The Builder Age
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and keep coming to the conclusion that building software products is the best leverage I've got. I'll be doubling down on it, sharing how and what I build.
If you haven’t heard there’s been a tectonic shift in our industry - AI is super useful now. I’ve been skeptical at first, let’s say a year or two ago because the AI tooling and models were kind of crappy but in the last 6 to 8 months things have changed dramatically. I do not see myself ever going back and coding things by hand - I have AI clankers (yes, I call them clankers because they are still quite stupid but at least a bit more useful) now to lay bricks for me! On one hand what it means to be a software engineer changed dramatically but on the other hand it remained, as usual, what it always has been.
No, this is not going to be one of those crazy hype posts where I’d tell you that “if-you’re-not-doing-this-one-thing-now-you’re-missing-out-on-the-entire-industry-direction-and-should-just-pack-up-your-things-and-go-home-now“. I am not that kind of guy and I hate hype vehemently.
Over the last several months the way I work and how I ship software underwent a dramatic change. My scope and sphere of influence at work has increased and changed as well. I’ve been transitioning last couple of years from individual contributor/developer to an engineering management role. Sure, I’d still code here and there and pair program, but it was more about guiding and helping teams. Where I’d get my coding “fix” would be in my own projects where I’d get to sink my teeth into the meatiest coding and architectural problems myself. But now that has changed at work as well - thanks to AI I can tackle bigger and more challenging coding projects in the spare time I have, I can manage engineers more effectively with the help of AI (oh all data gathering scripts I have now! Such power! Such joy!), and I also am able to expand my scope into other roles and tackle product management because AI now makes large data parsing feasible and prototyping fast.
It’s been such a refreshing change actually and it reinvigorated the builder spirit in me. Now I can really focus on what matters in software development - the product, the user experience (UI/UX), and the architecture and the system design.
I’ve built so many personal scripts and mini apps for a variety of tasks and problems and automations for myself. Anything from scripts parsing and pulling data from every single Slack channel at work so that I don’t miss anything important, all the way to personal command center apps for budgeting, stock portfolio performance tracking, gym weight lifting tracking, and personal OpenClaw assistant bot Jarvis, and much much more.
Most of these scripts and apps are only useful to me personally or are very specific to the way I work or my data and circumstances. But some are useful more broadly and can be generalized and converted into products others can benefit from.
I was doing a lot of thinking about that. Where to put my efforts in life and what would bring me the most joy and be the most helpful to others and potentially be the most financially attractive so that I can sustain my activities to work on those. No matter how I twist it I come to a conclusion that making products and apps trumps everything else and would be the best return on time invested in terms of fulfillment, joy, and monetary return.
Working on articles, books, videos, and other content about coding is also very fulfilling but also became harder right now since it’s a moving target. Things change so fast with AI these days that I’m having a hard time to find the motivation and the right things to recommend in my second edition of The iOS Interview Guide for example. So I’ll slow down on it for the moment and instead focus on building apps and releasing products and sharing my process and journey and how I build them with you guys. I feel like this would be the most helpful to share as the process, the tools I use, and the best practices are ever evolving and keep changing every month. It wouldn’t make sense to spend a year writing a book just to end up publishing something that is not as helpful because things have changed over the last 6 months of writing it. But, on the other hand, if I’m working on an app right now and releasing it for real in production in the real world and sharing it with you guys, how I built it, how I architected it, how I tested it, how I designed it, etc. that would be much more real and useful and helpful and timely. But it also would be much more raw as well. What I also realized has been tripping me up with publishing content and articles on this Substack is my perfectionism and trying to polish the content to be “well enough to publish”, where I think I should just shoot from the hip more and publish things sooner and faster, even if they are somewhat raw and unfiltered/unpolished. “Good enough and fast” is probably a better goal to aim for rather than “great/well done”.
So, why am I telling you all of this? Well, expect me to post more about the products and apps I’m building, iOS and backend, whether I’m releasing them to the public or only have them for personal use. I’ll try to stick to the topic of mobile development in general and iOS development specifically as much as I can. But, as I mentioned before, we’re all fullstack now.