We have decades of experience trying to automate processes. The biggest lesson is that automation is not about the easy and known flow, but about exception handling.

The best diagnosis for exception handling I can think of is to wait on line at the post office. If you’ve ever done that, you know the thought of “doesn’t anyone just want to mail a package” comes to mind. As it turns out the entire flow at the post office (or DMV or tax office) is about exception handling. No amount of software is going to get you out of there because it is piecing together a bunch of inputs and outputs that are outside the bounds of a system.

The ability to automate hinges not just on the ability to know the steps to take for predefined inputs, and not even the steps to take if some inputs are erroneous or incomplete, but what to do if you can’t even specify the inputs.

My favorite example of the latter is how the arrival of IBM computing in the 60s and 70s totally changed the definition of accounting, inventory control, and business operations. Every process that was "computerized" ultimately looked nothing at all like what was going on under those green eyeshades in accounting. Much of the early internet (and still most bank and insurance) look like HTML front ends to mainframe 3270 screens. Those might eventually change, just not quickly. It might be that the "legacy" or "installed base" of many processes is such that the cost to change is too monumental.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765594

OpenAlternative is a community-driven list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and applications. Discover the best tools for your needs.

AI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.

• A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.

Programming as Theory Building

Non-trivial software changes over time. The requirements evolve, flaws need to be corrected, the world itself changes and violates assumptions we made in the past, or it just takes longer than one working session to finish. And all the while, that software is running in the real world. All of the design choices taken and not taken throughout development; all of the tradeoffs; all of the assumptions; all of the expected and unexpected situations the software encounters form a hugely complex system that includes both the software itself and the people building it. And that system is continuously changing.

To circle back to AI like ChatGPT, recall what it actually does and doesn't do. It doesn't know things. It doesn't learn, or understand, or reason about things. What it does is probabilistically generate text in response to a prompt.

7. The Shopify App

With recent trends in drop shipping, lifestyle businesses, and a push for independent retail-based outlets to move online, Shopify has opened up another wonderful opportunity for us developers.

8. Build an API as a Service

We live in a data-driven age where information, attention, and content are king — to give you some perspective, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day.

Readable & Writable
Typora gives you a seamless experience as both a reader and a writer. It removes the preview window, mode switcher, syntax symbols of markdown source code, and all other unnecessary distractions. Instead, it provides a real live preview feature to help you concentrate on the content itself.

Welcome to the ebook on Building Micro-SaaS Businesses. What’s Micro-SaaS? It is a software as a service business owned and operated by one person or a small team. These businesses are location-independent, high margin, low-risk with predictable recurring revenue. They are the lifestyle business of the future. I scrapped and scrambled my way to building and ultimately selling a profitable SaaS business.

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To learn how to use Shaarli, consult the link "Help/documentation" at the bottom of this page.

You use the community supported version of the original Shaarli project, by Sebastien Sauvage.

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