Learned Fortran on an old TI-99; forgot Fortran; learned to draw, paint, sculpt, and play violin; learned how to merge code and art, turned it into my UX/Front-end dev Frankenthing.
Building an app doesn't always result in worrying about marketing, scaling, connecting to Stripe, making money, or any of the thousand other distractions that can creep in if you're not careful.
I made Blue Alphant, and then refactored it for speed and simplicity in updating and re-released it as Azure Alphant. I built it for myself, but made it publicly available in case someone else finds it useful. It's free, so I make no money off of it, and I have no plans to violate Unicode's licensing and charge for it later on. I'll fix coding errors as I find them, add search back in if a simple scripting solution becomes possible, and update it when Unicode updates.
Being able to use the app has saved me a great deal of time in the long run, and even though it's not a Stripe transaction, I'd say I've earned enough to make the project worthwhile.
The best part? If I do eventually make money from my side project, it will be from making art to sell to any typophile users who wish to support me. The trick is in creating a thing you want to create and always keep the monetary stuff and the marketing as nothing more than an afterthought - if you make money or become popular, fine, but if you don't, it's still not really an issue. (This also helps in cases like caregiving for the elderly when it's a case of legally mandated obligation, 24/7, for no pay. Sometimes you just have to accept that misery and servitude are the only things we are guaranteed in life and to just push on through it if we mean to survive.) Mindset is everything.
Sure, I spent over 2 decades getting turned down for jobs involving art, over 1 decade getting turned down for jobs writing code, and have ended up making most of my money from both the technical and 'business' sides of operating multi-million dollar military equipment, directly supervising my own Soldiers and Troops during peacetime and wartime operations, and stocking shelves and cleaning toilets in grocery stores for minimum wage. But that might be what's taught me that doing what you love and making money for survival purposes are entirely different things and, at least in my life, rarely or never overlap.
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Building an app doesn't always result in worrying about marketing, scaling, connecting to Stripe, making money, or any of the thousand other distractions that can creep in if you're not careful.
I made Blue Alphant, and then refactored it for speed and simplicity in updating and re-released it as Azure Alphant. I built it for myself, but made it publicly available in case someone else finds it useful. It's free, so I make no money off of it, and I have no plans to violate Unicode's licensing and charge for it later on. I'll fix coding errors as I find them, add search back in if a simple scripting solution becomes possible, and update it when Unicode updates.
Being able to use the app has saved me a great deal of time in the long run, and even though it's not a Stripe transaction, I'd say I've earned enough to make the project worthwhile.
The best part? If I do eventually make money from my side project, it will be from making art to sell to any typophile users who wish to support me. The trick is in creating a thing you want to create and always keep the monetary stuff and the marketing as nothing more than an afterthought - if you make money or become popular, fine, but if you don't, it's still not really an issue. (This also helps in cases like caregiving for the elderly when it's a case of legally mandated obligation, 24/7, for no pay. Sometimes you just have to accept that misery and servitude are the only things we are guaranteed in life and to just push on through it if we mean to survive.) Mindset is everything.
Sure, I spent over 2 decades getting turned down for jobs involving art, over 1 decade getting turned down for jobs writing code, and have ended up making most of my money from both the technical and 'business' sides of operating multi-million dollar military equipment, directly supervising my own Soldiers and Troops during peacetime and wartime operations, and stocking shelves and cleaning toilets in grocery stores for minimum wage. But that might be what's taught me that doing what you love and making money for survival purposes are entirely different things and, at least in my life, rarely or never overlap.