As I get older, the idea of "coding for fun" is very much akin to "being an author" or "artist". I appreciate those who appreciate the craftsmanship of it all.
Kind of the difference between writing blogspam versus short stories, maybe?
That's exactly how it feels. It's much nicer to create for the sake of it, without the tedium of meetings, tickets, sprints or even users.
Hell, there's even a difference between writing blogspam and high effort content about the same topic. I genuinely love delving into the minute aspects of German bureaucracy, because no one really put those details on the internet before.
Another aspect is that people genuinely appreciate my work. It's an awesome feeling, and it certainly kept me going.
WOW, this is beautiful. Have you written publicly about this?
One of the things I am upset about is grocery prices and the fact that people buy unhealthy food to offset rising prices... I ask myself what an "open source grocery store" would look like.
Have you thought of "open sourcing" your business model so others can do something similar? Or learn from it? Either way, I'd love to hear more if you have anything public.
I can’t really talk much about this yet because legally, until my E2 visa is approved, I can only be in the owner role, not operator. Right now, I pay my friend to be the manager.
Once I am in the clear, I’d be happy to open source the process of acquiring a SMB and running it. I basically become a business broker myself for this one deal, thanks to the broker I worked with.
I'm more on the data sci side right now, and am interested in commodities trading and geopolitical analysis. Less lucrative (well, the latter is, anyway) but seems more important + interesting.
I'm not posting because I'm making an imminent decision, though -- more that I see people discuss transitions every once in a while and am curious what challenges they see + how they overcame them.
Something I think I might like to do if / when I'm closer to financial independence, that sounds like it might be up your alley as well, is write about some deep and interesting topic. Basically, be a beat journalist with a self-driven beat that is heavy on empirical analysis.
For me, and my current interests, this would be climate and energy technology, a la heatmap.news. For you, maybe something in the commodities and geopolitical analysis space.
It's easy to make fun of how everyone has a newsletter and a podcast now, but at the heart of that is that it truly is the case that there has never in history been a better time to do reporting on interesting things, and possibly even find a large enough audience for it to be a real and sustainable vocation.
I had to leave game development because my seven year old son suffered a tragedy which completely disabled him. Game development is simply too volatile and risky a career for someone with that kind of family obligation.
As for the transition, I had accidentally achieved some recognition as a researcher of land economics through various blog posts. This attracted the attention of a new friend who was inspired by my work to put a startup together, seeing real estate mass appraisal as the most important missing piece for policy reasons, but also a potentially great business idea.
Investors agreed with him and a startup was formed. This gave me an alternative to game dev when I needed it most.
As for the actual work transition, I had a lot of subject matter to learn which we facilitated by hiring experts from the field, including former IAAO researchers (that’s the relevant standards body) as well as local appraisers.
I’m still learning but a lot of my skills transferred. The biggest difference is this is typically a pretty low tech field so many essential skills are soft — all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t explain things in simple terms to a citizen. As I like to say “Prepare for a property tax protest defense, not a PhD thesis defense.”
The other big difference is cost structure and expectations and competition. Game development is essentially selling one of the hardest kinds of programs to write, to the world’s best served audience, under maximum competition, for the lowest prices.
In local government you can charge what felt to me like large prices and still be genuinely considered cheap compared to what existing vendors charge. And people are used to software that doesn’t work and customer support that never responds. So if you can exceed expectations that is an edge here.
But many tech people have failed in this field, because they can’t master the soft skills and they can’t communicate simply; that part is deceptively hard.
