Building For Me

Lately I've been possessed with the urge to write software that satisifes a particular need. I consider myself a hopelessly curious individual with an obsession with learning, working, and creating that borders on unhealthy. In the past I've mostly built web apps as intellectual exercises—to explore new frameworks or languages—or just because I have an inexplicable interest in the topic (agriculture for example).

But over the past year or so I've been realizing that there are things I would really like a tool for. I wrote and launched HTTPizza so I could get email notifications (which I hate) when my apps have outages or errors. All so I could avoid forever having to delete marketing spam from someone else's monitoring service. The added perk is I can add whatever feature I want. But the email thing is the most important!

There's also Remark, which I built because I wasn't comfortable with the idea of posting my pictures in a mainstream social media account—God only knows what they do with them. If I want to share something, I post it here, because it's ostensibly my system and I know exactly what I do with the data.

And this very blog is also part of Remark, because I didn't want my posts out in the ether in some other system, and so I could do all sorts of cool stuff with them (e.g. code diffs). My blog posts are all written in Markdown so it would be pretty easy to port them over to some other app if I ever felt the need to.

I think this might be me finally coming around to the advice I once heard for entrepeneurs: find a problem that annoys you and solve it. Entrepreneurs are, at their core, problem solvers. And somewhere along the way I finally got enough experience and know-how to just build things to solve problems instead of going on a search engine hunt for the least annoying solution.