It's 1:41AM. I've finally finished the MVP of what will hopefully become my own personal editor, built by myself, for myself. I can't believe it. It's the first personal project that I've seen through to its natural end. So many things compete for my attention but despite that, the achievement feels so well earned. It was tough, but it was fun. It felt like forever, but the time flew by. But most importantly, it is an art project, and its only consumer is me.
What a blessing it is to be able to imagine a world, and then work to make it, not just a possibility, but a reality. I'm sure we all possess that ability in some ways, but the discipline of doing it through writing code feels special. It feels special because it holistically represents two distinct "meanings" in the world. There's the meaning of the program in the literal sense to the machine that has to process and execute what you've written. And on the other hand, you have the developer's intent, meant to represent something abstract in the real world. Everyday is a constant battle to have continuity and consistency between those two meanings. In many ways, I think the best engineers are the ones who manage to make the delta between those two meanings so small that it becomes negligible. And yet, after 5 years of making this my career(with an all encompassing job and even more encompassing side hustle), I still find that delta to be pretty large.
I think that a big part of it has to do with the fact that I didn't spend nearly enough time building things that were only going to work for me. Whether motivated by work, or mission, or passion, I spent a lot of time building for other people, never solving problems that I personally experienced. And while I think it's a noble pursuit to dedicate your life's work to making the lives of others better, this period of time in my life has reinforced the idea that I need to do things that work, just for me. In part, because doing so will make the quality of my life much better. But also, because nothing compares to the child like desire that we all have to receive a gift that uniquely solves a problem we have, that in many cases, only we understand.
My problem, was the problem of the blank canvas. A problem exacerbated by the way that content is proliferated as these static pieces of data, that tell us very little about the thought process that goes into making them. We all have a ton of great ideas in our heads, and sometimes, the thing that keeps us from getting those ideas out, is our own doubt about how those ideas will be received.
That's what this presentation of ideas is meant to be. A rebuke of perfect, not by putting out anything less than my best, but instead by embracing the actual journey of what it took to get here.