Hacking culture

It might be the world I'm swimming in, but it feels like a lot of people are starting to build apps. Some of these ideas spring from a desire to tinker and create, and maybe make money. But many others come from folks who have a problem, and are using AI to create something that solves their problem.

I'm hearing a lot of discussion online about where this will go. If we suddenly have millions more apps, but no growing user base, then the share of the pie will shrink on a per-developer basis. More apps but less money to go around. I don't know if this is true. But I know that the people building to solve their own itch will be fine.

Silicon Valley started from a pirate hacker ethos. It wasn't intrinsically tied to money (even though it was, yes I know that VC money has changed the world and is built into the ethos of startup culture in many intangible ways). The idea, in the beginning, at least from the books I've read and stories I've heard, was a group of people who loved to tinker, wanted to make things that were useful to them, and then ultimately found ways to share those.

That's the ethos I want to see more of. I want to see weird things from my friends, sharing crazy ideas they've built, problems they've solved. What I'm less interested in are get-rich schemes, ideas that are riding the latest fad, arbitrage attempts that follow the latest crypto, Beanie Baby (yes, aging myself), or whatever is the latest phase we all care about.

That's old, and I'm tired. I don't need to hear about how some person has found a way to make millions. If so, good for them. Maybe it's working, but it probably won't work for you.

I may sound a little bitter, I don't mean to be. But I'm also tired of all the slop that's been hounding me for years. What I want to see instead are the interesting things that you care about, the software (or hardware) you're building that is innately cool, that keeps you up at night, that you can't stop thinking about and tinkering with.

Maybe it's not for the world. But frankly I don't know if we need a bunch more ideas that have user bases reaching the billions.

I want to see your uniquely opinionated thing that scratches an itch that was driving you crazy, and that you've lost sleep over because you had to get it just right. It might not be for me, in fact by definition it probably won't be. But, if it was for you and helped you, then that means you cared, and by extension I'll care.

And the good part of that, there's a chance (but it isn't why you did it in the first place) that it will benefit others, and there might be a revenue stream behind that.

But don't count on it, and don't do it for that reason.

So coming back to the core question of usefulness, I've been testing a handful of app ideas over the last year. And more and more I'm leaning toward, if it's not an app I can dogfood and work into my daily life—well, it's probably not worth my attention right now. My life is too full, I have too many things I care about, and it's hard for me to invest time into something I don't innately understand.

But a todo app? I need one of those, I use one, it's just how my brain functions and I've invested a decade into building my life around that concept. That's a fair space for me to try and create a uniquely opinionated app, one just for me (and maybe if you think like me, it will also be for you).

An RSS reader app also fits the same category, and so I'm trying to build one. A drawing app for the iPad, a white noise sleeping app.

None of these are billion-dollar ideas, and that's fine. I'm not spending my evenings trying to get rich (if that happens I won't say no though), instead I'd like to imagine that my time learning, tweaking, playing with things, will reward me with deeper knowledge, useful things that make my life easier (and by extension the lives of others), and through all that I might become a better human as a result.

So if you're feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of new stuff (mostly crap) entering the marketplace, and that your idea has already been done a hundred times over. Well just ignore all that. Most of it won't work, and the folks in it for just getting rich quickly—they'll move on to other ideas. And those of us who care deeply, who just want to hack away and have fun, and make cool things—we're not going anywhere.