Tech Skills For Indie Hackers

Most coding tutorials, academic courses and bootcamps are designed to turn you into a professional software engineer. They promise to teach you how to write clean, performant, efficient code that is optimised for readability and collaboration amongst your Scrum team. They will teach you about the software development lifecycle and how to ship features quickly at a large enterprise organisation. They will teach you how to performance test your code, how to run browser automation and how to maintain an efficient and automated CI/CD pipeline. They will prepare you for your first job interview as a Junior Web Developer and give you all the skills you will need to get an offer.

But what what if that isn't you?

What if you don't want to become a professional software engineer. What if you want to just build something that works in the least amount of time possible. Comitting to learning only the minimum amount of new skills, so you can build an MVP and validate your product idea with a handful of users. You can always hire a team of professional software engineers further down the line when you have some cash in the bank, right? Well if any of this sounds like you then read on...

Throughout this series of videos, articles and tutorials we will be focussing on learning just the bare minimum you need in order to be productive and make money from creating software.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be done. And preferably done before you run out of time, money or energy. You are a startup founder first, and a web developer second.

We will not be writing pages of unit tests, we will not be implementing verbose design patterns, and we will not be supporting Internet Explorer. We will be testing in production, styling in the browser and pushing directly to the main branch on GitHub. This is tech skills for indie hackers and I hope you find it fun.