Self Taught Software Engineer. I talk about life, software engineering, productivity, and growing your own solo software business. Building. Writing. Creating.
United States
Joined April 2018
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I have a graveyard folder with fifteen repos, three years, and $1,608.35 to show for it.
For years I told myself the comfortable story: I have too many interests. I'm a curious person. It flattered me. It was bullshit.
PrioriPlanner made $978.58 in two years. ProAct made $629.77 in nine months.
Same engineer, similar app. ProAct asked for money on day one, and then I actually told people it existed.
I built an email signup that fired confetti across the screen when you hit submit.
It saved nothing. No database, no list, not one address.
I made the part that looks like it worked. I skipped the part where it works.
Mine has fifteen repos, three years, and $1,608.35 to show for it.
A repo nobody uses and a paycheck from one company dry up the same way: the day somebody decides you aren't needed.
A graveyard is not a backup plan.
Everything between the idea and the working product is approaching free. The bottleneck moves upstream.
"Here's a rough version. Does this solve the problem?"
That's the product engineer posture.
The ticket-taker posture is "I'll let you know when it's done."
Stop measuring your week in tickets closed. Start measuring it in problems solved.
If you shipped four features and none of them moved a metric, you didn't have a good week. If you shipped nothing but figured out why a feature wasn't landing, you did.
Talk to a user this week. Not through a PM. Not through a survey. A real conversation.
Ask them what they were trying to do the last time your product frustrated them.
Ramp's engineering principles include "build what the customer really needs, not what they ask for" and "build opinionated systems."
Ramp expects engineers to understand the problem deeply enough to have an opinion. Not "implement the ticket." Not "ask the PM." Have an opinion.