Building software as a hobby

Wednesday 17 July 2013 at 18:07 BST

I want to make things for everyone.

I haven't done that in a while. The last big project I did was eventual.ly, my event notification service, similar in ideas to Facebook Events. It was really fun, but doesn't work so well any more. (It still works, but there's some serious problems with editing events. Use at your own peril.) Since then, there's been a bunch of stuff appearing on my GitHub account, but hardly any of it is for the general public. Most of it is just me dicking about.

Having a day job is great, but generally, you have customers, who might be the most lovely people you've ever met, but they're not your friends or family or even the people you follow on Facebook and Twitter. I want to make software for those people. I want to build things for fun and then watch people smile as I show them what they do. Deadlines are pretty motivational, but I'd rather the work I do to be reward enough that I can't wait to get home and get the next feature out.

And you know, the only thing stopping me is, well, me.

I'm going to program because I love it, not because I'm being paid for it. Forget programming; I'm going to work on the entire stack, from administering the server to drawing the logo on the web site. I'm going to write in eight different languages I don't know very well because the only thing that would make this better is learning new things at the same time.

I'm really looking forward to the next few months. Hopefully, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, I'll have some announcements to make.