Not building again

I woke up today around 7am and went straight to work.

There were a lot of little things that needed my attention so I took care of those first.

By 10am I was done with most of them and felt relieved that I had made it through my list. First coffee for the morning.

I went back to work around 1pm.

One realization: there are SO many edge cases when building a mobile app. Maybe I’m doing something fairly complicated, but I just cannot see the end of it.

It’s too long and boring to explain the details but I’ve come to realise that you need a lot of patience or maybe I’m doing it wrong and I could just have a stupid idea and launch it quickly without glossing over the details.

Or maybe, I’ve got a lot of patience and I can tell myself that I’m pursuing (romanticising?) the fact that I’m becoming good at my craft.

Maybe it sounds like bullshit but I really want to be good. I don’t really love coding per se, I love the fact that I am creating, but I want to feel confident that I can create anything.

I’ve gotten a lot of work done today: stabilised my app where 80/90% of the bugs have been taken care of.

I’ve also had an honest conversation with my girlfriend about the commercial viability of our little app.

In short, I think it’s super niche, maybe too much even.

I kinda feel like we aren’t going to make a lot of money.

I don’t know.

Somehow, I’m writing this and feeling myself becoming quite negative with it. It’s not a good feeling.

What’s positive then?

I’ve got a super nice boilerplate for mobile app projects that I can try to commercialise, and also maybe recycle the app that I’m currently building to repurpose it into another use case.

The way I see it is that I’m still going through my apprenticeship phase.

Although I don’t have a lot of mentors, I think a lot of developers can recognise themselves in doing lots of solo projects to “level up”. Maybe the ones where you can ship something from A to Z are the best.

Yes. I’m not getting the teachings of someone, so maybe I’m slow and maybe I’m not learning all the good, best practices, but I’m curious enough about this discipline to read about foundational stuff because I want to become a better builder.

Anyway, I’m starting to be a bit overbearing.

Just to say that, next time, I’ll slap together a mock-up, “draw” something quickly on the canvas, create a landing page, and throw the idea at my target audience way way earlier. The goal is to see if an idea sticks.

What I will not do is build an app from the ground up.

I won’t do this ever again.

It’s too time-consuming.