The Joy of Building
The last time I felt immense joy of building was about 4 years ago when I was working on Tiantia — an ecommerce platform I built from scratch over the course of 9 months which included an admin dashboard which I designed based off the design system by the client because the client was either too lazy or too busy to build an admin dashboard so they reduced the scope of the work to not have an admin dashboard but it didn’t make sense to me how you would manage an ecommerce platform without an admin dashboard because how would you track orders? Manage items in the store and so on and so forth. Sadly, the platform is dead — like many startups.
While I have consistently built stuff between then and now, it’s usually mostly in codebases that have been bootstrapped by other people and simply just adding features here and there which to be honest can get boring and seemingly unchallenging at times.
I think the ‘challenging’ stuffs is where the growth and the ‘fun’ is at. These days, some of those ways for me include:
- looking for bugs that have plagued the application for so long that no one is willing to take a look at them
- trying out new technology or trying out new approaches on projects at work e.g introducing unit testing in one of our frontend codebase at work, bootstrapping a new project from scratch with Typescript
- looking for hard-problems that colleagues are having and looking for ways to help them solve it: a recent one was helping a colleague figure out a deployment issue they were facing which had lasted about two weeks and I managed to get it done in 24 hours.
- volunteering for a startup and attempting to build the frontend and backend from scratch with supabase
I think overall, looking for ways to write code off-work increases your confidence to sometimes tackle your problems on the job especially if those projects provide you with challenges greater than the ones you tackle/meet on the job.
PS: While I have worked on pretty interesting projects/features in previous and current roles, building an e-commerce platform from scratch is probably the most challenging thing I have worked on in this time period.
