Have you ever started a project and stopped it to explore new things before completing it? I think this is a major distraction for people who want everything to be perfect. You know what you want to complete and how to complete it, but during the course of building it, you see a shiny thing nearby and get distracted. The worst part, is that you start using it on your existing project to somehow satisfy your desire. This is exactly what’s called Shiny object syndrome.
Working for yourself has advantages and disadvantages. I always wanted to build a business from scratch. It’s not because of the independence one get from their 9-5 day job, it’s about the freedom, and the challenging problems. All I am familiar with is web application development, and a bit of mobile application. Every technology advancements have a hype cycle. Gartner’s hype cycle, I kind of agree with, can be used as a framework for analysing a technology. We are currently in the peak of the cycle, I believe, and the change this time would be a new mark.
I am planning to update the status of Quillcaster regularly. I haven’t done something like this for any of my projects before. Progress updates, I assume, will help me track growth and stay accountable. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads my blog. All I am interested in is tracking how the project grows over time. Of course, one can use the source code commit date and time in the repository, but I am planning to log more than just the features. It’s going to be about my learning and failures. Here goes my first update:
Making a product involves a lot of research. The research helps to make decisions, build something different, and gives an idea about the market in general, for product creation. I have done some research before building my side projects. Most of the time, it’s about existing product availability and their features. This has really helped me to focus more on validating an idea. Scenarios like this would motivate one to proceed with a dream and make it work. In my case, this helped me create Hellokea and Mailboxfiler. Though they’re not used by many, it gave me a clear-cut path for connecting the dots.
Yesterday, I wrote about my new side-hustle. Before starting the research on whether to proceed further, I would like to elaborate on what’s my idea and end product would be. There is a bit of an imagination here. No code, no research, and I haven’t looked at any competitor websites. So bear with me if it sounds too futuristic.
One fine day, you decide to read an article on your computer and open your favorite browser, as usual. After a bit of reading, a line gets stuck in your brain, and you decide to post it to a social media platform.
Building something that people use is really hard. Making someone find your product and convincing them to use it is a lot harder. I believe this is where the marketing and sales come in. I have built a few side projects like this one here and there. Hellokea is the one that I have spent the most of my time on a side-hustle. It’s complex. It has a few features that not many competitor products have in common. The hardest part for me is convincing people to use it. Of course, I still have to make the website richer and create videos for documentation. But, again, I am not sure whether it would make people use this product after hours of effort. I would consider myself to be a developer who doesn’t want to get involved in the marketing or sales side of a business. This is the part where most software developers or people trying to make a business fail. And, I am, for sure, in that group.
It’s hard to ignore the word ‘cloud’ these days. If you are in fields related to the IT industry, the chances are you keep hearing about it more regularly over the past few years. Companies are trying hard to move your software to the cloud to earn more money and promising to make your life convenient. Product Managers and people in C-level positions are making a move towards serverless. There are a few who don’t want to manage their hardware.
It’s without a doubt that Apple has a great eye for aesthetics. When you migrate from the Apple ecosystem to another platform, the first thing you notice is the font. Windows and Linux fonts are beautiful in their own ways, but if you are as picky as I am about certain fonts in your browser and shell, there is a way to handle this on Linux.
For the file manager, terminal, and editor, it’s not hard to change the font. If you are using GNOME or MATE, gnome-tweaks is a great application for choosing specific fonts for the interface and documents. I recommend downloading your favorite fonts to the ~/.fonts folder and running fc-cache -fv to let the system know about the new fonts. GNOME Tweaks is a fantastic tool for that. My go-to option, which is close to the ‘Helvetica’ font, is ‘Inter var’.
I have been using Ubuntu as my default desktop. I am quite comfortable with Linux, Windows, and MacOS. To get a general idea of what machine learning is, I assembled a PC with a graphics card - RTX 4090 and Intel i9-1400k CPU. This system is a beast, and I am loving it so far.
Instead of spending money on a Windows license, I thought I would make Ubuntu my home. It’s not like I am new to Linux. I started my career in computers because of Linux. My first distribution was Knoppix live CD, and I have been a Debian user ever since. I did try more than 40+ distros, but I can’t get rid of my first love. All my servers run Debian. It’s one of the communities and distributions to which I owe my career. You may wonder why Ubuntu now.
This marks my ninth attempt to manage my online presence through a blog. Yes, I have tried posting content in the form of long articles on different platforms. Most of the time, I failed not because of the platform but due to the challenge of posting articles regularly. I often get distracted, primarily by building and reading articles.
How will this attempt be different? I struggled to answer this question for quite some time before launching this blog. The primary reason will be my commitment to improving my writing. While I am confident in my English skills, writing something that others want to read is an entirely different challenge, and I am determined to conquer it.