Over the years, this post has taken a different form everytime I wished to write about it. It's been written as a guide for other developers to read through. It's been a cry for help from a developer who wasn't able to achieve anything. There also was a version where I just felt I couldn't really produce any value for anyone anyway and was going to rant about not having a direction/purpose in life.
I don't know if I'll publish this version either because I don't know where this version is headed either. I never do, most of what I write here is an immediate jot down of whatever I'm thinking. I don't know if it justifies the spelling and grammatical errors but, they are mostly because what you are reading is a just a long form thought.
A lot of what I've built over the years were based on simple ideas I wished were accessible to people, it started off as a journey to build tiny, no nonsense apps for everyone to use at a low price tag or even no price tag.
This changed to building for developers since, I thought I could understand that market better and maybe do something for them. Over the last few years I moved to just building for myself. The feeling of freedom when you start doing this is really something else; this did fade for a while since I couldn't give these things time due to my day job but I'm hoping I'll be able to change that or get it in control over the next few months.
"What value does it provide for the general public?", tired of this question at this point. Does it have to? If a problem is a niche one, I don't think I need to build something that solves it for everyone, everytime. Let me enjoy my hobby a bit.
You think musync is an app anyone needs? It's a spotify to spotify sync since
spotify doesn't like being able to share your Liked Songs as a playlist. So I
basically automated that.
A category fluid changelog generator? Nope, no one needs that either. There's at least one version of that implementation in every programming language. A release manager? Nope, also something every programming language provides.
What about the 100 other things I've built? Nope, there's better and more polished versions out there.
Point being, I don't plan to provide value when I'm building for myself and most projects built for fun do have a section that defines that it was packaged/coded/released just for me or because I was tired of copying it around.
Are they useless? Mostly no.
They do exactly the amount of work I wished for them to do. I don't stop pushing to anything I'm building unless I feel they are able to do the basic thing I wished for them to do. I develop MVP's of my ideas as fast as I can and then move to other things that are blocking my work.
An example of this would be jinks, it's got 15 commits and a single release, it's a simple implementation that doesn't need more messing with, why would I keep adding or removing things from something that's already done and working, it's API was stable the moment I released it and has been ever since. Is it a useless library? Hell no, it's been in production for over 2 years now.
But that raises the question, does anyone else need it? Nope, they don't. It's not that hard to write to begin with and no senior developer writing an app with the requirement to be able to inject links would need something like this. They'd rather use a lexical editor's block model so they can allow editing such descriptions.
I on the other hand wrote it for an app where I knew there wouldn't be a lexical editor at all and it'd make no sense to add a full lexical rich text parser for something so simple.
That brings us to the best part
A lot of your work as a developer is going to involve going through boring parts and using boring software and sometimes you'll have to write targeted software and evaluate new tech. Some developers find the latter more interesting and some find the former the fun part of their work.
One of them is more focused on enjoying what they do and one of them is focused on completing their work. Both parties are right, and have different goals so comparing them makes no sense in the first place.
The point I wanted to make was, being a developer isn't always fun, 80% of your time is spent thinking and predicting problems that might show up and controlling yourself from solving them too early. The remaining 20% is spent thinking about variable names, which honestly isn't that fun either.
It's not a magic formula but know that a lot of what you code isn't going to make sense to anyone else unless they understand the requirement and understand the scope of your implementation. In which case you have 2 things that you can do.
Or there's a bonus 3rd one.
There's more stuff that I could share but it might get controvertial if it followed up the points I mentioned here so I'm going to break it down into another post and publish that someday.
That's all for now in terms of growing to be decent at what you do, keep doing it for yourself first, you can do it for others once you are happy with what you build for yourself.
Adios!