Every software engineer is expected to have a slew of side projects. You are supposed to end your day and go home and keep building!

Somehow you are supposed to have enough energy to continue creating after a full day of work.

I’ve never understood this. It sounds exhausting.

I get frustrated because I tell myself that I don’t know what I want to build. Or that the ideas I have are bad, that no one would want to use what I make.

But as soon as you start building something, your ideas start to flow. You start to think of new features. Of ways to expand what you’ve built.

You start to think of new things to build, because there is new space in your brain.

AI makes this easier than ever before. I wanted to make a landing page for an app I’m tinkering with. It took less than an hour to (1) buy a domain, (2) prompt AI to create a landing page and (3) setup a CloudFlare worker to link the domain with the app. This is a crazy time.

It’s true that I have experience with these things, and so I might be quicker than someone unfamiliar. But it’s only going to get easier. There should not be any excuses for not being able to bring something to life that you believe in.

I find it really exciting, because when you get an idea to build something you can lose motivation when you get bogged down in dumb details and small problems. Now you can really focus on high-level ideas and let AI do grunt work.

I go through phases where all I want to do is sit down and work on a project, and other times where I can’t stand the idea of being behind my computer any longer.

But when you are flowing, and you have freedom to create, and you don’t get stuck in “why is this not working” land building is wonderful.