Ian Homer

He Built an Enterprise-Level Software for over a Year. Zero Users. Last week, I sat in a coffee shop with a brilliant friend who showed me something incredible. An enterprise software he'd been building for over a year. Beautifully designed. Thoughtfully architected. Genuinely solves a real problem. I asked him: "How many users do you have?" "None yet. I'm still working on it." "Does anyone know this exists?" "...No." I looked at him and said, "Your first 10 users could've come from your network. But nobody knows your solution exists."? Here's what kills me about this: We resist showing up because we're afraid of crickets. "I don't get engagement." "I don't know what to post." "Nobody cares what I have to say." Meanwhile, someone in your network has the exact problem your solution solves. The numbers don't lie: My second open-source project? The first 5 users came directly from my network. Now it has: • 26 active users • 5 countries • 426 actions taken (times someone actually used a feature) You know I love sharing receipts, but none of that happens if I stay invisible. Let's talk about what 3 likes actually means: In an attention economy where everyone is drowning in content, 3 people stopped scrolling, read your entire post, and chose to acknowledge it. That's not failure. That's three humans who gave you their most precious resource: attention. Leave metrics, focus on connections Don't know what to post? Just be yourself and tell people what you care about. The project you're building. The problem you're solving. etc You don't need profound wisdom. You need an authentic presence. Start small if you need to: → Comment thoughtfully on others' posts → Document what you're building etc Visibility isn't all-or-nothing. It's showing up consistently in whatever way feels natural. What showing up has done for me: • People recognise me from LinkedIn at events and random places • I get DMs with opportunities • The last 3 speaking gigs came from my network • Referrals I've never applied to speak at any event. Visibility did that. The voice in your head: If something inside you is saying, "I should be out there," stop ignoring it. Your ideas, your work, your perspective have value. Quieting that voice doesn't protect you. It just keeps you invisible. The cost of invisibility? Zero impact. "Your silence doesn't serve anyone, including you." Focus on value, not clout The authority comes from consistent value, not chasing viral moments. You don't need permission to be visible: You don't need thousands of followers. You don't need perfect content. You don't need to go viral. You just need to stop being invisible to the people who are already looking for what you offer. It's perfectly fine if you choose not to show up. Not everyone needs to be online, constantly sharing. But if that voice is telling you that you DO need to be out there, then get out there

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The shine is starting to wear off vibe coding. I know, because I’ve been there. One moment I’m in Cursor, impressed by what a large language model can produce. The next, I’m staring at the clock, realising I’ve lost hours because it couldn’t navigate the complexity of the codebase I’m working on - and I find myself back in PyCharm, questioning the value of the detour. One answer that’s emerging is "Spec-First Development". You don’t toss vague instructions at an AI and hope for magic. Instead, you craft the clearest, most rigorous specification you can - and let the agent build from that. Better still, treat specifications as code artefacts: versioned, under source control, and continually refined with compacted, curated context. For me, this isn’t a radical shift. I’ve long worked with test-driven development, where the unit test is the specification. And LLMs thrive on this. Unit tests aren’t just notes in prose; they’re executable specifications - formal, computable, and unforgiving in all the right ways. That’s the deeper lesson: when you hand a spec to an LLM, the more formalisation, the better. Natural language is fine, but structure wins. Code loves tests. Maths loves notation. Business, however, has no equivalent - no unit test for strategy documents, compliance rules, or process design. Enter ontologies and knowledge graphs. They give us a way to formalise business semantics, capturing domains in rigorous, computable detail. Paired with an LLM, they don’t just guide the generation - they also validate it. The future of agentic coding - and of LLMs in business more broadly - won’t be built on “vibes.” It will be driven by how well we can formalise intent: transforming ambiguity into something structured, testable, and executable. ⭕ Spec-kit: https://lnkd.in/dPZCgUeq ⭕ What is an Ontology: https://lnkd.in/ePS7ha8z ⭕ What is a Knowledge Graph: https://lnkd.in/e5ed_f8g

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AI won't make your team faster on its own. Better developer experience will. I sat down with Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, to talk about what actually improves engineering team performance and what just looks like it does. We covered: 1. Why most metrics fail (and how to use them properly). 2. What developer surveys can tell you that GitHub stats never will. 3. How to track DevEx without a fancy tool, even at a 10-person startup. 4. The real impact of AI on engineering workflows (spoiler: it’s not replacing your team). The big takeaway? Developer performance isn’t about shipping faster. It’s about removing friction. Whether it’s bad tooling, unclear goals, or noisy metrics, the teams that win are the ones that make it easier to do great work.

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The sequence matters: 1. Build with no-code 2. Find paying customers 3. Hit limitations 4. Then hire engineers Not: 1. Search for CTO 2. Spend 6 months pitching technical co-founders 3. Build something nobody wants 4. Wonder why it failed The market doesn't care about your tech stack. It cares if you solve a problem worth paying for.

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