This dev log is less about a recent project I’ve been working on and more about a feeling I’ve been having recently.
For the first time in a while I’ve been able to work on several projects that just interest me. I’ve gotten back in the past few months a sort of joy of creation that come from just saying “Hey, this is a neat thing to build, let’s do it, let’s try it out. We can do some research get a mock up going and figure out how to make it work along the way.”
I think something that has really been dholding back not just myself but a lot of developers in the pas few years is this idea that everything needs to be monetized and competent and a business idea and that it needs to get you a job or something like this.
I think that’s one of the biggest hinderances to actually programming regularly. I think you have to just build software for the love of the game sometimes. Obviously I have projects like Vantage Fit which I think has a solid value proposition but there’s also projects like Jarvis where realistically it won’t be massively commerically viable and if it is used by other people, it would have to be as an open source software. The whole idea of Jarvis is that he’s offline and that I don’t want to ship off any data to a server in the cloud or have him connected to the internet.
The point that I’m geting at here is that developing software is really best when you do it for the sake of developing software or becoming a better developer. Along that path there’s a lot of commerical benefits but I don’t think anyone can expect to come onto the scene and just suddenly be a top tier developer and write a project that revolutionizes the world.
Obviously that can be a goal but I think the majoriy of becoming a good developer has to be centered around developing for the sake of developing. Otherwise you’ll never come up with a good enough idea to actually start building something.
But golly once you just embrace the idea of building for the sake of building it becomes so easy to develop every day. The past few weeks it’s just become an obssesion. I’m just up late at night working on Jarvis and tinkering. The other day I built a chrome extension that gives me a cool looking new tab page with infromation I wrote custom API calls for.
Without a doubt I’m currently at the peak of my development prowess and it’s really just been as a result of building without worrying about commerical viability or a need in the market or how it would look a resume or things like this.
I think if I keep building with this mindset I’ll become a trully excellent developer. And the wolrd realy needs excellent developers.