I’ve spent years obsessed with the wrong thing. I’ve let myself down repeatedly trying to build projects, being obsessed with the idea of a product and building something of my own, but instead just wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

The Fun Bit

The excitement of first imagining the problem you are solving, fantasizing about the product solving X and Y, building a real company, being free. You write down what you are going to fix, and how you are going to do it.

You figure out the target market, basic features required for an MVP. Soon you’re on to brand names, logos, colour palettes.

You tell your partner. Friends. You’re sure this is it this time. You can realize all you’ve worked for, and deliver real value to end users.

Reality Hits

Next you’re imagining what the tech stack looks like. You’ve recently worked with, or read about, Kubernetes, React, Redux, Containers, Serverless. Must add these in, you know, because we’re not going to scale without any of these things. I don’t enjoy front-end development, anyway, so this means I can outsource the work, too! Full stack Javascript is a must in 2021.

Now you’re spending all your time researching technology, how do I know how to correctly deploy my containerized app and be sure it auto scales? I have no idea how to do this, so I better learn. Two weeks later, you know a little more about Kubernetes and Horizontal Pod Autoscalers after watching 10 hours of DevOps conference videos. Code written? Zero.

You’re frozen. Instead of building a product you’re building anxiety. Anxiety over delivering this idea correctly in the new technologies you’ve chosen. Anxiety over understanding how it will all play out. You can’t work on features, because you must get the foundations right first.

Fin

You’re defeated. The passion you had for this idea is gone. You spent what little you had left learning how to maintain a Redux store with Typescript. Generics were the last straw.

Two weeks later, someone delivered your idea. In Rails. On Heroku. No SPA. Done.

Then your next idea comes along. Repeat.

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