One of the most crippling things you can do as a programmer is to try and build an app. Especially an ambitious one. Apps are like buildings. They ...
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This is awesome. I absolutely agree with you. Building an app does help learning to code, but there is so much that gets in the way. Making something small and fun will help one learn and possibly provide joy for others. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Agreed -- codepen.io and glitch.com both are great homes for making fun little artsy code blocks.
Definitely! It's always great (and humbling) to see what the people there come up with.
That is so true, and I've noticed that in my own doing. It's so much more rewarding to create something that you can be proud of. And I, speaking of myself as a developer, start to create these grand ideas of applications and think that I someday will change the world with them (I hope I someday do)
However, I think it is good to try out things that are out of your reach. Even if it's a failure, you can always return to that same idea and try to build it again. And if you've been coding there between the attempts, you will get much closer on the second or the third attempt.
One personal example I have, is when I tried to build my own blog. I think I restarted building it with 1 year intervals, each time removing the old one and creating a new improved version. I was so excited when I finally got out something, after failing those previous two times!
I like to think of coding as some form of art (literature?).
That isn't easy at all. Thinking that way challenges your mind to always look for better ways to make code a joy to read and work with.
This way of thinking has led me to study things like state management, bem, functional programming all while asking myself how to better communicate with the code's readers.
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.
I'm going on ten years, and I have yet to build an "app". Plenty of small desktop utilities, a game or two, and a plethora of libraries, but no apps. I feel no need to, and may well go my entire career without once touching mobile.
Agreed, at a certain point every app is just a mix of CRUD functionality and API calls. It's much more fun to make cool little interactive pieces
Yes! It's good to learn CRUD and have a firm grip on building such functionality, but there's so much more to learn and make.
Thanks Thomas! This is really encouraging
I really needed to read something like this. Thank you!
Wicked article thanks for posting! That's a great idea to make art out of code and probably something that not every developer will have in their portfolio.