Growing Up
Growing Up
Turning Your Hobby Project into a Real Product
About the Book
Growing Up is targeted at technical owners and employees of potential to small web-oriented businesses. If you are:
- Serving primarily dynamic content at less than 30 requests per second,
- Terrified of being linked to from the Reddit homepage, or
- Wondering when you should get around to hiring a sysadmin to manage your servers,
you will probably find this book useful.
While not entirely technical, Growing Up focuses primarily on problems with the technical side of a business; a non-technical CEO will find this more useful in the hands of their lead developer.
In a similar fashion, the advice in this book is aimed at running a web site. Not all software is written for the web (in particular, mobile has seen a big boom recently), but it’s still the primary method of delivering a service to users, and the one most favored by startups. Some information will be useful to an engineer working on native applications, but be ready to skip over large chunks that aren’t relevant to you.
You're going to need to get your hands dirty. You'll be writing code, modifying configuration files, and installing software (perhaps from source). You should be at least basically comfortable with your entire stack, from Javascript to web server, and shouldn't be afraid of using the terminal to administrate your servers. Most importantly, you need to be prepared to do some research on any topic we cover that's a weak point for you. Space and knowledge constraints prevent me from writing about everything you need to know, but I'll liberally scatter references to other resources, mostly free, that I've found helpful for my own education.
Causes Supported

Oxfam America
Right the Wrong
http://www.oxfamamerica.orgOxfam America is a global organization working to right the wrongs of poverty, hunger, and injustice. We save lives, develop long-term solutions to poverty, and campaign for social change. As one of 17 members of the international Oxfam confederation, we work with people in more than 90 countries to create lasting solutions.
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