Ever since I started working as a software engineer, I’ve noticed there are two things I’m always asked about. The first is what kind of things I build. The second, which happens as soon as they listen to my accent and ask me where I’m from, is why on earth would I leave Tenerife’s weather to come to the UK. Today we are only going to focus on the first one 😛
Photo by Joshua Humpfer on Unsplash
Story time
Many many years ago a ~6 years old Kevin received a toy laptop for Christmas 🎄🎁. It was one of those that only had popular and educational kids games on them. That kid was very impressed by the gift and how it worked, how was it possible for everything to work, display, program, etc. That was the time I fell in love with Technology and decided that I wanted to deeply understand how everything worked. I had a short lapse and thought I wanted to be a biologist, but that didn’t last long 🤣.
I’ve always wanted to build things that people would fall in love with or solve problems that they had. That is and always will be my North Star. But throughout my career, I’ve come to realise that the best things I’ve built were always the ones that solved a problem I personally had.
What to build?
Back at university I saw lots of people thinking of things to build, problems to solve. I even saw a group of friends who were building a web application to allow people to collectively write documents/spreadsheets online, and yes this was before Google Docs was a thing in Spain. It was inspiring to see how people would fall in love with a problem and work on it until they solved it or well until they saw Google had the same idea.
Nowadays I see a lot of people trying to build things to achieve something i.e become the next unicorn. But I’m not sure that’s how it works most of the times. People should build things that they feel would solve people’s problems or at the very least make their lives much easier. Look for example at Home Assistant. Paulus Schoutsen started building this in 2013 and it has now become one of the most active open source projects in the world!
If you want to build something, don’t look for what will sell very well, look for a problem you have or something you’re currently doing that you love and takes you a long time to do. Think of how you can build something to make it easy for you. I guarantee you that you are probably not the only one in the world with the same problem. This does not mean that you will become a millionaire, it just means that you will be building things for the right reasons.
AoC2md
One example of this way of thinking is my little project AoC2md. I’ve always had used a python program to initialize my Advent of Code solutions for the day. This has been working for a while but this year when I started doing them either with my work or my personal laptop I had issues with python’s package management. So I thought there has to be a better way to do this.
I built this little program with Go because I wanted something compiled that always worked whether I was using an Intel, AMD or an arm processor (Apple Silicon) and well yes, even Windows. It works like a charm, I even built my own Homebrew tap for it so that I can easily install it on my Mac.
Does it mean that this tool is used by everyone and I’m a millionaire now? Absolutely no, but I’m a happier person with a tool that I built to solve a problem I had and it’s free out there for anyone to use.
Conclusion
To summarise, these are the key takeaways I’d like you to consider:
- Look out there for problems and pains in the world and fall in love with those.
- Build something to solve or improve the life of people, starting with your own.
- Don’t build things because you want to get a job in a FAANG company or because you want it to be the next unicorn.
- You are probably not the only one in the world with your problem, so share what you build.
I hope this article inspires you to look at your daily life and find something worth building. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be yours.
Thanks
I’d like to thank my wife Marie Dziubich as always to help me review my silly articles.