regular job behind to work on a passion project, and about the challenges of maintaining a service and earning a living as a solo developer.
Today we're celebrating Divakar, who was awarded a lifeboat badge for answering the question: Searching a sequence in a NumPy array.