This year, it’s been about 20 years since I started coding. I was a teenager when I got my first Windows PC and a yellow book about web development. For the first few years, I had no idea what I was doing, but it was probably the best time of my career. I had ten thousand ideas every week. Everything was exciting and new, and everything seemed possible. I remember the dopamine rush whenever I solved a problem! Today, I have 13 years of professional experience building SaaS products, and I feel… very hungry for that feeling again.
Throughout my career I was building early-stage startups that failed after a few months, and I also was part of a successful scale-up that was eventually sold out for a 9-figure sum. I worked with small companies of just a few people, as well as corporations employing thousands. For what it’s worth, I eventually reached the Senior Staff Software Engineer title in a big organisation! I’m sure I still have a lot to learn, but I can venture to say that I know something about software development at this point. I know how to plan and deliver a project, how to assess risks, how to make trade-offs, and which battles to pursue (most of the time). I feel I can use these skills for something more than day-to-day work in another VC-funded startup, which, realistically, can succeed with or without me.
Now, you might be wondering what the title of this post means and how it relates to all this. First of all, I truly cannot complain about the tools I had when I was learning web development. I had everything I needed—IDEs, debuggers, local servers, developer tools, and learning materials… and most of them were free and open source! I’m grateful to all the engineers before me who built these tools. You made my career possible—thank you. Yet, I believe there are still many problems to solve in engineering, and we’re far from a perfect state. It’s not about AI or groundbreaking innovations, though.
Everyone who builds software (or really anything else) has these moments: “Sigh! I wish I had a better tool for this!” Often, “this” is something small and not very important. It might be a tedious task you don’t do very often, but it annoys you every single time. Or maybe it’s a regular workflow that’s just unpleasant, yet not enough to bother fixing. It’s like having a tiny pebble in your shoe during a winter mountain trip—taking your shoe off in the cold is the last thing you want to do. Still, it would be so nice to get that pebble out and make the rest of the trip more comfortable!
So, I’m looking for your pebbles—I want to learn what these little things you struggle with in your day-to-day work are. The plan is simple: In 2025, I want to invest 10 hours of my time every week in helping others build software. By the end of the year, that will add up to 500 hours—about three months of a full-time job. That seems like enough time to solve one small problem that a decent number of people experience.
I plan to share the progress of this project on this blog. Yes, writing will eat into the time budget (this post alone took me two hours; I’m a slow writer!), but I believe it’s worth it. The journey is just as important as the destination.
Now, please help me kick this off! Finish the sentence below in the comments:
I wish I had a better tool for…
(If you prefer anonymous response, use the survey link)
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