Ten years ago, I was still an IT college student in a college somewhere. I didn’t really know what my future is going to be like. My ethics professor asked us all in class to watch the movie The Social Network. At the same time, my web development professor who was one of the founders of Yehey.com taught us how to deploy your own PHP website on a cheap local hosting provider. That’s where it all started, I wanted to make my own social network. I wanted to somehow be the founder of the next Friendster, or I wanted to be that guy who’s your first friend in MySpace.
“A guy who makes a new chair, doesn’t owe money to everyone who ever built a chair.”
- Mark Zuckerberg
Back then, I used to drink a lot of iced blended mocha and smoke in a nearby The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf place across the street from my college with my hardy Asus rugged laptop. Usually, I just coded alone in a corner not for fun or leisure, but to finish my homework without any distractions. Occasionally, my then best friend would ask me to play computer games with him where I always ended up losing. It was just that. Simple.
Then, there’s this one guy who approached me. He said he wanted to create his own website called punchworld and if I ever could help him. Taking from the movie, I was also interested in making my own website. I did some searches for other social networks, and I found Orkut and Diaspora. I found Diaspora more interesting. Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the founder of Diaspora, wanted to create a decentralized social network, each hosted separately and was called a “pod”. It’s a little bit like Google+. I admired how Ilya thinks, and how he wasn’t doing it for the money. He was aware of Facebook’s flaws when it comes to data privacy. He had his own convictions, which unfortunately took his life the following year. After that, this quote stuck to me:
“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff. Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”
- Ilya Zhitomirskiy
Let’s fast forward ten years later. Throughout my career, I’ve been making websites and mobile applications for many clients of the companies that I’ve worked with. Most of the time, it’s all about meeting the deadline for the business goal. Some of them just want a website or an app just for the heck of it. There were memorable projects which I’m proud to be a part of, and these is were the client was a part of the app’s development. They listened and they took the time to understand as much technical details of how their product app works. They were the ones who always had the “feel of the app” from its initial development to its deployment phase. Nevertheless, I was just like a carpenter who lent his skills for people who wanted a customized chair. As the years passed by, many new methods have been devised on how to create the same chair where every carpenter both young and old claim to be “certified” to make the best chair. Well, the bottom line is, it just matters who makes it cheaper and faster. In age of digital transformation, it’s ironic that software development has gone towards being a race towards the new hype rather than an enlightening and learning process for all.
From time to time, a client or a stakeholder will ask: “how’s our project doing?”. These are the types that only care about the timeline, but I can’t blame them. It’s their project. Yes, every developer will have a gripe about strict timelines every now and then and this is a given. However, has every developer thought of doing things for himself? In another analogy, while making a project for someone else, you don’t even get the credit for it. You’re just paid to do it.
After all, am I doing it for the money? Yes, I am. The hype is quite lucrative, but it feels like selling my own soul.
Then, there’s this realization that I’ve never ever created a single thing for myself out of my own abilities. Therefore, I made this website. This is a manifestation of my own conviction. At least for once, I did use my skills that I’d normally use on the job for myself and I’m sharing it to the world. I think that’s awesome.